The short history and long tail of Baltimore’s “zero tolerance” policing.

The post Here We Go Again appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

For decades, “common wisdom” regarding violence reduction has failed a city that regularly surpasses 300 murders a year and spends the most per capita on policing.

The post Baltimore’s Crime Numbers Game appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

Since 2014, when cannabis possession of 10 grams or less was decriminalized across the state, Baltimore City has become a fascinating experiment in patchwork drug policy. Attempts to make cannabis legal in Maryland have failed for many years, resulting in more stopgap interventions, leading to an especially confusing situation for those who use or sell cannabis.

Having more than 10 grams of cannabis on you technically means you can get arrested for misdemeanor possession (or, depending on the amount, possession with intent to distribute). But starting in 2019, Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby introduced a policy that her office would not prosecute those arrested for cannabis possession no matter the weight—11 ounces or 11 pounds. Simply put, you could be arrested, but you would likely not be charged.

The far-too-complicated and often contradictory tangle of policies, rulings, and actual laws means, for example, that J, a Baltimore security guard and former cop, has to choose between using cannabis or having the license for the gun he needs for his security gigs.
“I got PTSD. I was a cop for a long time. I got PTSD. That’s one of the symptoms that gets you a medical marijuana card. PTSD,” J told me. “But I can’t get a card from a doctor because then I got to worry that I’ll lose my security job.”

Despite increasingly loose gun restrictions, federal law still prohibits people who use cannabis from buying or owning guns, even if they have a medical cannabis card. In Maryland, the sale of all firearms requires a background check, and on a background check the applicant
must disclose if they use cannabis, which would mean they couldn’t buy a gun. In 2021, the Maryland General Assembly attempted to pass a bill that would make it illegal to prevent medicinal card holders from having guns, but it failed. And even if it had passed, Marylanders with a medicinal card and a gun would still be violating federal law.

Last year, when that bill was up for a vote, J characterized the position the law puts him in: He must choose between having a job and being able to use cannabis to relieve stress, pain, and other emotional turmoil. He also pointed out that armed guards offer security for cannabis dispensaries.

“I know cats who work security at dispensaries. So what are they doing, really? They’re working security, protecting a product they’re not allowed to use,” J said. “And why aren’t they allowed to use it? Because they have to have a gun license to get the job protecting the product they can’t use. It doesn’t make sense.”

Maryland’s slow crawl towards legalization also means the underground drug market has been disrupted a few times over now. Dealers in particular are increasingly out of luck, especially since medicinal cannabis dispensaries opened in Baltimore. M, a side-gigging dealer for decades, has even changed which drug he sells, increasing his risk of arrest and prosecution.
As M explains it, around the same time medicinal dispensaries finally started popping up in Baltimore in 2018, he began to consider selling more cocaine.

“It was only weed for years and years,” M told me. “And then sometimes some blow.”
Over the next two years, M lost more and more customers to medicinal cannabis and the scorched-earth BOGO deals that dispensaries all promoted. His underground prices often couldn’t compete. People who didn’t even have medicinal cannabis cards would compare and contrast his prices to what the dispensary websites listed. He’d text (via Signal) them what he had and how much it was going to be, and they’d send back a screenshot of a nearby dispensary’s website with a similar enough strain on sale, demanding he match the price.

“Ridiculous,” M said. “The kids, they’re spoiled.”

For decades, M dealt enough weed to friends and associates and friends of friends to put about $2,000 or so extra in his wallet each week. By 2021, M felt as though he had to abandon cannabis.
At the start of the pandemic in March 2020, weed sales briefly spiked for him: “More people were home, less people had a card,” he explained. But that didn’t last long. In July 2020, there were nearly 107,000 cannabis patients in Maryland. By July 2022, that number climbed to 148,000 patients. And at the start of the pandemic, dispensaries developed contact-free COVID-19 protocols that made it easy for people to pick up during quarantine, turning the process into the rare activity to do outside of the house in (relatively) safety.

For years, though, M’s out-of-state pot connect had offered him small amounts of cocaine, and occasionally M would take a little to sell. Since 2021, M has almost entirely switched to cocaine, and, he told me, he’ll “pivot” again if he must to keep his lights on and feed his two cats and himself.

“If they legalize cocaine, I’ll pivot and sell something else,” M said.

Despite decriminalization, medicinal cannabis, and changed prosecutorial policies, people in Baltimore City can still get jammed up in the system for weed—and those getting jammed up are still most often Black Baltimoreans.

A 2018 study published by Baltimore Fishbowl (full disclosure: I was one of its three authors) revealed that between 2014 and 2017—the first three years of decriminalization—Black Baltimoreans made up nearly 97% of misdemeanor cannabis possession arrests. An ACLU study from 2020 showed that in Maryland, a Black person was twice as likely to be arrested for cannabis than a white person. For Mosby and her office’s Strategic Policy and Planning Director Michael Collins, the argument for not charging people for weed possession was simple: Fewer arrests for cannabis also meant fewer racially disproportionate arrests were happening over a drug considered “medicine.”

Far fewer people in Baltimore City are being arrested for drugs now than in 2014 when Mosby was elected (and when cannabis was decriminalized):

In 2014, there were 13,356 drug arrests in the city.

In 2021, just 1,046 drug arrests.

However, as our partners at Baltimore Courtwatch have revealed, suspected cannabis possession or claims of cannabis smell still remain an excuse for cops to stop, search, and possibly arrest Baltimoreans and the State’s Attorney’s Office rarely take issue with this practice. Back in June, the Maryland Court of Appeals—the state’s highest court—ruled that, even with decriminalization, police officers can continue to stop and search people in vehicles based solely on cannabis smell. However, explained the court, the cop who makes the stop “must end the stop if they do not quickly obtain information that gives them probable cause to believe the person has at least 10 grams or has committed another criminal offense.”

Police, however, are known to use claims of the smell of cannabis to justify questionable—and downright illegal—searches. For example, in 2017, Baltimore Police Officer David Burch claimed that he received a “tip” that a man in a convenience store had a gun on him.
Burch said that the man smelled of cannabis when he approached him. That claim enabled Burch to search the man for a gun, which he found.

In 2020, the Maryland Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the man Burch searched. “The mere odor of marijuana emanating from a person, without more, does not provide the police with probable cause to support an arrest and a full-scale search of the arrestee incident thereto,” the unanimous ruling said.

This 2022 ruling by the same court, however, said that searching people in their cars is justified. More than a year of citywide traffic stop data provided to the Beat by City Councilperson Ryan Dorsey shows that the city’s primarily Black and poorest districts endure a disproportionate number of traffic stops.

In short, pot smell remains a way to make an end run around the Fourth Amendment, which is supposed to protect people from “unreasonable search and seizure.” Neill Franklin, a former Baltimore Police commander and the founder of Law Enforcement Action Partnership (LEAP), has been warning citizens of cops claiming they smell cannabis for years.

