• Baltimore City Councilman Brandon Scott made a surprise entrance into the Maryland governor’s race—he announced last Thursday that he’d be running as James Shea’s lieutenant governor. The two say they plan on making Baltimore a top priority. Many have speculated that Scott, who serves as vice chair of the council’s public safety committee and has frequently clashed with Mayor Catherine Pugh, would eventually run for mayor. He doesn’t have to give up his council seat to run, so he doesn’t risk anything by giving this a try.

• We got to see a little bit of what Mayor Catherine Pugh and other city officials used to unsuccessfully woo Amazon to Baltimore via the website thismustbetheplace.city, and, well, we weren’t impressed. The pitch didn’t feel very much like Baltimore at all. In fact, Port Covington seemed to be the city’s only selling point (it’s a “master-planned, mixed-use, urban redevelopment project,” you know). There’s nothing wrong with seeking to bring new business into the city, but this feels like a real moment to break away from the business-as-usual way things have been done, and create something new. Consider this quote: “The Port Covington peninsula, located in South Baltimore, has very low crime rates, as do the surrounding neighborhoods of Locust Point, Westport, Fells Point, Federal Hill, and Riverside.” Yes, those are the parts of the city that have always received the resources that help keep crime down. But let’s not ignore the parts of the city where crime rates are higher and life isn’t so rosey (there’s no use ignoring it—surely the folks at Amazon have read a paper or two). And, btw, can we start asking these companies what they are willing to do for us, too?
• The whole country was left reeling after another tragic mass shooting—this time in Parkland, Fla. Here in Maryland, school officials at Loch Raven High School in Baltimore County went on high alert when a student brought a pellet gun the day after the Florida shooting. Police got the gun and no one was injured. Baltimore County Executive Kevin B. Kamenetz noted that he wanted things at the school to go back to normal. But it feels like fear is the new normal now.
• Then there’s this: Sgt. Aaron Penman, a Republican running to represent Harford County in the Maryland House of Delegates, held a gun bingo fundraiser the weekend after the Parkland shooting. One of the prizes: an AR-15, the same kind of rifle used in Florida and in other mass shooting events around the country. We’ll just say kudos to the protesters who didn’t let the weekend’s snow stop them from showing up outside the event and holding a vigil for victims of the mass shooting.
• Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF) members Daniel Hersl and Marcus Taylor (the only two of the eight federally-indicted officers not to plead guilty) were found guilty by a jury on Feb. 12. Next comes the sentencing of all eight of them in the spring, but in the more immediate: Ongoing demands for massive police reform. Del. Bilal Ali recommended disbanding BPD (an idea Mayor Catherine Pugh quickly dismissed). Meanwhile, BPD commissioner Darryl DeSousa went on ABC2 News and apologized to the public for GTTF’s actions and also declared that there will be an “independent, outside” group looking into Det. Sean Suiter’s death. Suiter was killed just one day before he was supposed to testify to a grand jury about a GTTF-related incident.
• A jury made up entirely of women found that the police shooting of Korryn Gaines and her son to be “not objectively reasonable,” awarding her family $37 million. The ruling feels bittersweet, considering the officer who shot her has received a promotion since the August 2016 incident. The Baltimore Sun has noted that the case is far from over, and it’s likely that Gaines’ family will never see the full amount. It’s notable that although Baltimore County government attorney Mike Field released a statement indicating that he could appeal the verdict, County Executive Kevin Kamenetz, who is running for governor, declined to comment. And of course, no amount of money will bring a life back.
• There have been four homicides between Feb. 12 (when last week’s issue of the Beat went to press) and Feb. 19 (when this week’s issue goes to press): Sadik Griffin and John Townes Jr. on Feb. 13, Maurice Anthony Knight on Feb. 15, and a victim not yet identified by police on Feb. 17. These four homicides come after a lengthy break without any homicides—from Feb. 3-12. So far this year there have been 31 homicides in Baltimore.

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The Baltimore Police Department’s Gun Trace Task Force builds on what we have already known about policing in Baltimore.

The Baltimore Police Department has been shown to use undue and excessive force as covered by Mark Puente in his Sept. 28, 2014 Baltimore Sun article. In August 2016, the Department of Justice released a scathing 164-page report indicting the entire department. They wrote on page three of the document: “the Department of Justice concludes that there is reasonable cause to believe that BPD engages in a pattern or practice of conduct that violates the Constitution or federal law. BPD engages in a pattern or practice of: (1) making unconstitutional stops, searches, and arrests; (2) using enforcement strategies that produce severe and unjustified disparities in the rates of stops, searches and arrests of African Americans; (3) using excessive force; and (4) retaliating against people engaging in constitutionally-protected expression.”

After the DOJ report, the Baltimore Police Department did not fundamentally change. They continued to have a “War Room” and were found to have engaged in secret aerial surveillance, facial scanning, and using Geofeedia and Zerofox to track activists on social media. They have secretly deployed a device called Stingray to capture all cell phone signals in an area effectively criminalizing entire communities, especially disinvested, redlined Black neighborhoods.

Hence, the Baltimore Police Department is fundamentally a white supremacist organization that hurts Black Lives. The GTTF trials reveal the ways by which BPD officers have increased crime in Baltimore City—looting the city via excessive overtime pay, selling looted drugs on the street, planting guns and drugs on suspects, jumping out and committing armed robbery of residents, and racial profiling. And perhaps most mysteriously, there still remains the unsolved murder of Det. Sean Suiter killed just a day before he was scheduled to testify in the GTTF trial.

These prolific and systemic criminal police acts also indict Baltimore’s current and past mayors that tripled the budget of BPD since the 1990s—especially by former mayor Martin O’Malley. Tens of thousands of lives have been destroyed. The Baltimore Police Department must be disbanded and the local Fraternal Order of Police abolished.

Baltimore can follow the example of Camden, New Jersey and fire the entire force with a plan to immediately transition to the Baltimore Peacebuilding Authority. Instead of hyperpolicing our hypersegregated communities, we can operate a peacebuilding and peacemaking entity that centers deescalation, mental health, public health, conflict mediation, and guarding the public’s interest to authentically protect and serve. This can be done. This should be done. It must be done if Baltimore is to reach its potential.

Lawrence Brown is the grandson of sharecroppers who lived in the Mississippi Delta and an assistant professor at Morgan State University in the School of Community Health and Policy. He tweets as @bmoredoc.

