Here is my current understanding of the Baltimore power structure and how it relates to the police:
There are three levels of power: nation, state and city:
1. Nation: US (64% non-Hispanic White, 13% Black, 23% Other in 2010):
- US Constitution – the highest law in the land, or so I have been told.
- US Justice Department – has the power to review police departments. Where it finds a pattern of abuse of power, it can reform a department, from top to bottom if necessary. It has been headed by a Black person since 2009, who gave Baltimore a pass till 2014.
- Tribune Publishing – the third largest newspaper chain in the US. Based in Chicago, it owns the Baltimore Sun (see below).
2. State: Maryland (55% non-Hispanic White, 30% Black, 15% Other):
- LEOBR, the Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights, is a Maryland state law passed in 1974. White lawmakers put it in place to block attempts by Blacks to hold the police accountable for their crimes. Among its rights:
- An officer can refuse to be questioned for up to ten days. This allows officers time to make up lies that fit the known facts.
- An officer can only be questioned by fellow officers.
- An officer is to be disciplined by a trial board – made up of fellow officers.
3. City: Baltimore (28% non-Hispanic White, 64% Black, 8% Other):
- Baltimore Sun – the main newspaper. Its board of directors is 88% White, 12% Black. In 2014, it spent six months looking into police brutality. Few would speak to it, so it went through court records. It printed its findings seven months before Freddie Gray’s death.
- The police – an army of occupation in parts of Baltimore, a law unto itself. It is 48% Black. They arrest whoever they feel like, even those who are doing nothing wrong. They have a long history of police brutality, going back to at least 1931. It got worse under Mayor Martin O’Malley in the 2000s. Now they rough up even old women. The US Constitution is a piece of toilet paper to them.
- The civilian review board – powerless.
- The mayor, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, is the head of city government. She is Black. She was a protégée of Martin O’Malley. She has been mayor since 2010, but did not ask for a US Justice Department review till 2014 – after the Baltimore Sun printed its story on police brutality. She has pushed for police body cameras and reform of LEOBR.
- The police union – protects the bad apples in its ranks. It is good at stopping any reform of LEOBR. Its president is White.
- The state’s attorney for Baltimore has been Marilyn Mosby since January 2015. She is Black. She has the power to investigate wrongdoing in the city and bring charges. Most in her position are in bed with the police, who they depend on to investigate crime. No surprise, then, that only 2% of killer cops in Maryland are charged with a crime. She is taking the Freddie Gray case to court, partly because:
- protesters – have given Mosby the political space to go after killer cops. They want LEOBR overturned. Protesters are mostly Black but many are White.
– Abagond, 2015.
See also:
- Freddie Gray
- Marilyn Mosby
- police brutality in Baltimore
- The police
- The Wire
- Bob McCulloch – Mosby’s counterpart in the Ferguson case.
- Prince George’s County – another part of Maryland with high rates of police brutality.
- About Eric Holder’s race speech – Holder was the head of the US Justice Department from 2009 to 2015.
566
Stephanie Rawlings-Blake calling people “thugs” SMH
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Cops are civil servants, i.e. bureaucrats with guns. Their main priority is to get a regular salary, retire with a decent pension and whatever else they acquire in the performance of their duty. Who pays their salaries, the city, the state, or both, aided by federal programs? Given their employee status, why the deferential attitude toward them? Why and how did the “law and order” agenda become dogma in the last 50 years? The attitude displayed in movies from the 1930’s and 1940’s showed a great deal less reverence. Where are the politicians willing to roll back the present trend? Why are protests such as riots and demonstrations so seemingly futile or self defeating? How come black communities were able to organize mass boycots and marches that lasted years, and yet, with greater resources and people occupying important places in government, media and law enforcement even, the talk is all about how nothing can be done to fix the problem!
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@gro jo
“How come black communities were able to organize mass boycots and marches that lasted years, and yet, with greater resources and people occupying important places in government, media and law enforcement even, the talk is all about how nothing can be done to fix the problem!”—Most of the blacks in positions are in white pockets. They more often than not are figure heads to show equality, but only get white backing so much as they stay inline.
Another thing is many blacks in positions have white mindsets. They will side with whites for one reason or the other regardless of the matter being blacks getting killed. Blacks in said communities vote for these blacks in positions with the idea that they will care about them because they share their skin color.
Boycotts and marches do not really accomplish much, considering most situations in the past and now result in temporary solutions from whites that get blacks to stop making a fuss. It does not get to the heart of the issue. I am not taking it is futile as it gets attention, but it does not get real results.
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Another element here is I believe higher ups will protect cops because of fear of revolt. If cops revolt who will keep those dangerous poor people in line. Who will protect them from those “thugs”. Who will product their free labor and keep the money train going. Cops simply do the dirty work they don’t want to do or rather that they feel is beneath them to do.
