Baltimore has a troubled history with police brutality
The outrage surrounding Freddie Gray's death is rooted in concerns about how cops handle themselves in the city. Not only have police allegedly abused other detainees in their custody, but they have hurt people by placing them in vans without seat belts — similar to what Gray went through, suffering some sort of medical emergency in a police van while not buckled in, then being rushed to the hospital.
The Baltimore Police Department has long been subject to allegations of brutality. A September 2014 report by the
Baltimore Sun's Mark Puente
found that the city had paid about $5.7 million since 2011 to more than 100 people — most of whom were black — who claimed that officers had beaten them. Some of the allegations are truly deplorable, as Vox's
Ezra Klein
explained:
Before Freddie Gray, there was Starr Brown, who was pregnant and walking up the front steps of her home when two girls were attacked on the street. By the time the cops came, the attackers were gone — but Brown, inside her home, could hear the police berating the women who had been attacked.
Brown, angry, demanded the cops chase down the attackers rather than yelling at the victims. An argument began, and the police tried to arrest Brown. She grabbed a nearby railing, screaming that she was pregnant. "They slammed me down on my face," Brown later said. "The skin was gone on my face." The city paid Brown $125,000.
Police didn't admit fault in the cases, instead paying for the settlements, the local police union
said, to avoid the higher costs of full-blown lawsuits. But the high number of cases and payouts has fed a perception that police officers in Baltimore are corrupt and violent — and these 100 cases likely cover a small fraction of the overall complaints in the city.
Baltimore police have also been accused of taking people in
"rough rides"
in which handcuffed detainees are driven in a reckless manner while they're not wearing seat belts — all to purposely cause injuries. The
Baltimore Sun's Puente and Doug Donovan
documented several cases in which people were injured in police vans, some of whom won lawsuits against the city. One of them, a 27-year-old assistant librarian who was arrested following a noise complaint, described the experience: "They were braking really short so that I would slam against the wall, and they were taking really wide, fast turns. I couldn't brace myself. I was terrified."
Leadership in the Baltimore Police Department has vowed to prevent this kind of behavior. "We will not let officers get away with any wrongdoing," Deputy Commissioner Jerry Rodriguez, who joined the agency in January 2013 to lead the new Professional Standards and Accountability Bureau, told the
Baltimore Sun. "It will not be tolerated."
But many residents and protesters in Baltimore feel the reform and accountability processes have been slow-moving, feeding into the anger that eventually culminated in protests and riots following Gray's death.