Private: Haywire Baltimore

by Tom Nolan, Associate Professor of Criminology at Merrimack College and 27-year veteran of the Boston Police Department

Back in the 1970s and 1980s, the “bad old days” of policing, we called them “screen tests” in the Boston police department—slamming the vehicle brakes suddenly to force a handcuffed prisoner’s head into the Plexiglas (or screen) barrier that separated the rear prisoner transport area from the front of the police vehicle.  Prisoners who flunked the “attitude test” were often administered these “screen tests.”  Apparently the equivalent referent in Baltimore is “rough ride” and in Philadelphia the “nickel ride.”  It appears as though Freddie Gray may have been subjected to a Baltimore PD “rough ride” that led to his spine being severed and to his subsequent death on April 19.

After years of settling excessive force lawsuits against the police in Boston that resulted in significant payouts in tax dollars to plaintiffs, the Boston police department in the late 1980s and early 1990s instituted a training regimen that emphasized constitutional protections and respect for civil rights and civil liberties.  Even more importantly, police administrators conveyed the severity with which they took allegations of excessive force and police brutality in imposing unprecedented sanctions against officers found to have engaged in such practices.  Officers received suspensions without pay for months at a time; some were terminated and even sent to federal prison.  The message went out to officers in the Boston police department: Engage in excessive force practices and brutality at tangible risk to your career, your future and maybe even your liberty.  So-called “screen tests” became largely a relic of the past.

The message apparently never made it to Baltimore (or New York City, or Cleveland, or North Charleston, or Albuquerque or Ferguson).  Although the Boston police have had their share of excessive force allegations in recent years, strict accountability and a robust disciplinary process have seen the sustention of excessive force allegations sharply curtailed.

Ta-Nehisi Coates and Conor Friedersdorf, both writing in The Atlantic, have insightfully and grippingly described the decades-long law breaking, disrespect, violence and brutality of the Baltimore police department.  The Baltimore Sun has tabulated the millions of dollars in payouts and settlements to the victims of Baltimore police officers’ extralegal beatings and killings.  That violence and brutality are endemic to the milieu and the ethos of the Baltimore Police Department will pose formidable challenges to the systemic, foundational, cultural and organizational change necessary to initiate the large-scale reforms needed to deescalate and extirpate the routinized and too frequent use of excessive force.

Can we expect justice for Freddie Gray?  Many observers believe strongly that justice was denied to Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Miriam Carey and many other black and brown men and women who have died at the hands of police.  Consider this: The standards of criminal liability to which police officers are held, specifically in use of deadly force incidents, are significantly lower than those standards used to assess criminal responsibility in those of us who are not, in Bittner’s terms, “the bearers of non-negotiable force.”  It seems clear that the legal standards of “probable cause” and “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” have markedly different applications for law enforcement officers, perhaps owing at least in part, I will argue, to the public’s image of the netherworld of policing as being fraught with constant and never-ending danger, violence and peril. 

The mainstream media and the popular culture depict and fuel this collective persona of law enforcement officers as the lone warriors against the ubiquitous forces of evil and darkness, for in the police world, as well as in the larger society, evil too often has a dark face.  The police themselves do little to dispel or discourage this lionized portrayal of themselves and the demonized depiction of those whom they see as adversaries (after all, Freddie Gray had a knife, and he ran from the police).

For many of us (working- and middle-class white people), the police embrace nothing if not working- and middle-class values and morality.  These values privilege a “good vs. evil” dichotomy in which the police are on the “good” side; those who come into contact and confrontation with the police are always and already on the “evil” side.  Framed in this light, it becomes easy to see how low the standard of criminal liability sinks when seeking to assign culpability to those who we believe keep us safe from “evil.”  This is something that we are only now beginning to question and to interrogate. 

The vast majority of police officers who are respectful of civil rights and civil liberties, and who are mindful of the provisions of the Constitution, and who are sensitive to the needs of the communities that they police, should welcome this nascent public scrutiny.  For most law enforcement officers in the United States (and I have had the privilege of working with many) are compassionate, dutiful, respectful, fair-minded human beings of unquestioned probity.          

However, we are finally, I believe, becoming collectively aware of, and exposed to, the realities and lived experiences of policing in too many communities where the police are not viewed as nimbused defenders of righteousness and the custodians of moral propriety, but as state-sponsored and sanctioned oppressors, ruffians and bullies.  

Racial Justice