So they cooked the books.
Oh yeah. If you hit somebody with a bullet, that had to count.
If they went to the hospital with a bullet in them, it probably had to count as an aggravated assault.
But if someone just took a gun out and emptied the clip and didn't hit anything or they didn't know if you hit anything, suddenly that was a common assault or even an unfounded report.
Armed robberies became larcenies if you only had a victim?s description of a gun, but not a recovered weapon.
And it only gets worse as some district commanders began to curry favor with the mayoral aides who were sitting on the Comstat data.
In the Southwest District, a victim would try to make an armed robbery complaint, saying , ?I just got robbed, somebody pointed a gun at me,? and what they would do is tell him, well, okay, we can take the report but the first thing we have to do is run you through the computer to see if there's any paper on you.
Wait, you're doing a warrant check on me before I can report a robbery?
Oh yeah, we gotta know who you are before we take a complaint.
You and everyone you?re living with?
What?s your address again?
You still want to report that robbery?
They cooked their own books in remarkable ways.
Guns disappeared from reports and armed robberies became larcenies.
Deadly weapons were omitted from reports and aggravated assaults became common assaults.
The Baltimore Sun did a fine job looking into the dramatic drop in rapes in the city.
Turned out that regardless of how insistent the victims were that they had been raped, the incidents were being quietly unfounded.
That tip of the iceberg was reported, but the rest of it, no.
And yet there were many veteran commanders and supervisors who were disgusted, who would privately complain about what was happening.
If you weren?t a journalist obliged to quote sources and instead, say, someone writing a fictional television drama, they?d share a beer and let you fill cocktail napkins with all the ways in which felonies disappeared in those years.
I mean, think about it.
How does the homicide rate decline by 15 percent, while the agg assault rate falls by more than double that rate.
Are all of Baltimore?s felons going to gun ranges in the county?
Are they becoming better shots?
Have the mortality rates for serious assault victims in Baltimore, Maryland suddenly doubled?
Did they suddenly close the Hopkins and University emergency rooms and return trauma care to the dark ages?
It makes no sense statistically until you realize that you can?t hide a murder, but you can make an attempted murder disappear in a heartbeat, no problem.
But these guys weren't satisfied with just juking their own stats.
No, the O'Malley administration also went back to the last year of the previous mayoralty and performed its own retroactive assessment of those felony totals, and guess what?
It was determined from this special review that the preceding administration had underreported its own crime rate, which O'Malley rectified by upgrading a good chunk of misdemeanors into felonies to fatten up the Baltimore crime rate that he was inheriting.
Get it?
How better than to later claim a 30 or 40 percent reduction in crime than by first juking up your inherited rate as high as she'll go.
It really was that cynical an exercise.
So Martin O?Malley proclaims a Baltimore Miracle and moves to Annapolis.
And tellingly, when his successor as mayor allows a new police commissioner to finally de-emphasize street sweeps and mass arrests and instead focus on gun crime, that?s when the murder rate really dives.
That?s when violence really goes down.
When a drug arrest or a street sweep is suddenly not the standard for police work, when violence itself is directly addressed, that?s when Baltimore makes some progress.
?Freddie Gray runs, and so when he's caught he takes an asskicking and then goes into the back of a wagon without so much as a nod to the Fourth Amendment.?
But nothing corrects the legacy of a police department in which the entire rank-and-file has been rewarded and affirmed for collecting bodies, for ignoring probable cause, for grabbing anyone they see for whatever reason.
And so, fast forward to Sandtown and the Gilmor Homes, where Freddie Gray gives some Baltimore police the legal equivalent of looking at them a second or two too long.
He runs, and so when he?s caught he takes an ass-kicking and then goes into the back of a wagon without so much as a nod to the Fourth Amendment.
So do you see how this ends or how it begins to turn around?
We end the drug war.
I know I sound like a broken record, but we end the fucking drug war.
The drug war gives everybody permission to do anything.
It gives cops permission to stop anybody, to go in anyone?s pockets, to manufacture any lie when they get to district court.