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I now understand why O’Malley is not as popular with the Democrats. Just like Clinton he is not as progressive as he says he is.
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As a corollary to the Baltimore power structure, we should also take a look at how black power structure is organized in general, esp. in those jurisdictions where blacks are the majority and hold the key positions of county executive / mayor, congressmen, police chief, judges, school board superintendent, etc. , as well as its impact on the residents.
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@Abagond,
I know where you got your demographic statistics (ie, 2010 census), but I think your figures are somewhat comparing apples to oranges.
Your figure for “whites” for the USA EXCLUDES non-Hispanic whites (otherwise, if including the “white” percentage of Hispanics, the figure would be 78%). However, your “white” percentage for Maryland INCLUDES non-Hispanic whites. If excluded, the percentage would be 54-55% (non-hispanic white). Maryland is projected to reach minority-majority status (non-hispanic white dropping below 50%) around the next decennial census.
Your figures for Baltimore also seem to suffer the same problem as for Maryland, but as Latinos are not as big a population in Baltimore as they are in Maryland or the USA in general, the comparable figure for the non-Hispanic white population for Baltimore is 28%.
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Gro Jo said:
Why and how did the “law and order” agenda become dogma in the last 50 years? The attitude displayed in movies from the 1930’s and 1940’s showed a great deal less reverence.
Kiwi said:
This is a good question I would like to see answered. I suspect it is a combination of the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, the postwar boom, and the Civil Rights movement.
One can find corrupt cops in quite a few TV modern shows and movies but I get what you are saying. I suspect that police corruption was much more open and widespread in earlier years. Bribery of judges, jailers, and police has been well documented from that era.
http://crooksandliars.com/gordonskene/vice-illegal-gambling-bombings-beating
Clifford Clinton: “ In one of our visits to persons whose help we thought would assist in the exposure of vice and the racket payoff system in Los Angeles, we stepped into a well laid trap. A Dictatophone that was set out to find our exact intentions. When those intentions were discovered, Los Angeles was soon to learn once more, that those who profited by the millions annually as a result of protected law violations in Los Angeles would not stop at murder to protect those illicit profits”.
It certainly didn’t endear him to the power structure that was Los Angeles at the time. In fact, he was the intended victim of a house bombing in 1937, carried out by the LAPD who were in the pocket of the Mayor, Frank Shaw who would later be thrown out of office on his own set of corruption charges.
Chicago:
http://www.umich.edu/~eng217/student_projects/nkazmers/corrupt1.html
“Some gangs amassed such unbelievable amounts of money from activities such as alcohol production and bootlegging that they could afford to buy off most of the police officers and politicians in the districts of the city in which they conducted their illegal activities”
Also private security guards, off duty cops, and on duty cops were used to break up strikes and intimidate unions and harass undesirables which included a large number of whites. The LAPD was used to turn away desperate Okies who were fleeing the dust bowl :
http://articles.latimes.com/2003/mar/09/local/me-then9
I’d rather drink muddy water
Sleep out in a hollow log
Than be in California
Treated like a dirty dog.
This is what the migrants sang in the 1930s, when the Golden State was anything but welcoming to the “tired and poor” masses heading this way from Dust Bowl-ravaged states.
For a few months in 1936, the Los Angeles Police Department launched a foreign excursion of sorts — a “Bum Blockade” on the state’s borders. The LAPD deployed 136 officers to 16 major points of entry on the Arizona, Nevada and Oregon lines, with orders to turn back migrants with “no visible means of support.”
A notorious incident from 1932 where police where used as shock troops against impoverished WWI veterans:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonus_Army
Various strikes in the 1930s which had multiple deaths at the hands of police and/or the National Guard (At the time, the difference between the two was often thin or none existent):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-Lite_strike
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minneapolis_general_strike_of_1934
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1934_West_Coast_waterfront_strike
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flint_sit-down_strike
More suppression of labor from previous decades:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everett_massacre
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_Mine_massacre
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pullman_Strike
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre
Rampant corruption, lack of enforcement of the law against powerful gangsters, and violent streak breaking did not endear the police to many of the public in the 1930s.
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@ Jefe
I updated the post. Thanks for the correction.
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@ Kiwi
Perhaps the US is suffering from too much democracy. I think it is a pretty bad idea to have DAs, judges and police chiefs elected. They have no choice but to engage in the “tough on crime” rethoric. I think that is one of the major contriubtor to the terrible conditions in prisons, the ridiculous long sentences ans general disregard for defendant’s rights. I’m not sure if that directly relates to police violence, but it might be a factor.
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Al Jazeera’s take on LEOBR in Maryland.
They said the Police Union vigourously opposed reform of this law earlier this year.
Should police have special legal protections?
(http://america.aljazeera.com/watch/shows/america-tonight/2015/5/should-police-have-special-legal-protections.html)
My thinking – if these “rights” are already guaranteed by the Constitution, why do we need this law in the first place?