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Gun Trace Task Force members Daniel Hersl and Marcus Taylor have been found guilty on a number of charges tied to racketeering, conspiracy, and fraud.

The jury of eight white women, three black men, and one Asian woman took about two days—Feb. 8 and Feb. 12—to deliberate before delivering a verdict that declared Hersl and Taylor guilty on most counts. The jury acquit both on gun charges.

As the verdict was being read, Taylor seemed mostly unaffected, quiet. Hersl grew red, rubbing his head with his hands on his forehead. His family broke once they put handcuffs on Hersl.

Stephen Hersl, one of Hersl’s brothers, appeared wrecked. “I love you Danny,” he cried. Taylor’s family moved out of courthouse without comment.

Hersl and Taylor were the only two members of the Baltimore Police Department’s federally-indicted gun unit not to plead guilty, and their trial, which began three weeks ago, revealed numerous shocking tactics used by Baltimore Police officers to enrich themselves, including the illegal seizure of money, drugs, and guns—often keeping some or all of those drugs and money (and in one case reselling a gun)—along with extensive overtime fraud.

“I can go on with my own life without having to worry about and being in fear of someobody who’s supposed to protect me,” said Alex Hilton, a man who came to watch the verdict. Hilton says he was repeatedly harassed by Hersl in the 2000s so much so that he moved to West Baltimore to avoid him.

The trial also implicated a dozen or so other police officers, former and current, including Dep. Commissioner Dean Palmere, who announced his retirement hours after GTTF’s Momodu Gondo testified that Palmere helped cover up a 2009 police shooting (Palmere denies this); and slain detective Sean Suiter, who was killed one day before he was set to testify to a grand jury about a 2010 event involving GTTF’s Sgt. Wayne Jenkins, Ryan Guinn, and an unnamed sergeant who planted heroin in a car—until Gondo’s testimony, which said Suiter stole money with him as early as 2009. The department held a hero’s funeral for the murdered detective.

Hersl’s lawyer William Purpura argued that while Hersl had indeed committed overtime fraud and stolen money from civilians, he was not guilty of robbery (theft by force). Instead, according to Purpura, Hersl seized the money and drugs legally, as a police officer. His only illegal act was failing to turn them in.

But according to plenty of testimony, Hersl was more than aware of plans to rob citizens, and was complicit in the planning and execution of these robberies. As for Taylor, his lawyers Christopher Nieto and Jennifer Wicks argued Taylor’s innocence and mostly said that the witnesses, both police and citizens—most of them current or former drug dealers—could not be believed. She accused the prosecution of going to the “depths of the criminal underworld” to find its witnesses.

But Assistant U.S. Attorney Leo Wise countered that it was Hersl and Taylor who had chosen to commit crimes with the former detectives who had testified and the generally vulnerable people they had victimized.

“What these men hoped as they committed these crimes,” Wise said. “Is that someday, if they were ever called to account for these actions that they could hide behind lawyers like Ms. Wicks, Mr. Nieto, and Mr. Purpura,” who would demonize their accusers.

Wise said they had indeed descended into the “depths of the criminal underworld.”

“And what we found in those depths were Daniel Thomas Hersl and Marcus Roosevelt Taylor,” he said.

The FBI is still looking into that underworld. Its investigation into the Baltimore Police Department is ongoing.

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On March 6, 2009, Det. Jemell Rayam shot Shawn Cannady at point blank range as he sat in his Lexus in an alley in Park Heights.

“Fuck him, I just don’t wanna chase him,” Rayam explained later on, according to Momodu Gondo, Rayam’s long-time partner, in his testimony Monday in federal court at the Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF) corruption trial.

Cannady died two days after the shooting. At the time, police said that Rayam, who had previously shot two people in 2007, shot Cannady in order to keep him from running over Officer Jason Giordano, but according to Gondo that story was concocted by Deputy Commissioner Dean Palmere, who “coached everyone about what to say.”

Palmere, the highest-ranking official to be directly implicated in the corruption of the officers indicted with GTTF, announced his retirement almost immediately after the testimony and denied the allegations.

“It’s not true. I would not coach somebody,” Palmere told the Sun. “I’ve always taken pride in my ethics and integrity.”  

Cannady’s family received a $100,000 settlement in 2013 for Cannady’s death.

In court, even Gondo, one of the most notorious members of the squad, who has pleaded guilty to helping a childhood friend-turned drug-dealer in another federal case and who Rayam had said once “laid someone out” seemed disturbed by the case.

“You knew Rayam had murdered somebody?” Christopher Nieto, the attorney for Marcus Taylor, one of the two members of the GTTF to maintain his innocence and stand trial for various racketeering charges, asked Gondo. Nieto referred to transcripts from proffer interviews between Gondo and federal agents, where he recounted a conversation.

“You murdered that guy,” Gondo reportedly said to Rayam in conversations long after the event.

“Yeah I did,” Rayam said according to the notes Nieto was reading.

Gondo seemed resigned to the corruption when he told Nieto why he didn’t say anything about the “murder” to Internal Affairs.

“If you’re in my shoes, if that’s what has happened,” Gondo said. “What’s gonna happen to me?”

The answer echoed a similar answer to the question that has haunted all of the officers at the trial: Why did they follow Sgt. Wayne Jenkins—who it was revealed Monday is not cooperating with the investigation—as he perpetrated a reign of terror on the citizens of the city they were all sworn to serve and protect?

“Wayne brought a whole different dynamic to the gun unit,” Gondo said.

Still, Gondo confessed earlier in the day, that he had stolen money with other officers long before joining the GTTF.  He named several detectives with whom he stole money, including Giordano (who was investigated to for 2011 theft that Rayam admitted to being involved in when he took the stand last week) and Det. Sean Suiter, who was murdered the day before he was to testify to the grand jury about the case on Nov. 15.

Suiter was set to testify about the case of Umar Burley, which began in 2010 and involved Suiter, Jenkins, and Det. Ryan Guinn—who was named for a second time Monday as the person who tipped off the GTTF members that they were being investigated. A member of the State’s Attorney’s Office and someone working in police Internal Affairs also tipped GTTF off.

But, while he was on the streets, Gondo was not afraid of IAD, he testified. “It was part of the culture,” he said. “I wasn’t out there getting complaints—putting my hands on people.”

That answer came about after Gondo was asked whether he was worried that Daniel Hersl was an informant when he first joined the GTTF. But Gondo said he trusted Hersl because of his of his reputation and the suspicion simply arose from Hersl being new to the unit.

