The
Olympics continue in Rio de Janeiro, where Stanford swimmer Simone
Manuel has made history, becoming the first African-American female
swimmer to win an Olympic medal in an individual event. After winning,
Manuel said, "It means a lot, especially with what is going on in the
world today, some of the issues of police brutality. This win hopefully
brings hope and change to some of the issues that are going on."
Manuel’s win was only one of a number of historic Olympic victories for
African-American female athletes over the last week. African-American
gymnast Simone Biles scored her third gold medal when she became the
first American woman to win the Olympic vault individual. And Michelle
Carter became the first American woman to win a gold medal in shot put.
For more, we speak with Jesse Washington, a senior writer for The
Undefeated. He’s covering the Olympics from Rio.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMYGOODMAN:
As we head to Brazil, the Olympics are continuing in Rio de Janeiro,
where Stanford swimmer Simone Manuel has made history, becoming the
first African-American female swimmer to win an Olympic medal in an
individual event. Manuel tied Canadian swimmer Penny Oleksiak in the
100-meter freestyle. Both women won gold medals and set a new Olympic
record. After winning, Simone Manuel said, quote, "It means a lot,
especially with what is going on in the world today, some of the issues
of police brutality. This win hopefully brings hope and change to some
of the issues that are going on. My color just comes with the
territory," she said.
Simone Manuel’s win was only one of a number of historic Olympic
events over the last week. Usain Bolt of Jamaica won the 100-meter dash
in 9.81 seconds Sunday night, making him the only person to ever win the
100-meter race three times. He was Jamaican. American swimmer Michael
Phelps scored his 23rd gold medal when the U.S. won the men’s
four-by-100-meter medley relay. Phelps is now the most decorated
Olympian in all history. African-American gymnast Simone Biles scored
her third gold medal when she became the first American woman to win the
Olympic vault individual. And tennis player Monica Puig won Puerto
Rico’s first gold medal in Olympic history.
Justice Department to Release Blistering Report of Racial Bias by Baltimore Police
Photo
An officer in Baltimore
taking part in an investigation of a police shooting of a 13-year-old
boy who had a fake gun on April 27.Credit
Gabriella Demczuk for The New York Times
The
Justice Department has found that the Baltimore Police Department for
years has hounded black residents who make up most of the city’s
population, systematically stopping, searching and arresting them, often
with little provocation or rationale.
In
a blistering report, coming more than a year after Baltimore erupted
into riots over the police-involved death of a 25-year-old black man,
Freddie Gray, the Justice Department is sharply critical of policies
that encouraged police officers to charge black residents with minor
crimes. A copy of the report was obtained by The New York Times.
The
critique is the latest example of the Obama administration’s aggressive
push for police reforms in cities where young African-American men have
died at the hands of law enforcement.
The
findings, to be released Wednesday, are the first formal step toward
the Justice Department’s reaching a settlement with Baltimore — known as
a “consent decree” — in which police practices would be overhauled
under the oversight of a federal judge. The department started the
inquiry at the invitation of Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake.
To
show how officers disproportionately stopped black pedestrians, the
report cited the example of a black man in his mid-50s who was stopped
30 times in less than four years. None of the stops led to a citation or
criminal charge. Black residents, the report said, accounted for 95
percent of the 410 individuals stopped at least 10 times in the five and
a half years of data reviewed.
Photo
Baltimore police officers near a mural of Freddie Gray last month.Credit
Steve Ruark/Associated Press
The
most pronounced racial disparities were in arrests for the most
discretionary offenses: For example, 91 percent of those arrested solely
for “failure to obey” or “trespassing” were African-American, even
though the city is 63 percent black, the report found.
In
one telling anecdote from the report, a shift commander provided
officers with boilerplate language on how to write up trespassing arrest
reports of people found near housing projects. The template contained
an automatic description of the arrestee: “A BLACK MALE.”
“The
supervisor’s template thus presumes that individuals arrested for
trespassing will be African-American,” the report stated, describing the
sort of detentions the language was intended to facilitate as “facially
unconstitutional.”
The
report indicated that the frequency of arrests without probable cause
was reflected in the fact that booking supervisors and prosecutors had
declined to file charges, after arrests by their own officers, more than
11,000 times since 2010.
Two
weeks ago, Maryland prosecutors dropped charges against the last of six
officers charged in the April 2015 death of Mr. Gray, who sustained a
fatal spinal cord injury while in custody. With that, Baltimore joined a
growing list of cities where police-involved deaths sparked outrage,
and even riots, yet no one was held accountable in court.
While
no consent decree has been reached, the report states that the city and
the Justice Department have agreed in principle to identify “categories
of reforms the parties agree must be taken to remedy the violations of
the Constitution and federal law described in this report.”
Findings of the Justice Department Report
In its report, the Justice Department concluded that the
Baltimore Police Department “engaged in a pattern or practice of
conduct” that was unconstitutional or violated federal law, including:
Making unconstitutional stops, searches, and arrests.