“Marijuana is still the number one reason the police are using it to sidestep the Fourth Amendment and get into people’s car, pocket, or home,” Franklin once told me. “Constitutionally, it’s wrong.”

For many in Baltimore, the combined 2014 decriminalization, the 2017 rollout of medicinal cannabis, and the 2019 non prosecutorial policy, made them assume that weed was already legal. But this November, Marylanders will go to the ballot to vote on cannabis legalization proper, after bills to amend the Maryland Constitution to make cannabis legal for those 21 and over passed in the last legislative session.

According to a recent Goucher poll, 62 percent of Marylanders support cannabis
legalization.

With Ivan Bates, the likely new Baltimore City State’s Attorney, coming into office next year, it is possible that the policies will change back and be less forgiving of cannabis possession.
Bates, who defeated Mosby in the Democratic primary and is essentially running unopposed in November’s general election, campaigned in part on rolling back Mosby’s non prosecutorial policies. He has been a critic of Mosby’s policies, calling them “confusing” and claiming, without serious evidence, that not prosecuting people for cannabis has created more violence in the city. Decades of Baltimore City crime data shows that there is little correlation between general drug arrests and crime, let alone cannabis arrests.

According to data obtained by Baltimore Beat via public information requests, there were 304 homicides and 14,912 drug arrests in Baltimore in 1991.

In 2021, there were 337 homicides and 1,046 drug arrests.

Editors’ note: An earlier version of this story misstated the amount of cannabis the state decriminalized. The correct amount is 10 grams. The Baltimore beat regrets the error.

The post Yesterday’s Prices are not Today’s Prices appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

Back in 2020, I hid behind an abandoned building in East Baltimore with three guys who all used heroin together as they tested their drugs, injected them, and made sure they were there for each other in case any of them overdosed. 

It was about 8 a.m. in the middle of January 2020, sunny but cold, and “D”—Black, in his late 30s, without a home, and requesting anonymity for obvious reasons—held court behind a vacant rowhouse. D saw to it that he and his friends were as safe as possible—he’s more fastidious and more experienced than the others. Heroin had been part of his life for about 20 years.

“I’ve been using off and on,” D told me. “Mostly on.”

In case anybody did overdose, D was ready with naloxone, the medicine that blocks the effects of opioids and reverses overdose. He gripped the small nasal spray bottles of Narcanand got less jokey with me: “Lifesavers, man,” he said.

Overdoses have been increasing for years now because the drug supply has been poisoned with fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that has leaked into street drugs, making them unpredictable and lethal. You just don’t know what you’re getting. For the most part, the response to this lethal phenomenon has amounted to the all-too-typical declaration of an “opioid crisis,” mostly focused on addiction and treatment.

For D, who does not want to stop using heroin, just about any kind of large-scale service aimed at people who use drugs is pretty much useless as far as he’s concerned: “I don’t need a bed and I don’t need treatment,” he said. 

What D needs is a safe place to use drugs and to be treated with dignity and respect. Until that day comes, he’ll be here, holed up behind a bent and crumbling building propped up by some two-by-fours, trying to keep himself and others alive. Most mornings back then, D and his friends looked out for one another because they understood that they were most likely to overdose when they used alone. If no one’s there with you, no one’s there to save you. 

“I’m a lifeguard,” D said. “We’re all like lifeguards for each other.”

You know it’s fentanyl because there’s no waiting for it to hit you. 

“It’s a little too good sometimes,” D said.

The threat of overdose feels omnipresent now.

“You think about it and you don’t,” he said. “Everybody tries not to think about dying.”

The first question D asks when he gets a hold of some heroin is: “Is it good?” The next question is: “How good is it?” Then he wonders, “Is it safe?” He has some sense of how safe it is because he tested it. With cookers and strips given out by organizations such as the Baltimore Harm Reduction Coalition, he tests his drugs. He mixes heroin with clean—or clean-ish—water, puts it in the cooker, and mixes some more. Then he dips the end of the testing strip into the heroin-and-water mix and waits about 30 seconds. If the strip shows a single line, there’s fentanyl in it. If there are two lines, there’s no fentanyl.

Simply knowing fentanyl’s in there actually calms the nerves a little. There are often murmurs of “bad batches” circulating. D hears the stories, or sees it for himself, and tries to connect the dots. Three people whom he’d seen the day before all found dead in an abandoned building. Some guy told D about how he snorted, slipped out of the alley afterwards, and immediately dropped to the ground. You know it’s bad when the snorters are dropping. Soon there will only be bad batches.

What D got that day—the day I was with him and the others in East Baltimore—was alright, it seemed. His one buddy just wrapped up. The other was deep in a nod. The good kind, though. Now it was D’s turn. He sat down against the vacant, and pulled up the sleeves of his oversized hoodie and stretched out, Narcan next to him.

“Hey, it’s y’all’s turn to watch me,” he reminded his friends, both heavy-lidded and relaxed.

No one overdosed behind that vacant on that day in January 2020. What D was doing that day was essentially running an overdose prevention site, or “OPS”—a place where people can safely use drugs with other people present to monitor them and stop them from overdosing if necessary. If D or one of his friends had overdosed, another one of them would have been right there to provide naloxone and call 911. 

If D didn’t have naloxone or fentanyl test strips, he would still use. If he didn’t have clean needles, he’d still do it, too. D and millions of people like him (and I, for that matter) are going to do drugs. You can’t stop us. And no matter how many bricks of dope the cops seize, drugs aren’t going anywhere. The solution is to make drugs safer and easier to do, because it’s not the drugs themselves tearing communities apart; it is the drug laws that keep people hiding and desperate and that keep the drugs unregulated, unsafe, and, these days, especially deadly. 

“Legalize heroin,” D advised, yelling it like a protester, mocking advocates and advocating at the same time.

In June 2021, I ran into D again. I hadn’t seen him since that day behind the vacant. He hadn’t seen his two friends in months. He worried they were dead—of overdose or COVID-19.

D was thinner 18 months later. His hair was longer. He had a lot to say. During COVID-19, D was encouraged to social distance but he literally had nowhere to go. He’s homeless. Even the rare public places someone like D could sneak into and wash up or fill a water bottle—such as a coffee shop bathroom—were closed, and if they were open and forcing workers to serve lattes during a plague, bathrooms were locked. If D had decided to go to a shelter, he would’ve been surrounded by people who could possibly infect him—or he, them. He also wouldn’t be allowed to use drugs in the shelter.

2020 saw nearly 100,000 lives lost to overdose on top of the 375,000 people who died due to COVID-19. Hundreds of millions learned what it’s like to be neglected and considered expendable—which is how D and so many other people who use drugs have felt their whole lives.

“If you told me last year that the government would treat everybody the way they treat junkies like me, I wouldn’t have believed it,” he said. “They want us all dead. To them, we’re better off dead.”

