Corrupt Police Need Federal Oversight

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/18/opinion/baltimore-police-federal-oversight.html

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The Trump administration acted in bad faith last year when it suggested that cities with corrupt police departments could fix the problem without federal oversight and when it tried to derail a police reform agreement that Baltimore had negotiated with the federal government in the waning days of the Obama administration.

The argument that Baltimore might be able to remake its grotesquely corrupt Police Department without federal help was blown apart last Monday, when a federal jury convicted two detectives of robbery and racketeering charges in a trial that has exposed pervasive corruption in the department.

The city’s elite Gun Trace Task Force has been gripped by a conspiracy in which officers covered for one another as they stole property, narcotics and money from people, some of whom had committed no crimes and had earned the money lawfully. In addition, the officers filed false reports that allowed some to pilfer vast amounts of overtime, doubling their salaries, and those who were convicted testified to seizing weapons that were subsequently sold on the street — a cardinal outrage in a city wracked by gun violence.

Monday’s convictions follow guilty pleas by six other officers in connection with the case, and as The Baltimore Sun reported last week, the officers and other witnesses have now implicated a dozen additional colleagues, so more charges could be in the offing.

What makes the guilty officers’ conduct particularly brazen is that much of it occurred during a separate federal investigation into police practices, an inquiry begun in the wake of the protests and rioting that followed the death of Freddie Gray, a young African-American man who died of a broken spine suffered in police custody in 2015.

That investigation revealed an abusive form of policing, vindicating black Baltimoreans who had complained for years that they were being stopped, frisked and even arrested without cause. These practices destroyed public confidence in law enforcement, paving the way for the fiery outrage that followed Mr. Gray’s death.

Congress had cases like this one in mind in 1994 when it gave the Justice Department the authority to restructure troubled police departments that were clearly unable of root out corruption and brutality on their own. Using this authority, the Obama Justice Department negotiated a sweeping agreement that requires Baltimore to undertake a wide range of reforms, including better training and technology, community oversight and transparency measures.

A federal judge last year rejected the Trump Justice Department’s attempt to delay court approval of the agreement, known as a consent decree, which the city’s civic leaders say is absolutely essential to overhauling a police department that has a longstanding reputation for abusing the people it is meant to protect — and that has failed, at every level, to contain lawlessness in the ranks that should have been visible to everyone in charge.

The monitor who was appointed by the court to determine if and when Baltimore has fulfilled the terms of the consent decree needs to keep those failures foremost in mind.