“One of the problems is that we’re so quick to throw our youth into prisons and jails that we refuse to look them in the face and see them as human beings,” said 23-year-old East Baltimore native Shahem Mclaurin as members of the Frederick Douglass High School Marching band milled about with their instruments behind him.

Mclaurin was one of over 100 students and advocates who marched from the Penn North Kids Safe Zone to Frederick Douglass High School on Nov. 21 in support of Baltimore Youth Fund, a $12 million dollar a year fund for city youth.

The Youth Fund is expected to pass when it is voted on by the full City Council in December. “This is very important. It’s historic. I think we’re the only third or fourth city that have targeted funding for our youth,” said Council President Bernard “Jack” Young.

Young and other city leaders spoke at the pre-march press conference outside of the Kids Safe Zone, which founder Erika Alston-Buck describes as “a safe recreational place where a kid can be a kid during out-of-school time.”

“We’re open every day, and when school is closed, we’re open at noon because we know that a lot of kids go to school for gas and electric. They go to school for a hot meal,” Alston-Buck said. “So, when those schools are closed, we need to provide those same services.”

Kids Safe Zone also provides mentorship, organized sports, a computer lab, and homework assistance, but, Alston-Buck says, because it doesn’t fit into “the wheelhouse for any foundation,” it is hard to get funding.

This, says Young, is what the Baltimore Youth Fund is for. “It was meant to get to grassroots organizations that’s out doing the real community work,” he said.

“It’s really essential that people from the community get to be in control of these programming dollars and get a say in who gets them,” McLaurin said.

Visit therealnews.com for independent local, national, and international journalism that examines the underlying causes of chronic problems and searches for effective solutions.

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“Look out for people missing from this room,” Kevi Smith-Joyner, an activist with the Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network, said in a tone that was at once critical and encouraging at the Transgender March of Resilience on Nov. 20. “I see no one in the community I work with every day.”

The attendees applauded.

Smith-Joyner was drawing attention to a clear tension. The event was organized by the Baltimore Transgender Alliance (BTA), a group started by trans women of color. But as Smith-Joyner pointed out, a majority of the event’s attendees were white.

As Smith-Joyner spoke, BTA Executive Director Ava Pipitone and BTA Communications Organizer Jamie Grace Alexander nodded and snapped, welcoming the constructive criticism. The two had marshalled the march into the 2640 Space on St. Paul. The march had made its way from North Avenue up “the stroll” on Charles Street, where many trans sex workers—mostly Black—work every night.

Smith-Joyner said there’s work to be done to ensure that sex workers are included in the event, and suggested paying sex workers to forego a night of work to participate in the event.

“If they’re working ‘the stroll’ right now, that’s when they’re making their money,” they said. “I think it’s really important to [hear] the voices of those who are most affected and marginalized the most.”

Jamie Grace Alexander, an event organizer, also addressed these tensions.

“We want to empower all trans people to do what’s best for them,” she said. “If someone’s like, ‘I don’t want to get a job at like Costco or whatever, I want to trick on the street,’ I’m like, ‘bitch, do it.’”

Taylor (who did not want to use her real name), a sex worker and an organizer with the Sex Workers Outreach Project, also noted that sex workers face issues of stigma—but that for many people, especially Black trans people, “it’s not a choice, it’s survival.”

The International Transgender Day of Remembrance was started 18 years ago to honor the lost life of a transgender sex worker named Rita Hester. It is meant to highlight and give respect to the trans lives lost each year to violence. Each year, it’s observed globally by millions. This is Baltimore’s third year recognizing the event.

The Trans Murder Monitoring Project has recorded over 17,000 murders of trans people between 2014 and 2017. And in the U.S., this has been a particularly horrific year for trans people. Last year, a record-breaking 27 trans people were killed in the U.S. and a new report from the Human Rights Campaign and Trans People of Color Coalition shows that 2017 will not be better: At least 25 transgender people have been murdered in the U.S. so far this year. Most of those killed were people of color. In March, a transgender woman named Alphonza Watson was murdered just a few blocks away from 2640 Space.

The event also came during high-profile national conversations about sexual assault and harassment.

“It’s always [cisgender] white women whose stories are heard, especially when they’re beautiful,” said Taylor.

Studies show that roughly half of all transgender people will experience sexual violence in their lives. Still, the BTA is trying “subvert” the focus on grieving and hardships, instead centering resilience.

