“This team needs to get off the stage and into our communities,” one citizen says, interrupting the first public meeting on Tuesday Nov. 28 with the five-member team appointed to monitor the Consent Decree enacted by the Department of Justice following their scathing report on the Baltimore Police Department. “We don’t understand how you can make an assessment and write a report unless you’re out in the streets talking to people in real time.”

The woman’s sentiment was echoed by almost everyone in the audience at Frederick Douglass High School on Tuesday night.

“You’ve got to be on the scene in real time…if you have to roll up out of bed in work-out gear. Then come. We’ll be there,” said Lawrence Brown, a professor of Public Health at Morgan State University. Brown said that the team should be on the ground, with Facebook and Twitter so that when an incident arises, citizens can log-in, insteading of suiting up and going out.

“What happened with Harlem Park?” Brown asked. “If you’re an arm of the court you should be on the ground monitoring in real time.”

The police lockdown of the Harlem Park neighborhood where Det. Sean Suiter was murdered dominated the conversation.

“We are asking for legal protection from our police department,” a 21-year teaching veteran said, adding that the monitoring team needs to act before another community is “held hostage.”

Only one member of the monitoring team, Shantay Guy of the Baltimore Community Mediation Center, actually did go to the Harlem Park neighborhood while it was under police occupation—but citizens insisted that they wanted the lawyers on the team, like Kenneth Thompson, the head Monitor, to be there.

“We the people want to hear from the professional about how we the people can deal with the police,” one woman said. “I didn’t go to law school. They did.”

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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.

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Last year, 300 Gangstas, a radically pragmatic collective of organizers and reformed gang members, gave out about 100 donated turkeys to families in need on Monument Street, all the while also hosting a block party, dropping plenty of knowledge, and clothing and feeding the homeless, and this year they’ll do it again.

“Our goal is basically to inspire,” says Ray Lugar, 300 Gangstas’ head of entertainment and a veteran rapper, posted up with 300 Gangstas co-founder PFK Boom at the park on St. Paul and Lafayette streets. “We want you to get involved in your own transformation and we use ourselves as an example.”

“The movement is important: By me knowing you, you knowing me, all these collectives can grow,” Boom says. “If we all throw $10 out and someone who has $50 can pull that out for someone who doesn’t have $10, then you can get it, they can get it, and we can get it.”

This year’s turkey giveaway will take place at Latrobe Homes public housing on Nov. 18. The event is an extension of the work 300 Gangstas began during the Baltimore Uprising, when they were founded as major players in the much-publicized “gang truce” and as a corrective to many of the opportunists who swooped in to cash-in on the unrest.

“When the so-called riots—the uprising, really—happened, that was an opportunity for people to come get this money and that’s why 300 Gangstas stepped out on the frontline so people didn’t get it twisted, because these people weren’t out here when the problems were here—they were only here when the cameras were here,” Lugar says. “The Freddie Gray situation was comprehensive but there are kids and people in those communities still dealing with it now and they were dealing with it before then too.”

Indeed, a whole bunch of social justice-oriented groups have fallen by the wayside or collapsed post-uprising. 300 Men, the anti-gun violence campaign which predated the uprising (the name 300 Gangstas, by the way, is a churlish response to 300 Men’s respectability politics) has been mostly silent over the past two years despite praise from police and other city officials, and initiatives such as former mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake’s One Baltimore shuttered last year with little evidence it did much of anything beyond pay some people’s salaries.

“All money isn’t good money…We don’t take any money that we don’t put into the movement,” Boom says. “You know what ‘GANGSTAS’ mean? Gathering All Nations Gaining Salvation Through Advancing Society.”

He rests on the phrase “all nations” for a moment and then repeats.

“All nations. White, black, yellow, green, Christian, Blood, Crip, BGF, ex-addict, whoever actually want to help,” he says.

These are 300 Gangstas’ people, and these are the people who can get things done.

“The guys and girls we go after are the ones that people throw away—the ones that people feel are lost,” Lugar adds. “We see their potential. They just need someone to stop in and show them some love.”

“It takes the people who are afflicted and conflicted to understand the realness,” Boom says.

Boom was one of the afflicted. He was charged with murder in 1993 and spent years in solitary confinement until he was found not guilty in 1995. Out of that experience came a commitment to helping others, a focus on changing how ex-felons are treated, and a hyper-cogent rage that motivates him. He’s a masterful talker—like an amalgamation of H. Rap Brown, 2Pac, and Bernie Mac—and a bold, unafraid organizer. Just a few days after Freddie Gray’s death, in the early days of the uprising, Boom helped marshall a large protest of mostly teens from Gilmor Homes to downtown and back. It wasn’t his march; it was set up by Pastor Westley West—a figure then criticized for chasing cameras—but Boom knew they needed someone who knew how to march and stepped in.

Since the uprising, 300 Gangstas has stuck around. Its core dozen or so members—including co-founder Big Wolfe, a Blood no longer in the life; and Bonez, also a Blood and a writer, educator, and prognosticator of yoga—pop up wherever needed. 300 was present with the Fruits Of Islam for overnight events during Baltimore Ceasefire and for Tent City, the 10-day homeless encampment and protest in front of City Hall.

“What we did at Tent City was we provided security,” Boom says. “But my kids’ mother and daughter was also feeding them spaghetti for the first few days too—the city wasn’t providing any of that.”

“The volunteers there stayed the night, that experience was a representation of what 300 Gangstas was about: You had people from different walks down there to support Tent City. They were about the sacrifice, man,” Lugar says. “We were there for them, it was more than security.”

The longview is proper, cop-free community policing. It’s through reaching people on their level and realistically that change can happen—it has almost nothing to do with the city or the state or any elected officials. Wolfe has declared that his goal is to put a 300 Gangstas chapter (or as he’d write it “khapter”) in cities around the country.

“It’s about people taking ownership,” Lugar says. “We want to build that. Right now we have to be the faces of it, but it’s not about 300 Gangstas. We need to show when it’s not us, when it’s all the people doing the work. And we want to inspire people our age as well. ‘Just let it go, the times is different,’ people say. You can’t complain about how times is different, you played a role in accepting: Terms change, but we gonna have to change.”

“It’s crazy how certain things didn’t change but then you look at the unrest and a new generation, most of these kids are from the Sheila Dixon era, so they see someone who stole gift cards,” Boom says. “And now they got Pugh, and when she talks they hear their mom or their dad and shit—”

“You all right ma?” Lugar shouts across the street, interrupting Boom.

A woman in a walker is wheezing, struggling to move up the slight incline of Lafayette Street.

Lugar dashes across the street to check on her— there are more important things than this interview, than talking. There’s action.

She just lives up the street and needs some help getting there, Lugar tells Boom.

“I got you ma,” Lugar says, crouched down, his hand on her back.

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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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