“Dan was banned from the whole Eastern District when he got to our squad from complaints,” Gondo said. “Dan had a history.”

And in the twisted world of the GTTF, that meant Gondo and the others could trust him.

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It was toward the end of the day at the Gun Trace Task Force trial of Daniel Hersl and Marcus Taylor yesterday when Ronald Hamilton, whose home was raided without a warrant by the GTTF in July 2016, finally had enough.

On the stand, he received too many nagging, loaded questions about where and how he got his money and not enough about what he believed to be the real issue at hand: the full extent of the GTTF’s reign of terror. So, when Christopher Nieto, the defense attorney for Taylor, asked one more time about the $17,000 in cash he put down for his half-a-million dollar home in Westminster, Hamilton blew up.

“I put $17,000 down on the house. You wanna know it right? I put $17,000 down,” he said.

Then he got loud: “THIS RIGHT HERE DESTROYED MY WHOLE FUCKING FAMILY MAN. . . . EVERYBODY’S LIFE IS DESTROYED, MAN. . . . THEY CAME IN MY HOUSE AND DESTROYED MY FAMILY. . . . I’M GETTING DIVORCED BECAUSE OF THIS.”

He added that his kids are afraid to go in their own house now, his wife waits at the nearby Wal-Mart if she gets home from work before Hamilton does because she doesn’t like to enter the house alone, and she’s taking medication for stress caused by the raid.

“You want the facts?” he asked Nieto. “Is this what you want?”

Hamilton’s invective was aimed at the pack of federally-indicted cops, along with their defense lawyers, whose entire argument, time and time again, implied drug dealers are not only entirely untrustworthy but hardly even allowed to have grievances (or carry cash).

Attorneys went over nearly every transaction Hamilton made over a period of years, pouring over his receipts, gambling records, and properties. But it was the questioning about his home—which, prosecutors allege, was invaded by the rogue cops who had followed him and his wife from a Home Depot store—that set him over the edge.

Hamilton’s outburst may have been one of the pivotal moments in the case, voicing the fear and rage that all of Wednesday’s witnesses seemed to feel.

In March 2016, Oreese Stevenson was arrested by Sgt. Wayne Jenkins’ pre-GTTF special unit (consisting that night of Taylor, Ward, and Evodio Hendrix) after a friend entered Stevenson’s car with a backpack for a cocaine deal. Jenkins and Ward told Stevenson they approached because his windows were tinted too dark—Stevenson said they weren’t tinted “at all”—and Jenkins jumped in the car, grabbed the backpack of money (which Stevenson said he expected to have contained $21,500), and later took Stevenson’s house keys.

Soon after, Keona Holloway, Stevenson’s girlfriend, who also testified, got a call from her 12-year-old son that cops were at the house, so she left her nursing job early. Inside the house, Jenkins showed her a piece of paper and claimed it was a warrant. She also said he recorded video of them entering the house, recreating their entry (when GTTF’s Maurice Ward testified last week, he said that during that same incident they recreated discovery of a safe in the basement).

Stevenson later spotted discrepancies between what he had when he was arrested and what was seized. He said there would have been $21,500 in the car but police said they seized $15,000; he said he had $300,000 in a safe but police said they seized $100,000; and he said he had 10 kilograms of cocaine in a safe but police said they seized 8 kilograms.

“I’ve never seen them stop a car and run right into the house that way,” Stevenson said, reflecting on how the arrest began.

In August 2016, Dennis Armstrong was pulled over by GTTF’s Hersl, Jenkins, and Momodu Gondo but sped off, lobbing cocaine out of his van and onto the street to destroy the evidence. When cops nabbed him after he drove down a dead end street and ran off on foot, they drove his van to a storage facility where he kept his coke, they had learned. He never consented to them accessing the storage unit.

Armstrong was charged with possession, possession with intent to distribute, driving without a seatbelt, and driving with a minor in the car without a seatbelt (he did not have a minor in the car). When he got out of jail, he got his watch, belt, and a bunch of lottery tickets back. He also learned GTTF had claimed they had only seized $2,800 when he said he had $8,000 in his van. And the 2 kilograms of coke he said he had inside his storage locker were not there and his storage locker was wrecked.

The possession charge—for which he received two years probation—was for what amounted to a few “crumbs” of coke, Armstrong said.

In September 2016, Sergio Summerville, who was experiencing homelessness at the time, had his friend Fats drive him to his storage facility near the Horseshoe Casino where he kept his belongings and the “small amounts” of cocaine and heroin he was selling. On the way out of the facility, two unmarked police cars pulled up to Fats’ car. Jenkins claimed they were DEA and had a warrant, and Hersl said they knew Summerville was a big deal drug dealer “from the Avenue.”

Summerville said that he was offered “freedom” if he gave up information on other dealers, and that when they finally let his friend Fats go, Summerville shouted out the code so he could exit the storage facility and that Hersl saved the code in his phone. When Summerville tried to look at Hersl’s phone, Hersl elbowed him. Summerville was eventually let go too and never charged with a crime. He said GTTF stole $4800 out of a sock in his storage unit where he hid his money.

“They came at me like a gang or something,” Summerville said.

The day’s lineup of witnesses—all of whom had immunity—show the extent of the GTTF’s targets: big time and small time dealers, current and former, some charged with crimes and some not at all.

But this cast of characters also illustrates the specific nature of drug dealing in a deindustrialized city like Baltimore—dealing as a dependable, dangerous side hustle and hardly glamorous even if you’re shipping out plenty of product. Stevenson is currently a truck driver and had the job on and off again while dealing. He was using money he earned to start an Assisted Living service with his girlfriend Holloway. Armstrong’s day job was a maintenance worker for public housing; and Summerville sold while he was homeless—now he works as a caterer.

GTTF’s alleged actions didn’t stop at those who dabbled in dealing though. Gregory Thompson, a maintenance man for the storage facility near the casino, is about as “square” as you can get and testified that Jenkins and Hersl intimidated him the night of the September 2016 incident with Summerville.

The commotion caused by the GTTF stopping Summerville and Fats caused Thompson to come out to see what was going on. Jenkins and Hersl—he had a hard time remembering who said what—asked to see the facility’s security cameras and he told him they would need a warrant for that. They didn’t like that answer, got “about a foot and a half” away from him, and threatened him.

“You look like someone who needs to get robbed,” Thompson said Jenkins or Hersl told him—he couldn’t remember which one had said it.