Using enforcement strategies of stops, searches and arrests that unfairly target African-Americans.
Using excessive force.
Retaliating against people engaging in constitutionally-protected expression.
“I
don’t think at this point, it’s about justice for Freddie Gray
anymore,” said Ray Kelly, a director of the No Boundaries Coalition, a
West Baltimore group that provided its own report on police abuses to
the Justice Department. “Now it’s about justice for our community, for
our people.”
City Councilman Brandon Scott, vice
chairman of the council committee that oversees the department, said
the next fight could be over how to pay for the police overhaul.
Baltimore
is among nearly two dozen cities that the Obama administration has
investigated after they were accused of widespread unconstitutional
policing. Using its broad latitude to enforce civil rights laws, the
Justice Department has demanded wholesale change in how cities conduct
policing. In several cities, including Seattle; Cleveland; and Ferguson,
Mo., those investigations began in the aftermath of a high-profile
death that sparked protests and in some cases riots.
Police
chiefs, prosecutors and experts say the investigations have forced
cities to address longstanding, entrenched issues far beyond the
targeted cities.
“Chiefs
are constantly looking at these reports, not just to learn lessons and
best practices from each other, but also what pitfalls we can avoid,”
said Scott Thomson, the police chief in Camden, N.J., who is also the
president of the Police Executive Research Forum.
But
court-ordered reform can take years, which does little to ease the
frustration of activists who say that police officers too often go
unpunished for deadly encounters with unarmed people.
Dayvon
Love, 29, a founder of the Baltimore advocacy group Leaders of a
Beautiful Struggle, said that changes would come only when civilians
have a say in whether officers should face punishment. Mr. Love
described frustrating meetings with Justice Department officials —
including Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch.
“I
was very skeptical and not really that enthused about meeting with
them,” Mr. Love said. At one point, he said, he asked Ms. Lynch what she
could do to change state law and give civilians more power over the
police. “She said what I figured she’d say, which is that from her
position as attorney general, she can’t really do anything about it.”
The
Supreme Court has given police officers wide latitude in how they can
use deadly force, which makes prosecuting them difficult, even in the
killing of unarmed people. For the Justice Department to charge an
officer with a federal crime, the bar is even higher. Prosecutors must
show that the officer willfully violated someone’s civil rights.
State and federal investigators cleared the officer who killed Michael Brown in Ferguson and those who killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland. Federal prosecutors are still debating whether to bring charges in the death of Eric Garner on Staten Island. Local prosecutors did not.
In
Baltimore, black residents have been complaining for years of
systematic abuse by the department. When the city’s top prosecutor,
Marilyn Mosby, failed to get any convictions in Mr. Gray’s death, many
in the city’s poorest African-American neighborhoods were not surprised.
After
the 1991 beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles, Congress gave the
Justice Department the power to investigate police departments for
patterns of civil rights violations. The Obama administration has used
that authority more aggressively than any other. Prosecutors are
enforcing consent decrees on police departments in 14 cities.
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“We
tend to confront systemic problems only when forced to by seemingly
extraordinary events,” Vanita Gupta, the Justice Department’s top civil
rights prosecutor, said last year.
In
Seattle, the investigation followed an officer’s shooting of a Native
American woodcarver in 2010. The shooting was ruled unjustified, but
prosecutors said they could not meet the legal standard to file charges.
The federal authorities, however, found a pattern of excessive force
and ordered the Police Department to provide better training and
oversight. In recent years, the Justice Department has held Seattle up
as an example of how cities can best respond to scathing investigations.
In other cities, the changes are just beginning. After months of arguing and delay, officials in Ferguson accepted a settlement in March that will force the city to change its policies on when officers can use stun guns, shoot at cars and stop pedestrians. Officials in Cleveland agreed in May to follow strict new standards governing how and when its officers can use force.
The
report is sure to fuel a broader debate on aggressive policing
practices, as it blames much of Baltimore’s woes on so-called
“zero-tolerance” policies adopted in the late 1990s. They were aimed at
anyone on the streets whom officers viewed as suspect, making heavy use
of stop-and-frisk and other confrontation techniques.
But
the approach, the report found, “led to repeated violations of the
constitutional and statutory rights, further eroding the community’s
trust in the police.”
While
Baltimore officials have sought to curb the most extreme zero-tolerance
policies, the legacy of the strategy continues to vex the department.
One
example the report cited was a police sergeant who recently posted on
Facebook that the “solution to the murder rate is easy: flex cuffs and a
line at” the central booking office, made up of people arrested on
charges of loitering.
Correction: August 11, 2016
An article on Wednesday about a Justice Department report on
the Baltimore Police Department misstated, in some editions, part of the
name of the organization led by Scott Thompson, who commented on the
report. It is the Police Executive Research Forum (not Foundation). The
article also misstated the surname of the president of the research
forum in some editions. He is Scott Thomson, not Thompson.