How effective with the Police union continue to be in blocking reform going forward esp. if O’Malley is no longer the governor?
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Let’s see,90% of the murders committed in Baltimore are committed by blacks. 90% of the blacks murdered in Baltimore are murdered by other blacks.80% of the violent crime committed in Baltimore is committed by blacks,hmmmm,,,,,,I’m starting to see a trend here.
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cowboy54 where are your figures from?
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You can lay that at the feet of the “success” of the racist Southern Strategy, a gift that keeps on giving. There is no greater indictment of white America in the 20th century. The Southern Strategy’s triumph spawned as many negative consequences–maybe more–than the truncated Great Society created positive ones, national, state, and local. It is not a reach to consider it the end of the second Reconstruction, a retrenchment, a second “Restoration.” If one makes a nuanced examination, one sees many analogous tactics and strategies, political, economic, and of course, in law enforcement.
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I agree with Richard III. “Law and order” is a racist dog whistle that goes back to Richard Nixon in 1968 and the Southern Strategy:
That led to the War on Drugs and mass incarceration:
This period is like post-Reconstruction:
The good news is that the demographics that made all that work is dying out. Literally: Whites have not been having enough babies (future voters) to keep it going much longer.
Republicans are fighting against their demographic doom not with a change in message, but with voter suppression laws, anti-immigration laws and pro-rich campaign financing laws where “free speech” is, in effect, limited to billionaires, big companies and the politicians they back.
The same demographic change allows Hillary Clinton to speak out against mass incarceration – something that her own husband had carried out in the 1990s.
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What I found interesting was that Mosby’s family was full of police officers, just like McCullough’s, and she had family members killed at the hands of police, similar to McCullough’s, but we saw a very different course of action.
The mayor has a real opportunity to distinguish herself from O’Malley.
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Among the comments under the blog post “Moral Mondays” there was some discussion about the problems regarding the political leadership in Baltimore, crime and the police.
It is interesting that this was discussed here on the blog just in Feb-Mar 2014
(https://abagond.wordpress.com/2014/02/22/moral-mondays/#comment-218117)
Anyhow, is there any chance that we are entering a “3rd reconstruction” phase as Rev. Dr. William Barber suggests?
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Any chance we could see a post on Martin O’Malley?
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@ Jefe
The chances are pretty high.
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That’s great.
I hope that in addition to mentioning his role as mayor, there would be a bit about MD State govt, ie, him as governor and relationship with the state legislature. Not much about MD govt is mentioned in this post.
And I have seen a lot of stuff about him in the last few days. Looks like he is now the main Democratic contender against Hillary Clinton. So, we have a responsibility to learn more about Martin O’Malley.
(http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/05/09/the-wire-creator-demolishes-baltimore-crime-myths-pushed-by-martin-omalley/)
‘The Wire’ Creator Demolishes Baltimore Crime Myths Pushed by Martin O’Malley
David Simon, reporter, author, and creator of the seminal HBO crime drama The Wire:(continues)
O’Malley responds that Simon is a great fiction writer.
The reporter summarized:
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I am sorry i did not mean to mean that I am promoting authenticity about the website above (Breitbart ). It appears to be big on bashing Democrats and does not always do good fact checking on its reporting.
But this is going to be hard to take a balanced look at O’Malley.
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The more I am seeing about O’Malley is not complimentary, e.g., this video:
How Martin O’Malley Helped Create the Baltimore Riots: LEAP’s Neill Franklin
(https://youtu.be/dCpXbibPDAg)
In 2005, Baltimore made 108,000 arrests in a city of 620,000. Apparently O’Malley tried to push up arrest numbers to demonstrate being tough on crime. However, many of those arrests was just to pump up the numbers. Many even signed a form not to contest the arrest so that they could be let out of jail and leave.
He dismantled community policing and replaced it with a policy of No Tolerance, focusing on low level drub possession arrests.
Besides O’Malley, we probably need a post to explain the “War on Drugs”.
Any complimentary information about O’Malley? What will the DOJ probe uncover?
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This guy is very articulate – (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCdNOj8r7Ec)
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He sums things up in such a clean concise way that people couldn’t fail to understand. These things are so simple, then why cant people just take heed
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Now that Martin O’Malley has announced his bid to run for President, we REALLY need a post on him.
But, hopefully it will be somewhat balanced – and maybe about how he was able to beat out black mayoral candidates in a majority black city. Evidently he is quite popular among some segments in Baltimore and in Maryland.
Or maybe we could have a thought experiment exercise, ie, a USA under the leadership of O’Malley.
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@ jefe
I will probably do posts on the top three or four presidential candidates in each party. O’Malley is interesting in his own right because of his hand in shaping Baltimore.
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effing black democratics
effing black misleaders
(https://youtu.be/7yc6K4GGwL8)
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