“The idea is to try and create this sanctuary that’s like, metaphorically and structurally resilient,” Pipitone said as people lined up for free cupcakes and hot meals.

Like Smith-Joyner, Pipitone spoke about the racial and class divides in the room and in Baltimore’s queer and trans communities.

“It’s really class segregated,” she said. “It’s kind of, are you coming from an academic intellectual feminist identity politic that’s very exclusive, or are you coming from a, ‘shit sucks for everybody, here are we all together in this mess of like, LGBT or whatever, let’s dance?’”

Pipitone said the “let’s dance!” crowd is usually more welcoming than the academic feminist one. There was some dancing later in the night.

As the dancing died down, Diane, a homeless trans person who has been presenting as a woman for about a year, spoke about how at home and safe she’d felt at the event. She felt the sense of sanctuary Pipitone had hoped for. But on the streets, she still faces what she called “terrorism” for being trans—from being picked on to “being sexually assaulted in a shelter.”

There’s still work to be done to ensure that she’s safe.

“It makes me angry,” she said.

This piece runs courtesy of the Real News Network.

The post People Missing From the Room: The Trans Day of Remembrance offers solace and acknowledges that’s still not enough appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

The highest-ranking officer who was charged in the in-custody death of Freddie Gray in 2015 was cleared of all charges by a departmental trial board last week. That result is not surprising since one of the three law enforcement officers on the administrative trial board is a controversial captain with a reputation for violating the civil rights of protesters during the protests following Gray’s death.

None of the officers criminally charged for Gray’s death were convicted. Lt. Brian Rice, the officer who first initiated a foot chase with the 25-year-old African-American man, was found not guilty of several charges, including involuntary manslaughter, on July 18, 2016.

Two days before the verdict was rendered by Judge Barry Williams, a group of activists held a protest at the city’s Artscape festival. The protest, billed as Afromation, was shut down when city police engaged in a mass arrest of people near where the protest had moved to an already-shut-down freeway ramp. The activists have filed a lawsuit against the Baltimore Police Department, Commissioner Kevin Davis, and Captain Charles Thompson.

“The protest was designed to draw attention to a series of incidents involving the unlawful use of police force against African-Americans,” the lawsuit reads.

Thompson, about whom activists have long complained, is one of three members of the panel who judged Rice in the administrative trial, where he was charged with 10 offenses. If Rice had been found guilty on any of them, he could have lost his job. But, activists point out, an officer like Thompson, who could also potentially face charges himself, has a vested interest in keeping the stakes low—and clearing Rice of all wrongdoing.

“Thompson’s presence on the trial board makes it clear that there is no intention to hold anyone accountable for the murder of Freddie Gray,” the Baltimore Bloc, an activist group involved in the lawsuit, wrote in a statement. “Thompson’s history of violence and corruption is well known, as his is particular hostility to people who seek to hold other violent officers accountable. He has physically assaulted and otherwise violated the rights not only of protestors but of citizens merely attempting to observe police in the aftermath of the shooting of an unarmed citizen. His inclusion on the board is an insult to Freddie Gray’s memory and to the citizens of Baltimore.”

The Baltimore Police Department says it had no role in choosing Thompson for the three-member panel.

“The Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) requires members of the Administrative Hearing Board (AHB) to be selected randomly,” spokesperson T.J. Smith wrote in an emailed statement. “This is accomplished by a computer randomizer. The names of individuals are selected by a computer program; then, the respondent officer is given the opportunity to makes ‘strikes’ in accordance with the CBA. The department is not permitted to make ‘strikes’ and does not have discretion in the selection process.”

After they were arrested, the plaintiffs in the lawsuit were allegedly “left in the cramped vans at the Northern District Police Station for between 6 and 10 hours” in 90-degree heat, according to the suit. One prisoner passed out. All charges against the protesters were later dropped.

The suit alleges that the officers, including Thompson, falsely imprisoned activists without grounds to stop or detain them, and that they did not give activists enough time to disperse after instructing them to do so.

Thompson’s antagonism toward the activist community is long-standing. He has been involved in the arrests of activists on dubious grounds at least since the earliest protests following Gray’s death. He has also threatened numerous journalists, including me, Brandon Soderberg, and Reginald Thomas II.