“As far as I’m concerned, they both said it to me,” Thompson added.

Thompson’s life wasn’t destroyed by the encounter that night, but he was clearly shaken and angry, more than a year later.

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On Aug. 31, 2016, two cars full of Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF) officers watched in the distance as two cars that had just collided sat on the sidewalk badly damaged, with the state of the passengers unknown.

Detective Jemell Rayam suggested they get out and help, but aiding the injured drivers was not an option because Sgt. Wayne Jenkins—who was described by those he commanded in the GTTF as both a “prince” in the Baltimore Police Department and as “crazy”— told them not to do anything.

He had also, told them to initiate the chase that led to this moment.

So they waited, listening to the radio, waiting for a concerned citizen to call in the crash or for other cops to come to the scene.

This is all according to Rayam, who pleaded guilty along with all of the officers except for Daniel Hersl and Marcus Taylor, and seemed visibly shaken and sometimes confused. It was his second day testifying in the ongoing federal corruption trial of the GTTF.

And though Taylor’s defense relied solely on presenting the witnesses as liars, what Rayam said was corroborated by audio from a bug the FBI had planted in the car of GTTF detective Momodu Gondo.

Rayam explained it all began that day when Jenkins saw a car he wanted to stop at a gas station. The car fled and both Jenkins and Gondo, each driving an unmarked car, drove after it in pursuit. The car they were pursuing ran a red light and, in Rayam’s words, was “pretty much T-boned,” by another car.

“It was bad, real bad,” Rayam said. “Both of the cars collided with each other.”

Briefly, he couldn’t answer follow up questions—a crying Rayam wasn’t sure which crash they were asking about.

“There were so many car accidents,” he said.

Instead of checking on the victims of the accident, the members of the GTTF sat tight and waited, worrying that their role in the event may have been discovered.

“None of us stopped to render aid or to see if anyone was hurt,” Rayam said.

On the tape, Hersl suggested covering it up: “We could go stop the slips at 10:30 before that happened. ‘Hey I was in this car just driving home,’” he said, and laughed.

The trial, now in its second week, has presented a tremendous amount of evidence showing that the officers claimed overtime for hours they did not work.

Hersl laughed again on the tape and wondered what was in the car.

Jenkins and others worried that Citiwatch may have it all recorded—they hoped the rain that night would make them hard to see—and worried the pursued may be able to mention he was chased.

“That dude is unconscious. He ain’t saying shit,” Taylor said.

“These car chases. That’s what happens. It’s a crapshoot, you know?” Hersl said.

This was an extraordinary statement to hear coming from Hersl as his family sat in the courtroom. In 2013, a driver—who was being followed, but not chased, by a state trooper—killed Hersl’s brother Matthew in front of City Hall in downtown Baltimore. WBAL said that Stephen, Herl’s other brother, told them Matthew “didn’t drive because he didn’t like traffic and thought drivers were dangerous.”

This incident wherein a chase led to a car crash echoes other events in this case. In 2010, Jenkins, Officer Ryan Guinn, and Det. Sean Suiter initiated a chase that also ended in a crash—one that was fatal. According to the federal indictment, the officers had a sergeant come and bring an ounce of heroin to plant in the back of the car they were pursuing, before giving first aid to the man, who ultimately died. Umar Burley, who was driving the car they chased, was recently freed from federal prison. Sean Suiter was murdered a day before testifying in the case—and the police car bringing him to Shock Trauma crashed on the way there. Guinn was reinstated to BPD after a two-week suspension—and, last week in court, another Gun Trace Task Force member Maurice Ward testified that Jenkins told him that Guinn had informed the squad that they were under investigation.

Hersl has admitted to stealing money, but his lawyers are arguing that because he had probable cause he did not rob his targets—and did not use violence to take the money. He glared at Rayam as he testified about the wreck and various thefts. Rayam has confessed to dealing drugs, stealing drugs, and strong-arm robbery. In court, he suggested that Momodu Gondo, with whom he worked closely, had discussed other serious crimes, including a possible murder.

He alluded on several occasions to the numerous internal affairs complaints against Hersl but the judge shut him down—that information was not admissible in court. On another occasion, federal prosecutors asked Rayam if Hersl gave him money for selling cocaine. Hersl’s lawyer objected and the judge sustained the objection.

But the overall sense is that, for the Gun Trace Task Force—and especially Jenkins, who has pleaded guilty but is not expected to testify—Baltimore City was at once a killing field and playground.

It is too easy to see Jenkins and Gondo and Rayam as sociopathic exceptions who are especially depraved. More testimony later the same day shows how this behavior stems from creating a city which criminalizes—or at best contains—a large part of its population. This structural disdain for life became clear in testimony from Herbert Tate, one of the witnesses against Hersl, who was treated like a criminal by defense attorneys.

Tate said he was on Robb Street in the Midway neighborhood on Nov. 27, 2015 to see old friends. A few days earlier, he said, Hersl had stopped him on Robb Street, searched him, and given him a slip of paper—not a proper citation, just a piece of paper—called it a warning, and said, “Next time I see you, you’re going to jail.”

It was about 5 p.m., Tate said, when he was walking up the street with an alcoholic beverage—he couldn’t remember if it was beer or wine—when Hersl, Officer Kevin Fassl, and Sgt. John Burns pulled up on him. Tate says that Hersl told Fassl to grab him. Fassl searched him, including searching his waistband and putting their fingers in his mouth, and then sat him down in handcuffs. In his pockets, they found $530 in cash, some receipts, and pay stubs—but no drugs. Hersl, Tate testified, dug around in vacants and on stoops looking for drugs. He went around a corner for about 10 minutes, Tate said, and came back with “blue and whites.”

Tate testified that he did not know what “blue and whites” were at the time but later learned it was heroin. Hersl sat beside his lawyer, William Purpura, glowering as Tate testified that Fassl asked Hersl what to do with the money and Hersl said, “Keep it.”

When Tate asked them to count it, he says that Burns got angry and bragged about how much money he made. According to a 2016 spreadsheet of Baltimore City employee salary data, Burns brought in a little more than $86,000, but with overtime—one of the main issues at stake in the case—he made nearly double that, bringing in $164,403 in 2016. On Feb. 21, 2017—just over a week before the Gun Trace Task Force indictments came down, Burns took medical leave and began raising funds with a GoFundMe account that claimed he was diagnosed with Guillain-Barre syndrome triggered, the fundraiser says, from “inhaling fecal matter during a search warrant.”