“We’re Doing This Purely Out Of Love”: OPS installation, July 2022.

In July 2022, I stood inside the NoMüNoMü arts space on Howard Street and got a tour of a mock overdose prevention site. For harm reduction advocates in Baltimore City, the installation was an experiment in what was possible and what absolutely should exist—places where people who use drugs can use them safely and without fear of arrest or even judgment.

Baltimore Harm Reduction Coalition’s Dave Fell began the tour. Fell moved a dozen of us through the art space—appropriately decorated with Black Panthers posters and newspapers, a nod to a long tradition of radical, community-oriented healthcare—and into the overdose prevention site (OPS). The installation simulated the intake process, using drugs in the use room, and the ways resources are offered at an OPS.

“When we talk about overdose prevention sites, we are talking about bringing people who are very alienated from organized services in. If there’s one thing you leave with today, it’s that we’re trying to facilitate health, safety, dignity, safe spaces, and just bringing people into love,” Fell told us. “We’re doing this purely out of love for our community and for ourselves too because we’re people who at various points in our lives would definitely have loved to use an overdose prevention site.”

When you enter the site, you’re greeted and you sign in, providing a minimal amount of personal information (mostly a name or even nickname and what drug you intend to use that day) and then you wait to be allowed into the room where drug use is allowed (you bring your own drugs, but clean needles and drug testing supplies are provided). In the meantime, there’s a room of couches to wait and relax. Some people also hang out in the room after they’ve used drugs to get settled or come down a little bit. Indeed, Fell noted, some people often hang out, or even show up to just hang and not even use drugs.

An OPS, it becomes clear, is a community space like any other, bringing people together, being there to help or just hear someone out, and providing access to a number of resources—including opportunities to stop using drugs, if someone is interested in that. 

The use room itself is not complicated: A table, chair, mirror, lots of light, and a curtain for privacy. The mirror allows the person using drugs to do it more comfortably and safely. In an emergency, the person working the OPS can delicately check in on someone using. If the person using drugs is having any problems—including, most importantly, an overdose—there is someone there to help them. People die of overdose most frequently when they use alone.

During the tour, Baltimore Harm Reduction Coalition’s Harriet Smith stood before a rolling desk full of safer use supplies—with Narcan nearby—and discussed the role of someone working in the use room: “My job here is really just to make sure people are safe. That they feel welcome and they feel like people are caring for them and watching out for them and not all up in somebody’s space—but just up in their space enough to be helpful,” Smith said.

A press conference about OPS was held at the installation. City officials, including Mayor Brandon Scott, spoke out in support. “We owe it to ourselves, to our city, to our neighbors, and to those that we lost to overdose to try new ways that have been proven—even if they’re going to make some folks in our community uncomfortable,” Scott said at the press conference.

Opening up an OPS in the city is something Scott has talked about for a long time. More than two years ago, Scott told me, “There’s nothing that says we can’t [open OPS], so we can do it.” Since then, all that has happened locally is a handful of hearings and now this installation, which begins to make the idea a bit more tangible.

Commissioner of Health Letitia Dzirasa also spoke in support of OPS, noting a frequent talking point about the benefits of OPS: There are over 150 overdose prevention sites around the world, and no one has ever died of overdose in any of them. Dzirasa also pointed towards the decades-long fight to open OPS in the United States which was finally won by New York City. Last year, two OPS opened up, one in Washington Heights and the other in Harlem.

“New York in 2021 became the first and only jurisdiction in America to open an overdose prevention site. It is my hope that we are poised to be the next city to embrace three decades of best practices and more than 100 peer-reviewed studies that have consistently shown the positive outcomes and impacts of overdose prevention sites,” Dzirasa said. 

In its first three months, OnPoint NYC’s two sites were used more than 10,000 times and staff reversed almost 200 overdoses.

William Miller Jr., a founder of harm reduction group Bmore POWER, spoke at the press conference, as well. Holding his young son, Miller Jr. brought with him the legacy of his father, William Miller Sr., an iconic harm reductionist who died of overdose in 2020. The Millers have been among those most vocal about the need for OPS for the longest.

“William Glen Miller Sr. started this work,” Miller Jr. reminded everybody. During the installation, a photograph of Miller Sr. sat on a table along with information about the BRIDGES Coalition, a large group of like-minded local organizations advocating for OPS at the state level, who worked together to create the OPS installation.

The OPS installation is an attempt to make real here in Baltimore what is real all over the world (and already operating in cities like Baltimore, illegally). It is a place that likely could have saved Miller Jr.’s father’s life and hundreds of other Baltimoreans’ lives each year. It can be simpler than that, though, Miller Jr. stressed: It’s also about giving people who use drugs their own place to be themselves.

“We can do a lot more to make people [who use drugs] feel good about themselves. And these places will have everything and anything that will make them feel comfortable,” Miller Jr. said. “People who will be using these facilities are people that use drugs—and they’re underserved. And they don’t feel comfortable anywhere else. I think it’s my job to make people who feel underserved feel comfortable.”

This story was made in collaboration with The Real News Network.

The post “We’re All Lifeguards”: An Illegal and Legal Overdose Prevention Site appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

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BOOT BOYS

soundcloud.com/bootboys
RIYL: Triple 6 Mafia, the wrestler New Jack
Start With: “Wigsplit” feat. Stoop Baby Mo
Listening to BOOT BOYS, local-hero-turned-everybody’s-favorite-nationwide JPEGMAFIA comes to mind and so does the short-lived Melanin Free. Armor King, BOOT BOYS’ 14-minute EP (with gnarled ’90s sci-fi production from Logicoma and Station North Sound) is a wild gesture towards the not-yet-pilfered intersection of New York hardcore and Memphis rap. BOOT BOYS can feel like a joke at times. Boof General’s bark-y raps recall DJ Paul and WWF legend Paul Orndorff and namecheck “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, but I get the sense BOOT BOYS are laughing but very serious: A shirt design shows four klansmen hanging from a Timberland logo tree.

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pearl-music.bandcamp.com
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On Pearl’s Thread, everything’s just a little too fast in a way that feels like it all could topple over at any moment, as if each member of this band’s all in a race to finish these songs before one another. That is not the case. This heavy, speedy music is tricky and easily bored. Often the band will slow down suddenly and seamlessly (it’s trippy), letting in some of what Dan Charnas has called “Dilla time” to the sound of bouncy, fervid doom punk. On vocals, Sienna Cureton-Mahoney (from the absolutely great Wet Brain) brings a wizened rage to it all. On “Control,” Cureton-Mahoney exclaims “control” over and over again and threatens to “put you in a headlock.”