The Afromation suit alleges that Thompson has told plaintiff Christopher Comeau that he “fucking hates” him and told Comeau he was “going to fucking sue your ass if you blow my ear drums out” with a bullhorn.

Thompson arrested Comeau two weeks after the suit was filed as Comeau filmed the arrest of another activist in City Hall. “No one unassociated with BPD has accused me of doing anything beyond filming at the time of that arrest,” Comeau said, although Thompson alleges that he was assaulted by Comeau, whose Nov. 16 trial was postponed because Thompson was still serving on the trial board.

“The irony is not lost on me that, at the same time I head to court . . . [to] face four charges, including second degree assault, the officer who has illegally arrested me and my friends on multiple occasions will be judging whether or not Brian Rice made an illegal arrest,” Comeau said.

In her criminal cases against officers Garrett Miller and Edward Nero, State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby pressed the novel legal theory that making an arrest without meeting the legal standard of probable cause is assault. Nero was found not guilty when Miller testified that he was the one who arrested Gray. Charges against Miller were dropped after Rice was found not guilty and so the theory was never tested.

It did not even come up in the administrative proceedings, where the three-member panel was provided opportunities to ask questions of the witnesses.

“Did you think that any use of force occurred?” Thompson asked Miller at one point.

“No, sir,” Miller responded, satisfying Thompson.

But if Miller’s case had gone forward, it is possible that Thompson himself would be facing criminal charges, as well as a civil suit, over the Afromation mass arrest.

Brian Rice had faced administrative leave before April 12, 2017, when he called in an order to chase Freddie Gray. Documents obtained by the Guardian in 2015 showed that an ex-girlfriend claimed that Rice threatened to kill her when she tried to leave a house they had once shared. She filed a restraining order and said he kept an AK-47 assault rifle in the house.

In 2012, Rice reportedly threatened to kill both himself and the partner of one of Rice’s exes. “I witnessed Brian Rice remove a black semiautomatic handgun from the trunk of his vehicle,” the man wrote, adding that Rice sent “harassing and sexually explicit text messages” and “caused me to become distraught and fear my life was about to end.”

The man added that Rice encouraged his children to use a gun to shoot photographs of their mother and her new partner.

After this alleged confrontation, Rice’s guns were confiscated and he was temporarily relieved of duty.

But he was back in office by April 2015 and in charge of other officers. If there were a more robust trial board or disciplinary system that did not rely on officers like Thompson, perhaps he would not have been on the street when Gray was killed.

Visit therealnews.com for independent local, national, and international journalisms that examines the underlying causes of chronic problems and searches for effective solutions.

The post Controversial cop on the disciplinary board of Brian Rice, the highest-ranking officer charged in the Freddie Gray case, nearly assured the outcome appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

The night before a holiday, when most people’s attention is generally not on the news, the Baltimore Police Department revealed potentially shocking revelations about the murder of Baltimore Police Det. Sean Suiter at a press conference, then emailed a statement not long after that announced the administratives charges against Sgt. Alicia White, the last officer facing a police trial board in the death of Freddie Gray, have been dismissed.

At the 5 p.m. press conference, Commissioner Kevin Davis told reporters gathered at Baltimore Police Department headquarters that Sean Suiter, the Detective who was murdered on Nov. 15, was scheduled to testify the following day,

“The very next day after Det. Suiter was murdered, he was scheduled to appear before a federal grand jury,” Davis said at the news conference. “Det. Suiter was going to offer federal grand jury testimony about an incident that occurred several years ago that included officers who are now federally indicted back in March, the GTTF [Gun Trace Task Force] squad and included officers who were on the scene in that particular incident.”

Eight members of the Baltimore Police Department’s Gun Trace Task Force have been indicted on federal racketeering charges. Eric Troy Snell, a Philadelphia police officer, was recently indicted for allegedly selling cocaine and heroin stolen from dealers by members of the GTTF. Prosecutors claimed he threatened the children of indicted Baltimore Det. Jemell Rayam.

“The acting United State’s Attorney and the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Baltimore field office have told me in no uncertain terms that Det. Suiter was not the target of any ongoing investigation,” Davis said.

According to Maryland court records, Suiter worked with Wayne Jenkins and Maurice Ward, two of the indicted detectives. Sources close to the department told the Real News that Suiter asked to be transferred to work as a Western District Detective in order to get away from these officers.