By the time the money made its way into evidence, the $530 had become $216. When Tate was released from jail, he was given 91 cents back. He never saw the rest of the money.

Defense lawyers made a different issue out of the money. Christopher Nieto, who is representing Marcus Taylor, who was not involved in Tate’s arrest at all, made a point of mentioning that some of the money submitted as evidence was in small bills like singles, fives, and tens.

“Dollar bills suggest drug distribution,” Nieto said.

“Everybody has dollar bills,” Tate responded.

The claim was odd in the context of a trial in which it had been repeatedly stated that large sums of cash also indicated drug dealing. Whatever amount of money African-Americans have in Baltimore City can indicate criminal activity, apparently: Tate had a 2003 charge tied to possession and distribution of narcotics, for which he took probation before judgement and admitted on the stand that when he was in high school he “did some things”—meaning small-time dealing—but had never been arrested back then.

Nieto repeatedly referred to Robb Street as “an open air drug market,” “a drug neighborhood,” and a “not a great neighborhood.” A perception encouraged, in part, because these neighborhoods are criminalized.

“That’s what y’all label it as, but that’s not what it is to me,” said Tate, who testified that he had grown up in the area and had friends and family there and coached a children’s basketball team in the area.

Nieto also said that Tate had a black ski mask when he was arrested, though Tate said he had it on him because it was cold and that he was wearing it as “a winter hat.”

This attitude displayed in the questioning of Tate (that certain people are inherently criminal) is the animating force behind the GTTF criminal enterprise, but it isn’t that far from the assumptions of our criminal justice system, which, in 21st century American cities, is based on an almost Calvinist view of crime: If some people are criminal, nothing you do to them can be criminal.

Because of the 2015 arrest, Tate said, he lost his job because he was in jail for four days, then lost his car because he couldn’t pay for it because he lost his job and couldn’t get another job because of the narcotics charge—and to this day, he owes a friend for the bail.

“I’m still paying them back,” Tate said.

In March of 2016, the state dismissed Hersl’s charges against Tate—a common occurrence in Baltimore. After the charges were dismissed, Tate was able to get another job, as an HVAC technician, which he has to this day. He also said that after the arrest, he moved away from Baltimore to Anne Arundel County.

“I got out of the city,” he said.

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Like the propaganda campaign surrounding his death, Detective Sean Suiter’s grave was empty. There was nothing there.

The massive procession that carried Suiter’s body from the Mount Pleasant Church in East Baltimore to Dulaney Valley Memorial Gardens cemetery in Timonium on Nov. 29 was a powerful display of support and unity for the troubled Baltimore Police Department.

“Suiter gave, and the Baltimore Police Department gives each and every day,” Commissioner Kevin Davis said to the crowd in the 3,000 square foot sanctuary at Mount Pleasant. “It’s time for the local and national narrative to start reflecting that reality.”

For the current BPD, the narrative is all-important.

“In America, in this free society, our democracy, police—and I don’t mean to sound like I’m teaching a civics class here—but policing in America is special,” Davis said the week before the memorial at a press conference justifying a lock-down of Baltimore’s Harlem Park neighborhood where Suiter was shot. “Any loss of life is unacceptable, but society says in particular a murder of a police officer is unacceptable.”

“As homicide detectives, we go through the valley, we stay in the valley, and we bring those out of the valley who are sometimes lost,” Jonathan Jones, Suiter’s partner, who was not with him on the day he was shot, said at Mount Pleasant Church, extrapolating on the Psalm that proclaims, “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.”

This idea that police enter into the valley voluntarily—with the ever-present chance of not returning—for the sake of the public, is part of what caused people to pull over on the side of the road and salute the passing procession; it was a phenomenon highlighted by videos tweeted by the BPD’s Director of Communications T.J. Smith.

“Drivers were urged to avoid northbound I-95 and I-895, as well as southbound I-95 approaching I-695 on the northeast corner. There were major delays on the outer loop of I-695 between I-95 and I-83 and I-83 between I-695 and Padonia Road between 1 p.m. and 3 p.m.,” ABC2 News dutifully reported to its audience.  

Even though I missed the procession there—I was in D.C. covering the trials of some of the people arrested en masse on Inauguration Day—a source from the department said I should go and see the grave.

As I drove through the bright late-autumn Saturday afternoon along the procession route, I thought about the difference between the road closures there and those in Harlem Park. Both possessed a military affect: The highway funeral with salutes and flapping flags was a parade; Harlem Park, with its crime scene tape, ID checks, battering rams, and expanded perimeter was an occupation.

Various contradictory and improbably coincidental facts surround Suiter’s death. He wasn’t with his regular partner that day. That partner called 911 instead of using his police radio. The police car that took him to Shock Trauma crashed. Suiter was shot with his own gun. He was connected with federally indicted members of Gun Trace Task Force and was supposed to testify against them. No one has come forward, despite a $215,000 reward. It is the longest the city has ever gone without solving the murder of a cop. There have been no leads.

All of this created an atmosphere of conspiracy and a flurry of rumors that swirled like dead leaves through the department and the streets. And the cop rumors and street rumors overlapped. It was another cop, half the people said. It was a suicide, contended others.

As I pulled into the 75-acre cemetery, the shadows were long and heavy in the late afternoon. According to its website, Dulaney Valley’s Fallen Heroes garden has more than 300 spaces that they provide, along with mortuary services, to the families of fallen cops, firefighters, correctional officers, and paramedics, free of charge.

The graves seemed endless, stretching out on rolling hill after rolling hill, splashing fountains catching the falling autumn light.

But I could not find a grave for Suiter.

I called the cemetery’s office on the phone. When I told the woman on the phone that I was looking for Det. Suiter’s grave, she paused and told me to hold on. When she came back on the line, her voice was harried.

“It was too late to make the burial,” she said. “It was dark.”

Three days had passed since Det. Suiter’s funeral on Nov. 29. On Dec. 1, in a press conference announcing that he wanted the FBI to take over the case, Commissioner Davis claimed that he had waited to make the FBI request until “after the funeral, after we buried Sean.”

I was confused. I wrote to the police department’s public information officer, T.J. Smith.

“We don’t handle the burial or anything after the fact,” Smith wrote in response to questions about where Det. Suiter was buried. “They are family decisions. Period.”