TRUTH CULT

truthcultband.bandcamp.com
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Truth Cult takes its name from a triumphant and lonely song by local legends Lungfish. And Lungfish, well, they were a Baltimore band on the super-famous D.C. label Dischord. So, really, Truth Cult’s name gestures to the band’s whole deal: A band of Baltimore and D.C. punks making scrappy, catchy, rhythmically ambitious music that offers a unique sense of impervious, tragic optimism. Searing, focused, and joyous, it makes a lot of sense Truth Cult were opening for Turnstile. Vocalist Paris Roberts used to be in Joe Biden, an excellent band who were on the cover of The Beat way back in 2018.

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Jivebomb.bandcamp.com
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Before JIVEBOMB’s 2021 demo truly starts, it begins with a lengthy sample of The Jive Bombers’ 1957 song “Cherry,” a gesture to Baltimore’s tradition of provocative, singular art (“Cherry” is in John Waters’ Cry Baby). As for the rest of demo? Well, after that foggy ’50s sample, it simply does not relent: Six songs, none of them longer than a minute forty or so, all assured and vibrating, full of nervous and excited and angry energy. Vocalist Kat Madeira is getting something out here and having a lot of fun, and at live shows, stalks the stage more like DMX than, say, the dude from Terror.

MOWDER OYAL

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There are many conflicts of interest involving Baltimore Beat and Mowder Oyal—a fierce, jazzy hardcore quartet butressed by James Young’s electric bassoon. I have made music videos for the band; the entire staff has worked at one point or another with vocalist Lor Ugly Yo; drummer Bashi Rose has worked with Lisa and I; Teri is on the board of Maryland Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts where guitarist Adam Holofcener works; Adam and I made a record together one time, and, of course, Adam’s family handed over their million bucks to the Beat. We’re not objective about Mowder Oyal (“motor oil” as written in Baltimore-ese) but to not acknowledge this band (which, fwiw, Baltimore Magazine recently named “Best Band To Watch”) when we’re highlighting bands doing the most to bend and sometimes break punk would be a disservice to you, reader.

The post Truth Cult, Mowder Oyal, and Other Baltimore Bands Bending—and Sometimes Breaking—Hardcore appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

The few Baltimoreans who were out and about this morning in the Station North area amid social distancing would have been the first to see the billboard atop the current campaign headquarters of Baltimore mayor Jack Young with fitted a new slogan.

Since Young announced he would be running for mayor, the billboard, at the corner of North Ave. and North Charles Street, has featured the mayor’s face and the words, “Bernard C. ‘Jack’ Young, Baltimore’s Mayor.” 

Now it reads, “CANCEL RENT AND FUCK THE POLICE!”

Presumably reimagined at some point late last night (and first reported by WYPR’s Emily Sullivan), the billboard blacks-out Young’s messaging and replaces it with, “CANCEL RENT AND FUCK THE POLICE! FTP” and a small three arrows image in a circle—the social-democratic logo associated with resistance to totalitarianism. A grinning Jack Young still remains along with the “By Authority Friends of Bernard C. ‘Jack Young. Martin Cadogan, Treasurer,” mischievously suggesting Young’s campaign has paid for this new, radical message. 

The Beat spoke to one of the artists responsible for the changes to Young’s sign who asked to remain anonymous. They characterized the tags as a positive change to the sign.

“The billboard has been painted and repaired by a group of individuals,” they told the Beat. 

Following the death of Freddie Gray five years ago, this same billboard had been changed to read, “Whoever Died of a Rough Ride? The whole damn system.” The “rough ride” statement on the billboard has remained there since 2015 though occasionally other occupants have temporarily covered it up. A Made in Baltimore pop-up sign covered it when the building was used in 2017 for the holiday season. During the 2018 election, Governor Larry Hogan used the building as his Baltimore campaign headquarters and the billboard displayed Hogan and Lieutenant Governor Boyd Rutherford, both with their wives, along with the words “Baltimore Strong.” 

This new message returns the billboard’s message to the demands for change and accountability it has been broadcasting for the most of the past five years. It was put up there now in response to it being five years since the Baltimore Uprising and to criticize ongoing actions by the Baltimore Police.

“The message is timed with the fifth anniversary of Freddie Gray’s death and the first flight of the N73266 spy plane,” the artist told the Beat.

This past Friday, May 1, the privately-owned, billionaire-funded surveillance plane supported by the Baltimore Police Department began flying over the city during the day, recording everything, in hopes, according to police, that it can help solve homicide. Activists and the American Civil Liberties Union have long opposed the plane and recently filed a lawsuit against it, which was struck down by a federal judge (the ACLU said they will appeal). The Beat revealed in December 2019, that the surveillance plane back when it flew in secret in 2016 captured a police shooting and police and prosecutors mischaracterized the footage and claimed it did not contradict what police claimed though it in part, did contradict those claims.

The artist explained that the message was also in response to increased calls for rent strikes during COVID-19 from those struggling to make ends meet and given severely limited support—as the disastrous roll-out of one-time $1,200 stimulus checks and Maryland’s severely dysfunctional unemployment website illustrate.

“Cancel Rent is a statement of solidarity with other cities with communities struggling under quarantine,” the artist told the Beat.

The “Cancel Rent” and “Fuck the Police” messages has popped-up all over the Baltimore neighborhoods of Charles Village, Old Goucher, and Station North over the past couple months with similar sloganeering even before COVID-19. These messages, scrawled on walls, electrical boxes, and really anywhere one can write, have only increased as calls for rent strikes grow. Those smaller tags in Baltimore neighborhoods are not directly tied to those who changed the billboard on top of Young’s campaign headquarters, the artist told the Beat.

“Fortunately, a lot of the other messaging in the neighborhood is all conducted independently,” they said.

The artist said they were “surprised” by the occasional covering of the sign over the years but stressed that its message is broader than anti-Hogan or anti-Young sentiments.

“This is not an attack on any politician but the whole system,” they told the Beat.

An update: On Monday, May 4, the billboard was changed and now reads, “CANCEL HATE AND THANK THE POLICE + BCFD.” The Beat reached out to one of the artists behind “CANCEL RENT AND FUCK THE POLICE” for comment on this change to their changes.

“There will be no gratitude to the police for the extrajudicial killing of Freddie Gray,” they told the Beat.

The post “Cancel Rent and Fuck The Police”: Tagged Jack Young billboard “statement of solidarity,” one of those behind the action explained appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

Five years later, very little regarding Freddie Gray has been settled. We still do not know exactly how he died and because of that, it can be hard to even know how to begin to discuss it. Calling the weeks of protest and one day of rioting and the illegal curfew an “Uprising” still angers so many people. They’ll tell you that’s “political correctness” or they’ll say worse things than that. They of course, prefer the euphemistic “unrest” or more likely, “riots,” even though riots—in plural—is not accurate. There weren’t riots. Baltimore Beat cofounder Baynard Woods located “a very clear taxonomy: the uprising was the entire thing; the riot is what happened on April 27 at Mondawmin; the protests were all of the individual marches and demonstrations that made up the uprising.” He wrote that in June of 2015, when many of us were still processing it all, so why we’re still unpacking this five years later is not because it’s just that complicated but because a lot of people benefit from simplifying everything that happened for those couple weeks into “the riots.”