Davis nevertheless insisted that there was no known connection between the murder and the impending testimony.

“The BPD and the FBI do not posses any information on this incident and it appears to be nothing more than a spontaneous observation of a man behaving suspiciously in a spontaneous decision to investigate his conduct is part of any conspiracy,” Davis said, addressing rumors circulating on the streets, in the media, and among officers, about Suiter’s partner. “The evidence refutes the notion that Dete. Suiter’s partner was anything other than just that, his partner.”

The partner, who has not been named, has “been talking to homicide detectives non-stop since this incident,” Davis said. “Upon the sound of gunfire Det. Suiter’s partner sought cover across the street and he immediately called 911.”

There is “evidence of a struggle between Det. Suiter and his killer,” according to Davis, who cited a radio transmission and the sound of apparent gunfire and evidence of a struggle visible on Det. Suiter’s clothing.”

Davis also said that Suiter was shot with his own weapon, confirming a story that has been reported on for days.

“It certainly makes for a great theory,” Davis said of the idea that the impending testimony motivated the murder. “It wasn’t as if anyone lured him into that location. None of those things exist. So I understand the wild possibility that go through people’s minds when we all want answers.”

During the investigation, police locked down parts of the Harlem Park neighborhood, insisting that people show identification to prove they live there in order to cross police lines.

Many, including the ACLU have seen this as an unconstitutional overreach. Davis, however, placed the exigency of finding Suiter’s killer above any constitutional concerns.

“I would much rather endure some predictive criticism from the ACLU and others about that decision, than endure a conversation with Det. Suiter’s wife about why we didn’t do everything we possibly could do to recover evidence and identify the person who murdered her husband,” Davis said earlier in the week.

Councilman John Bullock, who represents District 9, which includes Harlem Park, told the Beat earlier today that he has been in “limited communication” with Baltimore Police over the course of the investigation and that he has received a few complaints from his constituents about the police lockdown—some of them spotted officers around the area with military-style weapons. He’d also heard of people being patted down and searched.

“I’m open to meeting with members of the community,” Bullock said, when the Beat asked about whether he intended to take steps to address the issue.

He said that the length of time that the investigation took exacerbated the situation and that “there could have been better communication throughout the process.”

Davis would not rule out that the department will investigate other officers for the killing, even though he says there is no evidence of it at this time.

“There’s nothing we won’t consider. There’s no path we won’t go down if the evidence takes us down that path,” Davis said.

The press conference did nothing to quell rumors among citizens or police officers, who have been speculating about the case. In an emailed statement an hour and a half later, BPD announced that the administrative charges against Sgt. Alicia White, the last officer facing a police trial board in the death of Freddie Gray, have been dismissed.

“Commissioner Kevin Davis has dismissed the scheduled administrative hearing board for Sergeant Alicia White. She will face no further administrative actions,” the statement reads. “We now have the experience of two administrative trials. A trial is the best test of evidence. Two separate boards have examined the evidence and have reached the same conclusion. The evidence and allegations against Sergeant White are the same.”

Additional reporting by Lisa Snowden-McCray and Brandon Soderberg.

The post Slain Detective murdered day before he was set to testify against crooked cops; Sgt. Alicia White’s administrative charges dropped appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

At around 1:50 a.m. on Aug. 8, just two days after Baltimore’s first 72-hour Ceasefire, Dejuane Beverly was shot near a house on Liberty and Tulsa roads. He died. Police found no motive. No suspect was arrested.

Naturally, Dejuane’s mother Dedrah Johnson was caught completely off guard. It was the last thing she expected to hear on that Tuesday morning.

“It’s like, you become shut off from people sometimes because you feel like nobody understands what you’re going through,” she said.

After taking time to mourn, Johnson has been actively volunteering and spreading the word about Baltimore Ceasefire 365.

“I want to put it out there. This has to stop,” she said. “I really want to do whatever I can to stop this from happening, but some days are harder than others. So I go to my therapy group on Tuesdays.”

The therapy group is Mothers of Murdered Sons and Daughters (MOMSD), which meets every Tuesday and Sunday at St. John’s Alpha and Omega Church.

In that group she connected with other mothers dealing with the same kind of grief—and one whose 15-year-old son was murdered just 30 minutes before Dejuane, in almost the exact same way, in the same part of town.