The Department—and news coverage—had certainly made it seem that he had already been buried. So it didn’t seem like it would be a big deal. I’d ask a question and they would clarify.

But Smith’s response to my questions wasn’t straightforward

“I certainly hope and pray for your dear sole [sic] that you were truthfully there to pay your respects,” Smith wrote. It was not the first time Smith had chastised me and other members of the press for asking questions.

When I asked if Davis was aware that Suiter had not been buried—at least not at Dulaney Valley, Smith condemned the questions outright.

“I refuse to entertain these baseless conspiracy questions,” Smith wrote. “It’s a memorial there and the family can make other decisions after a police Officer’s interment is performed.

Interment means burial, so it is unclear what Smith was trying to say—and he refused to clarify. Certainly he didn’t mean that he had been buried and then they made other arrangements, so it is likely that he meant after the memorial service the family could make other decisions about where an officer’s interment is performed.

The lack of clarification in this, as throughout this case, has not stopped “conspiracy questions”; rather, it has created them.

What if someone drove down from some other state to pay respects and found that Suiter wasn’t buried there?

On Dec. 4, two days after my visit, Dulaney Valley said that Suiter still had not been buried there yet, but they assured me that he would be. Finally, on Tuesday, Dec. 5 Mary Auld, who does PR for the cemetery and had been in direct contact with the family, said that they were waiting for the family before securing Suiter’s remains in the Fallen Heroes garden.

“It was their wish that he be cremated,” she said.

It was that simple. He had been cremated. Just admitting that the family made other arrangements following the ceremony would have prevented any confusion. Why had Smith been so evasive?

Some of the reasons may not be specific to Davis or Smith, but part of the culture of policing as it has developed along with technology over the last decades.

“I think this is a cultural thing that has developed over the decades, over the years and where you’ve been somewhat closed lipped and secretive about investigations, about personnel issues, about complaints filed against police officers, about a number of things, that tends to carry over into just about every aspect of policing when it shouldn’t,” said Neill Franklin, a retired Baltimore and Maryland State police officer and executive director of Law Enforcement Action Partnership.

A source close to the department, who did not want to be named so he could speak freely, was more direct—and more specific.

He said that Davis pushed for the high-profile funeral.

“He did it to gain sympathy for the department,” the source said, adding that it is “out of the Batts playbook,” referring to Davis’ predecessor Anthony Batts, who was fired after a Fraternal Order of Police after-action report on the Baltimore Uprising was released.  

It may have been Batts’ playbook, but Davis owns it now. And like Batts, he may be obsessed with PR because he has had to learn how to deal with scandals.

On Sept. 4, 1999, Davis and other Prince George’s County officers pulled up beside a man, Brian Romjue, driving a car outside of their jurisdiction and told him that they wanted to talk to him. A deputy commissioner, it was later determined, had ordered them to make the young man tell them where the niece of a commander was. During the five hours in which they detained him, one of the officers, Sergeant Joseph McCann, threatened to break Romjue’s kneecaps, according to court testimony, and Davis, Romjue said, banged his head.

A jury awarded Romjue $90,000, while rejecting the idea that the officers used excessive force.

“If Kevin Davis is going to do stuff like that, what the fuck you think he is going to do at the top?” asked former deputy commissioner and interim commissioner Tony Barksdale. “He played this ‘I learned my lesson, I didn’t know it was an unlawful order.’ One of the earliest things you learn is you don’t follow an unlawful order in policing.”

Davis has often repeated the idea that he learned his lesson from the incident. But the lesson may have been in managing the message.

Even before he officially took over as commissioner, Davis hired T.J. Smith, who had worked with Davis in Anne Arundel County, where Davis had served as chief before coming into the Batts administration as deputy commissioner in Jan. 2015. Smith was offered $160,000 to take over as the department’s spokesperson.

City Council President Bernard “Jack” Young, who made $110,000, took issue with Smith’s salary, saying maybe he should quit his job and apply for Smith’s. But, as the Sun reported at the time, City Solicitor George Nilson told Young that “Smith comes highly recommended, and the communications job is crucial following April’s unrest.”

“April’s unrest” made propaganda even more important than it had been. On Twitter, after he was tapped for the job, Smith pledged transparency. “My goal is simple: Be transparent, Highlight the phenomenal work that goes on everyday in the city, gain the trust and respect of the citizens of Baltimore and the BPD through effective and honest communication,” he wrote.

As he posted this tweet, the department was already engaging in a plan to secretly spy on the entire city. Just days before Davis was confirmed, the department made an agreement to work with a private company that would fly a small surveillance plane over the city, out of sight, and record 32 square miles at a time, according to emails obtained through a Maryland Public Information Act request.

And although BPD began using the Persistent Surveillance technology in Jan. 2016, no one knew about it, including the mayor or the City Council.

Ross McNutt, who runs Persistent Surveillance, had argued that the program only really worked if the public knew about it. It was not only investigative but preventative.

City government along with the public discovered the program when the publication of a Bloomberg Businessweek story, “Secret Cameras Record Baltimore’s Every Move From Above” in August 2016 forced their hand. Smith insisted that it was not really a secret program. It was just that no one knew about it.

“This isn’t some nefarious intrusion on someone’s privacy, it’s anything but that,” Davis said on Oct. 7 2016 at a press conference pertaining to Fleet Week—the last time the spy plane would be used by BPD. “Something being a secret versus something not yet being disclosed or vetted with the community, I think those are different things. I never intended to surprise anyone by this.”

In 2016, Davis also hired Joe McCann, who was involved in the P.G. County case, and appointed him to head up a new “quality control” division.

Earlier this year, when body-worn cameras appeared to capture BPD officers planting drugs, Davis claimed they were “re-creating” a legitimate discovery of drugs, and accused the public and the press of acting irresponsibly.

“I think it’s irresponsible to jump to the conclusion that these officers were engaged in criminal conduct,” Davis said. “Their credibility is in question because of a moment of time that is either captured or not captured on body-worn camera.”

Somehow, Davis survived these scandals, even as the murder rate continued to rise. Nearly 1,000 people have been murdered since he took office. But he could afford to gamble. Along with his own $200,000 a year salary, his contract had a provision that would give him $150,000 severance.

Now, in the wake of the Gun Trace Task Force and the lockdown of Harlem Park, it seems inevitable that the city will soon write that check.