The same goes for Freddie Gray’s death. The most common way to refer to it is “Freddie Gray’s death in police custody,” and you’ll see that here on the Beat too because well, it’s the way to refer to it that seems the least loaded and closest to accurate since we don’t actually know what happened to him. Or rather, it all remains unclear what happened to him. This is everything that people hate about journalism—as they should. This “Well, actually”-ing of very serious events involving people’s lives all reduced into a kind of language that doesn’t really mean anything at all. “Death in police custody” is a concession to power pretending to be the “objective” way to handle it.

In some ways, “killed by police,” would seem to be a “compromise” but again, so many facts and details surrounding Gray’s arrest and the ride in that police van just aren’t fully accessible to most of us and likely never will. That said, journalist Justine Barron recently published, “Freddie Gray: Five Years Later,” for the website The Appeal. Barron’s work builds on the reporting she did on the podcast “Undisclosed” along with Amelia McDonnel-Parry and calls attention to the second stop after Gray was arrested and one where many witnesses saw Gray thrown into the van headfirst. Very quickly that second stop and all those witnesses left the narrative. Her story brings them back. This piece opens up a whole new understanding of Gray’s death and what led to it and typically. A lot of people with varying degrees of power have decided we know all we need to know about Gray. Gilmor Homes is being knocked down. A surveillance plane has been approved to fly over the city. An ongoing criminal enterprise within the Baltimore Police Department that continues to implicate more officers remains inexplicably, “just a few bad apples.” Police shot a sixteen year-old with a replica gun the other day.

Freddie Gray wasn’t murdered—technically. That’s because “murder” is a legal term even though pretty much everybody except for well, lawyers and reporters, use the word more colloquially. A killing becomes a “murder” when a representative of the state charges someone with that and then, jury or judge decides that charge was “deserving.” For most of us though, it means the harshest kind of killing, intentionality, cruelty, and so on. We all remember Marilyn Mosby on that May morning and the words, “depraved heart murder” as one of the charges against the police who were with Gray when he was chased and tackled and arrested and put in a police van. So this is why you hear people declare, “Freddie Gray was murdered” because it was a charge that never became a conviction. And people also say it was “murder” because if people who were not police officers had done what police officers did to Gray, we wouldn’t be hedging calling it “murder” and I don’t think there would have been all of that hand wringing surrounding it.

Calling what happened to Freddie Gray “a murder” is is a visceral reaction and making room for that kind of reaction is important to the Beat. So you’ll see in the essays and poems and reflections from the writers of Writers In Baltimore Schools (WBS) the word “murder.” It is how these writers feel and it is how a lot of people in Baltimore still feel. The writing the Beat is publishing this week came out of WBS’ Write-In for Freddie Gray in Baltimore, which took place on Saturday, April 25. 

I reached out to WBS Director Patrice Hutton to describe the write-in and its significance to WBS.

“On May 3, 2015, Writers in Baltimore Schools held a Write-In for Freddie Gray at 2640 Space. That we chose to hold our 10th birthday celebration in the same space in December 2019 was no accident. The death of Freddie Gray in police custody and subsequent Uprising led WBS to take a hard look at our work and figure out how to better center the voices of young people in Baltimore,” Hutton said. “This past Saturday, we held a second Write-In for Freddie Gray in Baltimore, this one over Zoom and with nods to the effect of COVID-19 on Baltimore. Many of the same young writers—now college students—attended. Two of them, Afiya Ervin and Marie Mokuba, led the write-in.”

The post Language and the Uprising: Writers in Baltimore Schools Respond to Freddie Gray appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

The Beat, like everywhere else, is trying to figure out how to do what we do right now to be useful—especially because as of late we’ve doing events such as co-presenting Real Talk Tho discussions or presenting with Baltimore Legal Hackers and that can’t happen right now. So we’ve begun a sort of catch-all column where Baltimoreans (and us) discuss some under-discussed elements of COVID-19.

Readers, we thought hard about how to frame this one. Usually, we let Larry Cohen’s expressive and witty photos just speak for themselves but covering the “Reopen America” demonstrations or protests or whatever these things are in Annapolis on Saturday, April 18, demands a little framing. Mostly because this is an extremely fringe group of people and a small number of them and, as Jaisal Noor at The Real News Network observed, there’s plenty of evidence these kinds of protests are being pushed—and funded—by a bunch of rich right-wingers. 

“The protest had been tied to Michigan’s DeVos family, billionaires who are leading Republican donors and activists. The DeVos family includes Erik Prince, Founder of Blackwater, and Betsy DeVos, the heiress who serves as Donald Trump’s Education Secretary,” Noor said. “The DeVos family’s also a leading member of the Koch Donor Network who bankroll conservative causes and it turns out who are major backers of the supposedly Grassroots Tea Party Movement, which called for less government and lower taxes.” 

So that’s something to consider when you see these aggrieved folks in their F350s demanding the country open back up so that they can get a haircut or a Venti Mocha Frappuccino with extra whip. Why is it news at all? Well, it happened and me and  Baltimore Beat editor-in-chief Lisa Snowden-McCray think that while it doesn’t represent anything resembling a “movement”—especially again, because this is being contrived by billionaires—it is news. Local news. And for Lisa, it really resonated because she grew up not far from Annapolis and is all too familiar with this kind of privileged white rage.

“It’s hard to know what is real when everything seems surreal. The spectacle that happened in my hometown isn’t much different than the spectacle of Donald Trump’s press conferences,” she told me. “What was real was the white entitlement, the white rage, and disregard for Black and brown lives. The protest that happened in Annapolis wouldn’t have happened if the protesters were Black. Black people are the ones who are dying by larger numbers from this virus. Not necessarily because we have been more cavalier with the warnings set out by Governor Larry Hogan but because we are often the ones working in the service industry. We are the ones who staff grocery stores and deliver food and work in nursing homes and hospitals.” 

That this happened—that these people were gathering in protest of nothing real during an nationwide emergency—nearly five years to the day that Freddie Gray died in police custody kicking off protests that were treated like a national emergency is disappointing but not surprising, Lisa told me: “Whether we are talking about Freddie Gray, who was, after all, just walking when Baltimore Police began chasing him on that April morning, or a deadly disease that is ravaging the globe— we are reminded constantly that Black lives don’t matter,” she said.

With all that said, here are some photos by Larry Cohen of Saturday’s Reopen Maryland protest in Annapolis.