Daphne Alston founded MOMSD in 2008. She knew firsthand what these women were going through. On July 14, 2008, her son Tariq was on the phone with his girlfriend at a party when someone shot and killed him. When Alston got the call, she was devastated. She was living in Harford County and tried a couple different groups, but she says they were predominantly white and the members were mostly parents who had lost their children to drug addictions, motorcycle accidents, or suicide. She says she eventually felt uncomfortable speaking in the groups.

“It would interrupt the group every time,” she said. “So I stopped coming because the women would be so overwhelmed with my story. How could I live through something like that? Many of them had lost homes, marriages broken up, got addicted and all kinds of stuff while going through their grieving process.”

But there was one woman, Mildred Samy, whose son Samuel had also been shot and killed during a dispute at a Waffle House one night.

At the time, Alston and Samy felt they were the only women in Harford County that had this shared experience of losing their sons to gun violence.

“That year I think it was only one murder for the whole county,” Alston recalled.

But when they watched the news at night and talked to one another, Alston says they saw so many women in Baltimore City who were going through the same thing. They felt their pain. Without knowing any of them, they still felt the loneliness these women may have felt. No one was paying attention to people like them, the mothers left devastated by the bullets that snatched their sons.

They decided to start Mothers Of Murdered Sons and Daughters in the city. A co-worker introduced Daphne to the pastor of St. John’s Alpha and Omega, a church in West Baltimore. He gave MOMSD space to operate out of their building and the group has been meeting there ever since. MOMSD officially became a non-profit 501(c)3 two years ago. Daphne says the group has been predominantly self-funded, only receiving their first grant this year.

“The majority of black people who live in this city, when they walk out they door, they don’t see hope,” she said. “Broken bottles, trash, blunt guts. How is somebody supposed to be hopeful living in these conditions?”

The conditions of poverty are heightened by the trauma of living in what she calls “homicide density.”

“We just went to a boy’s funeral the other day . . . Dante,” Alston said as she took a pause, thinking about him and his mother as if they were her own family.

Today, the group has around 65 active members who regularly attend the meetings and more than 300 in their extended network.

“A lot of the mothers don’t come out much, but we have a lot of phone conversations,” Alston said.

The group reaches out to every parent or grandparent when someone is murdered. They attend the funeral services and try to keep in touch with the family of the deceased. They also have two liaisons who work to follow up with detectives to be sure that cases are consistently being worked on.

“Look, I’m on the phone seven days a week, still talking to who I can about what happened to my son,” Alston said, “but everybody can’t do that.”

Dedrah Johnson knows the kind of support that these mothers need through her first-hand experience.

“Sometimes they just need someone to sit in the courtroom with them while they have to relive this over and over again. Some of them have the killers walking the streets again in the same neighborhoods because the courts didn’t have enough evidence to convict them. How are they supposed to live with that?”

Johnson paused.

“We are abnormal. Losing a child is hard regardless, but let’s be real, losing a child to murder is different than losing a child who is sick,” she said. “Sometimes my husband has to point things I do out to me and say, ‘Baby, that’s not normal.’ These women need to know that it’s OK to be abnormal. You can come on over here and be abnormal with us . . . together.”

This piece runs courtesy of the Real News Network.

The post Mothers Of Murdered Sons And Daughters offers space to deal with grief appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

A year ago, after the election of Donald Trump, Dylan Petrohilos hung an Antifa flag out in front of his house.

“I had [the flag] flying outside my home because Trump was elected and there was a belief he was a fascist, and so we had this idea that we needed to bring back the moniker of anti-fascism,” Petrohilos told me at a bar where he was discussing the Washington D.C. Riot Act case with other defendants arrested in connection with the protests of Trump’s inauguration.

When Petrohilos’ home was raided by D.C. police in April, the flag was the first thing they took. They also took seven small black flags, copies of The Nation and In These Times magazines, and a banner, made during the financial crisis, that read “Kiss Capitalism Goodbye.”

These items are evidence in the J20 case, the first mass trial of which begins this week. Most of the defendants were arrested on inauguration day, after a protest (which the government has deemed a riot) resulted in several broken windows. Police officers threw more than 70 “non-lethal” grenades, sprayed dozens of canisters of pepper spray, and cordoned off around 200 people in a “kettle” flanked by riot police and walls on all sides.