Det. Suiter was shot sometime around 4:30 p.m. on Nov. 15 on the 900 block of Bennett Place in an alley. A few hours later, Davis stood in front of Shock Trauma with Mayor Catherine Pugh and State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby. He did not say that Suiter was scheduled to testify against indicted members of the Gun Trace Task Force and he did not tell the public that the police car driving Suiter to Shock Trauma crashed on its way there from Harlem Park. He did not name Suiter, whom he said had two children. Later reports indicate that Suiter had five children. But he did squarely place the blame on a member of the community.

“He observed a man engaged in suspicious behaviors,” Davis said of Suiter. “Our 18-year homicide veteran approached this man to engage him in conversation. Our detective was shot in the head.”

“Davis clearly said that he was in a brief violent struggle with an unknown black suspect with a black and white jacket. You’ve locked down Harlem Park, man, you’ve locked them down and you have not released a sketch,” Tony Barksdale said. “Just show me a fucking sketch of the black and white jacket. If there’s a black and white jacket, don’t you think there’d be somebody in that neighborhood who’d say ‘Oh yeah such and such wears that jacket,’ even after being treated that way. Somebody might talk.”

Instead, officers and cadets occupied the neighborhood, checking IDs and knocking on doors, especially of vacants. One woman who lived in the neighborhood said that when she first walked outside she saw a line of men on their knees on the street, hands on their heads.

“I think that’s the expectation of the community,” Smith said. “Vacant homes are blocked and obstructed where they need to be open. That’s what we have to do. I think the community wants to know that a killer of a police officer is not holed up in a vacant home.”

The people in the community had a vastly different view of their expectations. At a community meeting with the court-ordered team set up to monitor the consent decree between the BPD and the Department of Justice at Frederick Douglass High School, a 21-year teaching veteran implored the team to take action before another community is “held hostage.”

“We are asking for legal protection from our police department,” she said.

Two days later, at a Civilian Review Board meeting in Harlem Park, people placed the blame squarely on the commissioner.

“We got to go after the people who gave the orders, because the police officers on the front line just don’t decide to cordon off a city and be assigned to one area,” one woman said. “They don’t make those decisions. This came from the police commissioner and that’s where we have to start it.”

“If the commissioner’s responsible, that he’s making the final call, then maybe the laws will be changed later, that somehow we would have to go over his head, because he’s defending the criminal violations,” another said.

“I think overall, there’s a policy issue about whether or not this was constitutional behavior,” Jill Carter, who runs the city’s Office of Civil Rights, told the Real News, calling the cordoning off of the neighborhood an “extremely radical act.”

The ACLU demanded “a clear explanation from the City as to why this unprecedented action has been taken, what rules are being enforced, and why it is lawful.

Instead of explaining why the lockdown was lawful—it would be easy to cite a specific law—Davis turned the death of an officer and the feelings of his family into a rationale, a state of exception that superseded the rights of the citizens and vilified those who questioned him.

“I would much rather endure some predictive criticism from the ACLU and others about that decision, than endure a conversation with Detective 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.

Then, in a news dump at 5 p.m. on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, Davis said that Suiter was scheduled to testify against fellow cops from the Gun Trace Task Force who had been indicted on federal racketeering and other charges.

It was a week after Suiter’s death and Davis said he had “just” been informed of the testimony.

“Whenever he was scheduled, a summons would be generated,” said Barksdale, who doubted Davis’ account. “When I had federal grand jury I was called by the chief of legal to come sign for my fucking summons. At some point the summons reached Suiter. They schedule you for this shit.”

Acting U.S. Attorney Steve Schenning later confirmed that Davis was informed of the testimony on Nov. 16, the day after Suiter’s shooting, on the day he died.

On Dec. 2, Davis asked FBI Director Christopher Wray to take over the case, all but accusing them of not sharing information with the department.

“Suiter had something to say and I get a feeling it was something advantageous to the Feds for making a bigger case,” Barksdale said. “I think the FBI was smart to get a little distance, if they didn’t want BPD to know.”

Now, nearly a month after Suiter’s death and more than a week since Davis’ request, the FBI still had not responded and Baltimore still had no answers as to why Davis shut down Harlem Park if he knew about the testimony.

The attempt to cordon off the neighborhood never made sense. But it was even more puzzling when I saw the actual crime scene after the barricade was lifted.

I rode over there with my colleague Eze Jackson. Eze grew up a few blocks away and we walked around at the corner of Bennett Place and Schroeder Street. There were two striking things about the alley: There were no windows facing into the alley from the three buildings immediately around it, and there were numerous cuts leading out of it. If the assailant went to the right, toward Franklin Street and through the next cut, he would have gone in three different directions and easily escaped the neighborhood.

“If you know those alleys you can get away from the police easily,” Eze said. “That’s what we did growing up, cut through all those alleys to get away from the cops.”

We walked down to the end of the block where there was a corner store with a camera. I asked the man behind the thick glass inside if the camera captured all the way up to the entrance to the alley where Suiter was shot. He said it did but that he didn’t see the tape before BPD came and got it. “ATF has it now,” he said.

“We have the tape,” wrote Smith when I asked.

But if the camera showed the other man with Suiter, as police have claimed, it should also have shown Suiter enter the alley. And perhaps the man in black and white. There should be some answers about the need to shut down the community, even if there are none about what happened to Suiter.

But other than the discomfort of talking to Suiter’s widow, Davis has still failed to give a reason for the closure of the neighborhood.

Davis has condemned the kind of corner-clearing drug enforcement that led to mass incarceration. But his critics say his desire to get guns off the streets has led to the same abuses. The Gun Trace Task Force began as an elite team designed to trace guns used in violent crimes and ended as a violent criminal organization within the police department.

Feds indicted seven members of Baltimore’s Gun Trace Task Force on March 1, 2017, but new charges brought on Nov. 30 show that in 2010, Suiter was working with Det. Wayne Jenkins and Officer Ryan Guinn. In the 2010 statement of charges, Jenkins wrote that he saw a man named Brent Matthews approaching a car with “an unknown amount of currency.” Jenkins and Suiter blocked the car in. Jenkins and Det. Ryan Guinn approached the car. According to Jenkins, the man in the car, Umar Burley, drove away and the officers followed him.

Burley crashed into another car. “Detective Suiter . . . recovered a total of 32 grams of suspected heroin laying on the passenger side of the floorboard,” the statement of probable cause reads.

“There were no drugs in the car driven by U.B. prior to the crash,” the federal indictment reads.