The post Social Distancing-ing: White Rage in Annapolis Whining “Reopen America” appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

In Baltimore, there are more than thirty mayoral candidates—most of them Democrats, which means that the city’s next mayor is really decided during the primary election on April 28 rather than in November. It also means that the next mayor of Baltimore is likely someone who receives a relatively small percentage of the overall vote. And undoubtedly, many of those running are considering how little of the vote they concievably need to win. Meanwhile, the Democratic presidential candidate pool (at least until this weekend) still had more than a half-dozen people running and there is plenty of strategic talk about taking this to the convention. You would be forgiven for feeling like the whole electoral process is a little skewed. One proposed way to make elections more representative of the voters’ attitudes is Ranked Choice Voting (RCV), an increasingly popular voting method that allows people to rank all of their choices instead of choosing just one. To get a better understanding of RCV, we reached out to Andy Ellis, co-chair of the Maryland Green Party and someone who has been raising awareness about RCV.

Can you just describe how ranked choice voting works?

RCV can used for single or multi-winner ballots. In some cases it operates within primaries and in some cases it eliminates primaries and allows all voters and all candidates from all parties to participate in a single, universal election. For single winner elections in Baltimore—that’s everything other than the House of Delegates races—a ranked choice ballot would ask voters to rank their choices 1-x, with 1 being the first choice, 2 being the second, and so on. Voters can rank as many of the candidates as they like. Once it is time to tabulate ballots, a system of rounds is used. If someone has one vote more than 50% of the #1 votes in the first round, they win. If, however, no one has over 50%, then the person with the lowest number of #1 votes is eliminated and their #2 votes become #1 votes. This continues until a candidate has more than 50% of the #1 votes. Currently the Baltimore City Green Party uses RCV, including a “none of the above” option, for our Primary and Steering Committee elections.

Can you discuss how RCV would help change elections and how RCV operates in the US?

Advocates of a ranked choice voting system make several key claims about why it would be better: 1) RCV diminishes “spoiler arguments” 2) RCV decreases negative campaigning 3) RCV ensures majority support. Ranked Choice Voting has the possibility to give people more flexibility to vote for candidates they like, to make more collaborative elections, and to make sure no one is in office with a minority of popular support. It should be celebrated for those possibilities, but the limits should be recognized as well.

Can you discuss anywhere where RCV is in effect?

Dozens of cities in 24 states use or plan to use RCV in some elections. The biggest is New York City, which recently agreed to use RCV for Primaries and Special Elections. On a state level, Maine will be using it for a United States Senate and House of Representatives general election in 2020. Minneapolis, Oakland, and San Francisco are similarly-sized cities to Baltimore that have each used RCV for the last decade. Here in Maryland, Takoma Park has used RCV since 2007.

Can you anticipate some of the criticisms of ranked choice voting?

There are some technical concerns with RCV, including making sure that machines are configured to allow the voting and the tabulation of RCV votes. There is a bill in the Maryland Senate this year that pushes that issue forward—Senate Bill 89). There are also fears that it would be confusing. Former Delegate Cheryl Glenn made that argument in order to kill a 2019 bill that would have allowed Baltimore City to adopt RCV. Furthermore, it is argued that if voters continue to vote like they vote now (just voting for one person and not ranking the rest of their choices), their vote would not be counted in the final tally if their candidate were eliminated. While it is hard to imagine situations where this changes the outcome, some voters will not be happy knowing their vote might not have counted in the final tally. There are also good reasons to believe that changing the procedural technique by which we vote, without changing the way power is allocated in society at large, will do little to address the structural problems that keep many voters from participating.

Specifically, can you discuss how you think it would change the mayoral election in Baltimore?

This would largely depend on how the RCV enactment dealt with primaries. There are a few options to consider: No Primary: everybody from all parties (and independents) run in one election, everybody regardless of party affiliation can vote in that one RCV election. (Minneapolis); RCV in the closed primaries, RCV in the General Election. (Maine); and RCV in the Primaries, No RCV in the General Election. (New York City)

An election with no primary and RCV would be the most transformative for Baltimore City elections. Democrats, Republicans, Greens, Libertarians, Ujima, Bread and Roses, and unaffiliated candidates would appear on one ballot in one election for all voters. In 2020 that would mean someone could vote for a Democrat, a Republican, and a Green Party candidate on one ballot. It’s hard to know what the outcome would be but it is likely that turnout would be very high, and candidates who may not do as well in the current system would do much better. One thing is for sure, it would eliminate our current two-party closed primary system and replace it with a more open system that made sure every voter was heard.

With regards to RCV in the closed primaries and RCV in the General Election. If we think back to the 2016 General Election where Walden (R), Harris (G), Dixon (Write-in D), and Pugh (D) were on the ballot in the general election, we can apply how RCV could have worked. As it happened in our current system, Pugh had 57.6%, and if that had transferred to more than 50% of first place votes in a RCV system she would have won after one round. However, it’s likely some of those voters voted for Pugh because they disliked another candidate(s) and were concerned they might win, rather than because Pugh was their top choice candidate. In addition, those voters may have had little incentive to research all the candidates within the pick-one system, which would not be the case in a RCV system.

Consider if RCV had existed in 2016 and that 10% of Pugh’s first place votes were instead allocated by voters to Dixon or Harris, triggering a second-round allocation of Walden’s #2 votes. It might have been a much closer race as Harris was more likely to be the second choice of Walden and Dixon voters than the other candidates. Would Harris, Dixon or Walden be our mayor under this system? Probably not, but it may have been closer, and would have more clearly expressed voter preferences. This matters because in a winner-take-all system, votes are sometimes taken to be stronger endorsements than they actually are.

RCV in primaries and traditional voting in the general could have a big impact on who the Democratic presidential nominee is. Fifteen people might be eliminated before someone gets to over 50%. The key question would be how many people would rank all the choices? There is some research to suggest that younger, wealthier, and whiter voters are more likely to rank all the choices. If we have to go through 10 rounds of elimination to get to a majority it is hard to imagine how that would play out.

Can you discuss more how you think it would change the presidential primaries?

There are several states that will use RCV in their Democratic Primary this year, Alaska (April 4), Hawai’i (April 4), Kansas (May 2), and Wyoming (April 4), so we will get to see what happens. It is likely that if this occurs that late in the cycle it will have less impact than if it occurred at the beginning of the process. It is a good exercise to consider what would happen in Iowa or New Hampshire if they had to go through rounds until someone reached 50% given that the winners are in the twenties or thirties at best. The Green Party has used RCV in our presidential primaries for 20 years. The other ballot access parties in Maryland do not use RCV at all.

And how would ranked choice voting help change the two-party system?

I think RCV would make some moderate changes to the two-party system. For example, Dan Robinson was elected to the Takoma Park City Council under a RCV system. I am not sure it would immediately elevate Greens into office, but I think it would be an important part of what will be a decade- long effort to make Baltimore a multi-party city by 2030. There are definitely voters willing to give another party a try, but are convinced that if they must make one choice it must be the Democrat.