And though the Department of Justice claims that Petrohilos conspired to plan the riot, he was not arrested that day. He says he was not even there.

But the fact that the government says he spoke about J20 on a podcast and was recorded by undercover police and the far-right sting video site Project Veritas at protest-planning meetings has put Petrohilos at the center of what could be the most important political conspiracy trial of a generation—one that could change the way we think about our data and other records of our actions.

Almost any statement made by Petrohilos about the day’s protest evidence was at play in what was to be the final hearing before this week’s trials. The Nov. 9 hearing was intended to establish the fact of the conspiracy, a move that would make co-conspirators’ statements admissible in court, despite hearsay rules.

Prosecutor Jennifer Kerkhoff cited statements made on the It’s Going Down podcast as evidence of conspiracy. At one point, the judge, Lynn Leibovitz, surmised that appearing on a podcast required planning, so if Petrohilos was going on the podcast to talk about the protests perhaps the existence of the podcast could be evidence of conspiring.

“Saying that coming on a podcast recorded for public consumption to talk about a public demonstration is evidence of conspiracy, is like saying that someone writing a column in High Times is proof that they are in a drug cartel,” Paul Hernandez, a member of the It’s Going Down editorial collective wrote me. “The State is trying to make the case that anyone that attends a demonstration or protest is thus involved in a conspiracy.”

All the prosecution needed to establish was a conspiracy to commit any crime, including “conspiracy to disrupt public congress.” This could refer to any protest at any time.

“This is a fundamental attack on the right to organize,” Petrohilos said.

Petrohilos is not among those to stand trial this week. The prosecution classed all of the defendants into four categories based on their alleged involvement in planning or participating in the riot. He is in category two, which Kerkhoff has referred to in court as the “planners.”

“Dylan Petrohilos said, ‘Come with me if you want to talk about black bloc. I am black bloc,’” Kerkhoff said in court, citing the planning meeting that was infiltrated.

“Black bloc” is the essence of a large part of the J20 charges. It is a political strategy in which wearing identical clothing and face masks allows a group to move collectively through the city in protest, mimicking the black flag of anarchism and making it harder for police to identify individuals, which is why the government is using clothing as evidence of conspiracy.

Isaac Dalto, Petrohilos’ friend who is also included in Category 2 as a planner, says the government is using affiliation with the Industrial Workers of the World union, for whom he organizes, as evidence of conspiracy.

“Because they went to legitimate, above-ground union meetings about forming a union in their workplace, their Google calendars say IWW, and that’s being used against them to prove membership in this criminal conspiracy that we’re alleged to be part of,” says Dalto.

“Conspiring to commit lawful acts is not a crime. It’s not a conspiracy. It’s called organizing,” he said. “That’s the real danger of this case to democracy and dissent in this country—that any form of organizing or civil resistance stands to become a crime.”

The threshold for conspiracy is so low that two journalists, Aaron Cantú and Alexei Wood, are still facing charges for following a group that they were covering. Wood is part of the group who demanded a speedy trial and goes to court this week.

With long hair, black clothes, and a leather wide-brimmed hat, Wood may have looked a bit like an outlaw at the hearing, but he was arrested and charged with conspiring because he was livestreaming the political actions.

“The chilling effect is obvious,” he said. “It took me months to go document another protest. Even the most like, Grannies Against Trump thing, I didn’t want to go to. I was traumatized. Absolutely traumatized.”

Finally, he says, on May Day, he was fed up.

“I was like, ‘Fuck it, this is what I do. This is my beat. This is what I’ve done for years,’” Wood said. “I didn’t do anything wrong. I live-streamed myself from beginning to end, and the entire world can decide whether I incited a riot. . . . It’s out there for the whole world to decide, and I’m glad it is.”

Baynard Woods is a reporter at the Real News Network and the founder of Democracy in Crisis. Email baynard@democracyincrisis.com; Twitter @baynardwoods

The post The government’s case against J20 defendants sets low bar for conspiracy charges appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

What we can learn from the 10th grade mock trial of Caesar Goodson

Last week, an all-police panel cleared officer Caesar Goodson on all 21 administrative charges he was facing for the in-custody death of Freddie Gray. Last year, a group of students at Reginald F. Lewis High School came to a very different conclusion.

The 10th grade law class spent the semester preparing for a mock trial for Goodson, who drove the van that transported Gray. The students, who were mostly black, said they were touched deeply by Freddie Gray’s death.