Jenkins called a sergeant who had the drugs in his car to come and give Jenkins and another officer about an ounce of heroin to plant in the car, according to the charging documents. The sergeant has not been identified.

Suiter, who found the drugs in the 2010 case, has been painted as “clueless,” maybe even innocent.

“What Jenkins did was set up officer number one to find the drugs and recover the drugs that Jenkins himself had planted,” Davis said at a press conference. “Det. Suiter was used; he was Officer Suiter at the time. He was used and put in a position where he unwittingly recovered drugs that had been planted by another police officer.”

But many people think that it is Davis who is using Suiter, constantly making his sacrifice the sacrifice of the department.

“Davis is NOT doing this for the family, the investigation or the Department..he is doing it for himself…and trust me..it is going to explode in his face,” Mark Tomlin, a former homicide detective, wrote on Twitter.

Even if it does not explode in his face, the commissioner could learn from this uproar. The attitude that Neill Franklin talked about—how police are secretive about everything—can translate itself into the PR machine of Davis and Smith, but it can also manifest itself as planting drugs in someone’s car to cover up the fact that you chased them and caused a wreck in which someone lost a life.

According to Barksdale, a crisis like that presented by Gun Trace Task Force isn’t the time to try to hide the department’s dirt.

“You can’t let incidents like GTTF go and just go on. You have to slow down and say, ‘I am going to be pushing so hard looking for more individuals like this,’” he said. “Get with the FBI and say, ‘Let’s wire up houses, let’s wire up cars, let’s test these squads that are out there. Let’s boost our integrity stings 100 percent.’”

Barksdale says that the department should bring in somebody who would test the department like this and straighten it up, a “a hard-hitting, don’t-you-fuck-around-or-I’m gonna-be-sure-that-you’re-jailed commissioner.”

“Instead they hold on to this guy, and it’s deadly for Baltimore City,” he said.

But no one can imagine that Davis has long.

A week after my first visit, I returned to the Fallen Heroes monument at Dulaney Valley. My boots crunched the season’s first snow as I walked around looking at the graves of police officers who have died in the line of duty.

There was still no grave for Suiter, still nothing there.

The post Grave Concerns: Will Detective Suiter’s death bring Commissioner Davis down? appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

New federal charges were filed Thursday against Wayne Jenkins, a sergeant in the Baltimore Police Department’s corrupt Gun Trace Task Force. The charges are related to a 2010 case about which slain detective Sean Suiter was scheduled to testify a day after his death in Baltimore’s Harlem Park neighborhood on Nov. 15.

In the 2010 statement of charges, Jenkins wrote that he saw a man named Brent Matthews approaching a car with “an unknown amount of currency.” Jenkins and Suiter blocked the car in. Jenkins and Det. Ryan Guinn approached the car. According to Jenkins, the man in the car, Umar Burley, drove away and the officers followed him.

Burley struck another car, killing one of its occupants. “Detective Suiter…recovered a total of 32 grams of suspected heroin laying on the passenger side of the floorboard.”

“There were no drugs in the car driven by U.B. prior to the crash,” the federal indictment reads. After the crash, Jenkins told Officer #2, whom we have identified as Det. Guinn, to “call a Sergeant who was not at the scene because he had the ‘stuff’ or ‘shit’ in his car.”

The sergeant arrived on the scene and Guinn spoke to him before turning “his attention to the elderly driver who remained trapped inside his car on the front porch of the row house.”

The sergeant—who allegedly had an ounce of heroin in his car—has not been identified.

After medics arrived on the scene, Jenkins told Guinn that “the ‘stuff’ or ‘shit’ was in the car,” and said he was going to send Officer #1, Suiter, to the car to find it because he was “clueless.”

“[Suiter] found approximately 28 grams of heroin that Jenkins had planted in the vehicle.”

“What Jenkins did was set-up officer number one to find the drugs and recover the drugs that Jenkins himself had planted,” Commissioner Kevin Davis said at a press conference, in which he identified Officer # 1 as Suiter. “And I know there has been a lot of speculation about that and I think that indictment spells out Det. Suiter’s role seven years ago in this particular case. Det. Suiter was used, he was Officer Suiter at the time. He was used and put in a position where he unwittingly recovered drugs that had been planted by another police officer. And that’s a damn shame. It really, really is.”

“The extent of criminal activity conducted by BPD officers on duty over many years is shocking,” said Debbie Katz Levi, head of the Baltimore City Public Defender Special Litigation Section in a statement. “We need massive culture change in the Department and urgent attention must be given to the citizens who have been charged and convicted based on the alleged observations of these officers.”

The Office of the Public Defender has identified more than 2,000 people with either pending cases or convictions related to indicted members of the Gun Trace Task Force. Levi says that Jenkins is personally involved in hundreds of cases.

“The new indictment shows how every case touched by Jenkins and the other indicted officers is irreparably tainted,” Levi said. “Engaging an unsuspecting officer to identify planted drugs still leads to an illegal arrest and wrongful conviction. The continued incarceration of people subject to this aggressive and unethical police abuse is unconscionable.”

Both Burley and Matthews pleaded guilty to possession with intent to distribute heroin “despite the fact that they knew they were innocent,” according to federal documents. “They did so because heroin had been planted in the vehicle in which Burley was the driver and Matthews was a passenger by a Baltimore Police Officer. Both men concluded that in a trial involving the Officer’s word against theirs they would lose.”

“Could you imagine how hard it is to be here for a crime I didn’t commit and struggling to find clarity and justice on my own,” he wrote in a letter included in his file. He was released after his file was reopened in the wake of the federal investigation. Matthews had already been released.

Jenkins is one of eight members of the Gun Trace Task Force to be indicted on federal racketeering charges. Shortly before Suiter’s death, a Philadelphia officer, Eric Troy Snell, was also charged with helping to sell drugs stolen by the Baltimore officers. Prosecutors alleged that he threatened to harm the children of a member of the Task Force if they implicated him.

The Harlem Park neighborhood where Suiter was killed was locked down by police for days. City officials and members of the public have called for the FBI to take over the investigation into his murder.

The clerk at a corner store with cameras that captured part of the crime scene told the Real News that he gave his footage to the BPD but that when he called to ask what had happened to it, they told him that the ATF now had it.

“We have the footage,” BPD spokesperson T.J. Smith said.

The post New federal charges say sergeant planted drugs on a suspect for Det. Suiter to discover; Public Defenders say new indictments taint thousands of cases appeared first on Baltimore Beat.