In order to truly transform our electoral system to make sure all people feel engaged, RCV is one critical part of a series of changes:

1. Change the way votes are tabulated (RCV)
2. Create a proportional representation system
3. Transform our campaign finance system to prevent donations from corporations and Super PACs from buying elections
4. Implement a robust public financing system
5. Allow vote-by-mail
6. Increase ballot access for unaffiliated candidates and non-principal parties
7. Hold special elections to fill vacancies
8. Allow petition by referendum at the city level.
9. Make sure that incarcerated people, young people, and non-citizen residents can vote.
10. Add transit-oriented early/election day voting locations

Some of these things are underway and some of these are things we can work on in this decade. If we do, we will significantly improve civic engagement and public accountability.

The post An Introduction to Ranked Choice Voting appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

The secret surveillance plane that flew over Baltimore throughout 2016 is coming back—and this time, at least, it won’t be a secret.

“I’m here today to announce a pilot program for the aerial surveillance in Baltimore,” Commissioner Michael Harrison said at a morning press conference. “As you probably know, I firmly believe in focusing on evidence-based and data-driven strategies when it comes to implementing new programs, new approaches, and new technologies in law enforcement.”

For those who do not know, the plane, with a dozen cameras on it, flies 8,500 feet above the city and records 30 square miles at a time. The resolution is not very high and it can only be used during the day, but the footage it records can be accessed, rewound, and fast-forwarded later on. 

The information gleaned from reviewing the footage is then compared with information from other cameras—such as Citiwatch—or incorporated into on-the-ground investigations. In this video, the plane’s creator, Ross McNutt of Persistent Surveillance Systems (PSS), describes how the plane was used to identify a shooter in Juarez, Mexico. He has long argued it can be used the same way in Baltimore.

“We will be the first American city to use this technology in an attempt to solve and deter violent crime,” Harrison said proudly.

The pilot program will determine if the surveillance plane will be used by the Baltimore Police Department in the long-term, Harrison said. Still, the return of this source ongoing controversy is a sign for local organizers of more of the same from the Baltimore Police.

“The answer to solving crime is building trust and addressing the root causes of crime such as employment, housing, wrap around services, mental health services, et.cetera, not turning Baltimore into a police state and treating its citizens as if their rights can be taken away any day by our public officials,” Tre Murphy of Black Leaders Organizing For Change (BLOC) said. “The community doesn’t trust BDP—this is yet another reason why.” 

Another Test Run

At the press conference, Harrison explained that the surveillance plane would be back in flight in May of next year. It would fly for 120–180 days as part of a round of testing to determine the plane’s effectiveness in helping to solve homicides and robberies.

In 2016, when the plane first flew, it was determined not to be particularly effective. That—along with the privacy concerns that come with a plane flying above the city and recording everyone all of the time—has been the argument against trying the plane again.

At a Public Safety Committee hearing about the plane in 2018, then-councilperson (and now council president and mayoral candidate) Brandon Scott said, “We all know in this body that if you guys were closing homicide after homicide after homicide when this plane was up, the police department would’ve come in with that data ready to go.”

After this morning’s announcement, Scott released a public statement about the plane: “We need solutions that work, and Commissioner Harrison has told the City Council multiple times this year, as recently as October, that there is no evidence the surveillance plane is an effective crime-fighting tool. BPD recently testified that, in the time the surveillance plane was secretly used in Baltimore, it yielded zero pieces of evidence that could be used to fight crime.” Scott’s statement continues: “A spy plane in the sky might make some of us feel safer, but it is not a proven crime-fighting tool. We know this.”

The spy plane’s return coincides with critiques of Harrison’s crime plan and a serious effort by Baltimore’s business leaders to push Mayor Jack Young to support the plane (and with that push, as Adam Johnson of The Appeal reported, a deceptive poll claiming overwhelming support for the plane).

Transparency This Time

Harrison stressed that the surveillance plane’s use would be “transparent” this time around and a rather perfunctory statement by Mayor Jack Young reinforced that talking point: “The process the Commissioner has outlined is transparent and includes necessary community engagement and auditing functions,” Young’s statement said.

The Baltimore Sun reported that despite Harrison’s appeals to transparency this morning, both the Office of the Public Defender and the State’s Attorney’s Office were not made aware of the decision to relaunch the plane before this morning’s announcement.

In 2016, the plane was flown entirely in secret and only acknowledged publicly after Bloomberg Businessweek published “Secret Cameras Record Baltimore’s Every Move.” Even then, the Baltimore Police Department, including then-BPD spokesperson and current mayoral candidate T.J. Smith (who has expressed support for the surveillance plane), claimed that the plane did not need to be disclosed by BPD in the first place.

“There was no conspiracy not to disclose it,” Smith said at the time.

As I reported back in 2016 for Baltimore City Paper, while McNutt went along with keeping the plane secret in 2016, communications between McNutt and members of the Baltimore Police Department obtained via public information request showed that McNutt pushed BPD to disclose the program. His requests were ignored.

This morning, Harrison described the pilot program as “trying a new thing for the first time,” which is not exactly true. Besides the plane’s secret use in Baltimore in 2016, the plane had previously flown in Compton in 2012—also in secret. When residents found out about it, they protested and the program was cancelled. After that, the plane was offered to Dayton, Ohio police, but activists loudly opposed the use of the plane and it never got off the ground.

In 2020, the plane’s use will at least be more transparent than in the past through public meetings, a memorandum of understanding between the city and PSS, and an “independent third party auditing team.”

Spying On The Past

Harrison detailed some adjustments to how the plane will be used during this pilot program.

It will only investigate “past events,” Harrison said, so the footage will no longer be viewed in real time. In 2016, the plane was sometimes directed to the location of a crime not long after it occurred and was also used to monitor protests. But the majority of the plane’s usage in 2020 will be the same as it was in 2016: with analysts following up on crimes and going through the footage to see if the plane caught anything.

The plane’s “video feeds,” Harrison said, “will not be directly accessible by Baltimore Police Department officers—instead the company supplying the planes will provide us with evidence packages that are specific to incidents that have already been reported.” In other words, a private company has full access to the plane’s recorded video—not exactly comforting to those concerned about the use and abuse of surveillance by individuals in the public and private sector.

And only “the most serious offenses, specifically murders, shootings, armed robberies, including car jackings,” will be investigated using the plane, Harrison stressed. But during the press conference, Harrison said that if, for example, it was shown the plane was effective, it could later be used to solve other kinds of crime—a sexual assault, for example.

“If by chance there happens to be a rape and we find that it could be used for that, well then that’s something that we have to talk about,” Harrison said. “It could evolve to that.”

This confirms criticisms from David Rocah of the American Civil Liberties Union Maryland (ACLU MD), a longtime critic of the plane who has stressed that the plane’s investigative abilities being capped or limited by police once they begin using the plane is unlikely. 

Although the plane was promoted as a way to investigate violent crimes—specifically murders— in 2016, a number of lesser crimes, including illegal dumping and hit-and-runs were captured and it was used to track dirt bikes by the Dirt Bike Violator Task Force. Some of those lesser crimes were part of PSS’s evidence that the plane was a success.