“We’re scared because what happened to him could have happened to any one of us,” Antonio Satchell said.

Living in the same world and facing many of the same problems as Freddie Gray, the students found Goodson guilty of involuntary manslaughter for his role in Freddie Gray’s death. The hearings Goodson faced focused instead on technicalities of what an officer should be expected to do, rather than what the law requires. Although no other public body has found Goodson—or anyone else—guilty of any crimes in Gray’s death, many students say that the months they spent studying the case in preparation for the mock trial inspired them to work on correcting the injustice and institutional racism they face everyday. Satchell said that after college he would like to work at an organization like the Innocence Project, which works toward exonerating the wrongfully convicted.

Poverty, joblessness, and a lack of hope are still endemic in these students’ communities. And the police don’t make it easier. With fresh reports on youth violence across the city, there have been calls to increase the number of police and set up undercover squads of officers who look young.

There is media hysteria. “Baltimore leaders, community frustrated by juvenile crime they say is ‘out of control,’” a Sun headline blared.

“This kind of headline and reporting drives false narrative. Buried in story is the truth ‘Overall juvenile arrests in the city are down 11 percent,’” Public Defender Jenny Egan tweeted.

There is no denying violence remains a problem for young people. But they are able to see its causes. It’s “caused by unnecessary laws and poverty,” Satchell said. “Because if you have nothing else to do you are going to resort to selling drugs.”

Students like Sa’mon Fedd don’t need the studies that have found that Baltimore is among the worst places to grow up poor and black to explain their realities, they already knew all that.

“We’re trapped, we’re afraid, and we’re hurting,” she said. (Jaisal Noor)

Housing activists argue for new community land trust plan

On Wednesday, Nov. 8, a coalition of housing activists marched into the offices of the city’s finance department, where they presented petitions demanding that the city adopt a plan called 20/20 Vision for Baltimore, a proposal to establish two separate $20 million funds to bolster affordable housing and fight blight through community land trusts.

Financed by city-backed bonds, the two pools of money would be administered in part by community groups, not just the mayor or city council. Activist Destiny Watford said the distinction was critical to address the dearth of affordable housing and the further encroachment of vacant homes in neighborhoods that have received little attention from City Hall.

“This tool will allow us to keep wealth in our neighborhood,” Watford said. “It would allow us to build the things that we need in our neighborhoods because no one else in Baltimore knows what we need more than the people that live there.”

Led by Workers United, a textile and gaming union under the umbrella group United Not Blighted, the housing activists made their case during a press conference just before entering City Hall. They argued that the existing process of funneling housing funds through the city council and the mayor has not worked.

“We need for our city leaders to be more than leaders at the podium,” said Terell Askew. “We need for them to join us and this great cause of building the city into a better place to live and building us all into better people to live in it.”

This argument seemed prescient just 24 hours later when the City Council held a briefing on the myriad tax breaks the city has granted developers to stimulate growth. During the hearing finance officials presented statistics that revealed just how costly this policy has been.

Baltimore Development Corporation President William Cole told the council that in 2017 the city lost $12 million in tax revenue annually as the result of payment in lieu in taxes (PILOTs), tax incentives that allow developers to forgo taxes for a prescribed length of time. During the same period the city collected just $2 million from projects where the PILOT had either ended or was winding down.

Deputy Budget Director Steve Kraus also told the council the that the city’s tax increment finance deals (TIFs), which hand over future property tax revenues to developers to invest in infrastructure, has almost maxed out the city’s credit.

“With Port Covington, we will reach $1 billion,” Kraus said of the amount the TIFs have contributed to the city’s debt. That number has nearly quadrupled as a result of a roughly $600 million TIF to build out Port Covington, a development backed by Under Armor billionaire Kevin Plank.

“We don’t have much room left,” Kraus said.

The numbers didn’t seem to faze the council: A number of members heaped praise on the presenters even as they failed to give an in-depth accounting of just how much the tax breaks are costing the city in aggregate, or what terms the city has committed to going forward.

The moment that best encapsulated the concerns of the 20/20 supporters was a question from Councilman Kristerfer Burnett, who asked Kraus if there was a database or web site where residents could track the progress of the growing array of tax subsidies.

“We don’t have the resources for that,” Kraus replied. (Taya Graham & Stephen Janis)

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