You sit in the district court in Baltimore and you hear, ?Your Honor, he was walking out of the alley and I saw him lift up the glassine bag and tap it lightly.?
No fucking dope fiend in Baltimore has ever walked out of an alley displaying a glassine bag for all the world to see.
But it keeps happening over and over in the Western District court.
The drug war gives everybody permission.
And if it were draconian and we were fixing anything that would be one thing, but it?s draconian and it's a disaster.
When you say, end the drug war, you mean basically decriminalize or stop enforcing?
Medicalize the problem, decriminalize ? I don't need drugs to be declared legal, but if a Baltimore State?s Attorney told all his assistant state?s attorneys today, from this moment on, we are not signing overtime slips for court pay for possession, for simple loitering in a drug-free zone, for loitering, for failure to obey, we?re not signing slips for that: Nobody gets paid for that bullshit, go out and do real police work.
If that were to happen, then all at once, the standards for what constitutes a worthy arrest in Baltimore would significantly improve.
Take away the actual incentive to do bad or useless police work, which is what the drug war has become.
You didn't ask me about the rough rides, or as I used to hear in the western district, ?the bounce.?
It used to be reserved ? as I say, when there was a code to this thing, as flawed as it might have been by standards of the normative world ? by standards of Baltimore, there was a code to when you gave the guy the bounce or the rough ride.
And it was this: He fought the police.
Two things get your ass kicked faster than anything: one is making a cop run.
If he catches you, you're 18 years old, you've got fucking Nikes, he?s got cop shoes, he's wearing a utility belt, if you fucking run and he catches you, you're gonna take some lumps.
That?s always been part of the code.
RODNEY KING could?ve quoted that much of it to you.
RODNEY KING
Rodney King was a taxi driver beaten by Los Angeles Police Department officers following a high-speed car chase in 1991.
The beating was caught by a TV camera, and the acquittal of the officers involved sparked riots in L.A.
But the other thing that gets you beat is if you fight.
So the rough ride was reserved for the guys who fought the police, who basically made ? in the cop parlance ? assholes of themselves.
And yet, you look at the sheet for poor Mr. Gray, and you look at the nature of the arrest and you look at the number of police who made the arrest, you look at the nature of what they were charging him with ? if anything, because again there?s a complete absence of probable cause ? and you look at the fact that the guy hasn?t got much propensity for serious violence according to his sheet, and you say, How did this guy get a rough ride?
How did that happen?
Is this really the arrest that you were supposed to make today?
And then, if you were supposed to make it, was this the guy that needed an ass-kicking on the street, or beyond that, a hard ride to the lockup?
I?m talking in the vernacular of cops, not my own ? but even in the vernacular of what cops secretly think is fair, this is bullshit, this is a horror show.
There doesn?t seem to be much code anymore ? not that the code was always entirely clean or valid to anyone other than street cops, and maybe the hardcore corner players, but still it was something at least.
?Too many officers who came up in a culture that taught them not the hard job of policing, but simply how to roam the city, jack everyone up, and call for the wagon.?
I mean, I know there are still a good many Baltimore cops who know their jobs and do their jobs some real integrity and even precision.
But if you look at why the city of Baltimore paid that $5.7 million for beating down people over the last few years, it?s clear that there are way too many others for whom no code exists.
Anyone and everyone was a potential ass-whipping ? even people that were never otherwise charged with any real crimes.
It?s astonishing.
By the standard of that long list, Freddie Gray becomes almost plausible as a victim.
He was a street guy. And before he came along, there were actual working people ? citizens, taxpayers ? who were indistinguishable from criminal suspects in the eyes of the police who were beating them down.
Again, that?s a department that has a diminished capacity to actually respond to crime or investigate crime, or to even distinguish innocence or guilt.
And that comes from too many officers who came up in a culture that taught them not the hard job of policing, but simply how to roam the city, jack everyone up, and call for the wagon.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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ORIGINALLY FILED Wednesday, April 29, 2015 at 7:32 a.m. ET