Another negative Harrison cast as a positive: It won’t cost the city of Baltimore anything. John and Laura Arnold, a Texas billionaire couple who also funded the 2016 flights (by donating money to the Baltimore Community Foundation and later, the Police Foundation, which then passed the money to the police, who then paid PSS) will be funding this pilot program. 

The Arnolds will fund the pilot program through Arnold Ventures, a corporation the couple established earlier this year which, as Vox reported, makes it easier for them to give their money to whoever they want (rather than only nonprofits). Media-averse since their involvement with the surveillance plane was revealed, the Arnolds now have a media contact of their own, and sent over a statement today.

“At Arnold Ventures, we seek evidence-based solutions to our nation’s most complex challenges. We support the City of Baltimore as it confronts its public safety crisis and pursues innovative strategies to ensure the well-being of its citizens,” a statement from John Arnold said. “By funding a limited-duration pilot and a fully independent evaluation, we hope to learn whether this technology can be a useful part of Baltimore’s crime reduction strategy. We appreciate Commissioner Harrison’s leadership on this project and his efforts to conduct an open conversation about how best to serve the citizens of Baltimore.”

As first reported by David Pontious’ Baltimore Bulletin newsletter, the Arnolds held a fundraiser in Houston for mayoral candidate Thiru Vignarajah, who supports the surveillance plane.

A Police Shooting Captured By The Spy Plane

Harrison also said that during the pilot program at least, the plane would not be used to investigate Baltimore Police Department.

After potential public support for the plane was squandered by 2016’s decision to keep it secret, McNutt began repitching the surveillance plane in 2018 as a way to catch dirty cops in the act. McNutt went right to community organizers and neighborhood associations. Following the 2017 Gun Trace Task Force scandal in which Baltimore Police officers were federally indicted for stealing money, dealing drugs, planting guns, and other abuses of power, this appealed to some Baltimoreans.

Briefly the plane was reconsidered, though that collapsed after a disastrous 2018 hearing by the Public Safety Committee where it was shown McNutt misrepresented community support (one of its most vocal supporters, Archie Williams, had been paid by McNutt).

When McNutt was promoting his plane as a way to catch crooked cops, he told me that the plane had potentially already caught some police misconduct: During one of its early 2016 flights, the plane captured police shooting a man in West Baltimore. 

On January 27, 2016, near the 3400 block of Piedmont Avenue a little after 1 p.m., two unmarked police cars, one driven by Det. Robert Hankard with Det. Tarik Toro-Munford in the passenger seat, and another car driven by Det. Ryan Hill with Det. Carmine Vignola in the passenger seat, stopped a man named Jawan Richards. At the time, they said Richards was not wearing his seatbelt. Toro-Munford also said he recognized Richards from previous encounters.

Richards, the police said, rammed into their unmarked police cars with his SUV and tried to escape, striking Hankard’s car and Hankard himself. Both Hankard and Vignola fired at Richards and Richards was shot in the neck. One of the bullets went through the windshield of Richards’ SUV.  Police said they recovered a small amount of cannabis and a gun from Richards and Richards eventually pleaded guilty to a number of gun and assault charges.

Last year, McNutt told me what he saw watching the spy plane footage of the Richards shooting. 

“The officers stop, blocking him in, they jump out of the car,” McNutt said. “The real question is why did the officers stop?…Obviously the guy wouldn’t throw it in reverse if the [police’s] door hadn’t been opened…Why would you jump out on a guy not wearing a seat belt?”

In May 2016, Hankard and Vignola were cleared of any wrongdoing in the shooting. Because of a conflict of interest within Baltimore’s State’s Attorney’s Office, the police shooting was investigated by the Carroll County State’s Attorney’s Office instead. McNutt told me he received pushback from Carroll County when he told them, months after the cops were cleared, that the shooting was captured by his plane. Documents show McNutt corresponded with Carroll County in September 2016 about the plane and the Richards shooting and in October 2016, Carroll County informed Richards’ lawyers about PSS’s findings. Carroll County also said they viewed PSS’s evidence packet (which only contains still images) disagreed with PSS’s claims that there were discrepancies.

“The non-Baltimore prosecutor was hyper once it was discovered that we had information on the shooting,” McNutt told me last year. “I would be very interested if it was anyone from the GTTF.”

More than three years later, it seems as though McNutt was onto something. Vignola, one of the officers involved in the shooting has plead guilty to lying to a grand jury due to his involvement in an 2014 incident related to GTTF.

On March 26, 2014, Vignola, a still-unnamed officer (identified only as “Rob” in Vignola’s guilty plea), and Sgt. Keith Gladstone helped GTTF sergeant Wayne Jenkins plant a BB gun on Demetric Simon, a man Jenkins had just run over. Documents related to Richards’ shooting identify Gladstone as Vignola’s supervisor.

According to the evidence packet prepared by PSS, what the plane shows partially conflicts with the police version of events. “Observed vehicle behavior matches BPD story of vehicle backing into officers but not into officers [sic] vehicle. Officers [sic] vehicle was in front of suspect car,” it reads.

The report also notes that initially, Richards pulled to the side, “into [a] shovelled [sic] parking spot [to] allow the two cars (Officers) to pass,” and it was only once he pulled into the parking spot that the interaction with police began.

That the evidence packet even suggested a possible discrepancy between the police version of events and what McNutt and his analysts saw should have piqued police interest, McNutt told me last year: “I was amazed how disinterested they were in an officer involved shooting.”

“It is an egregious insult to the citizens of Baltimore to put a constant surveillance plane that’s gonna operate 24-7 in the sky, to essentially track everybody’s movement and not call Baltimore a police state,” BLOC’s Murphy said when he learned of the 2016 shooting captured by the plane. “It’s an even bigger slap in the face when we can have the very person behind the spy plane give evidence that shows the discrepancies in a police involved incident—and those discrepancies have not been exposed to the public before now—and shows, to some extent, that the evidence itself was willfully ignored.”

A Public Way

On the phone today, McNutt said he did not know if Commissioner Harrison specifically knew about the 2016 police shooting captured by the spy plane. The Baltimore Police Department, he said, do know about it, and have had the evidence packet created by PSS since 2016.

“We told them we have it, they know we have it, they have not pushed it,” McNutt said this morning over the phone, a few minutes after the press conference ended.

McNutt talked to me while he was driving around the Florida Keys today. Not exactly an ideal time for BPD to announce the launch of a program he had been fighting to get into an American city for nearly a decade, he joked, but nevertheless, he was effusive about Harrison’s announcement.

“We are hoping to do this in a public way this time,” McNutt said. “There’s a whole lot of work to be done.”

The post Aerial Surveillance Returns: Debate over its effectiveness continues and documents show the spy plane captured a police shooting in 2016 appeared first on Baltimore Beat.