Baltimore City Council: From Woke to Alarmed and Awakened!

Baltimore, once known by a tag line "The City that Reads" became the City that Bleeds with murders and violent crime out of control.

Members of the Baltimore City Council have more recently become frustrated over the mayor’s and police commissioner’s longer-term crime reduction plans which have thus far been largely ineffective and openly being criticized all the way up to the Maryland State House and Maryland Governor Larry Hogan.

“The community are looking at us as a joke,” Councilmember Antonio Glover said during the Tuesday night hearing.  

His reaction was one of many tense moments that arose inside Baltimore City Hall during the hearing.

“I am absolutely disgusted with the state of public safety in this city,” Councilmember Eric Costello said. “My hope is that we can get some answers tonight and that members of this Ways and Means Committee can walk away from this meeting and reassure our constituents that you have this all under control.”

Baltimore City Police Commissioner Michael Harrison pushed back against his critics, “Let me set this record straight right here and right now . . . Our sense of urgency is set to maximum and it stays there and it never turns off,” Harrison said.

The scathing questions were continuous as council members strived to determine if Harrison was doing enough to make the streets safer.

“We are going after drug dealers and making those cases every single day,” Harrison said.

Councilmember Robert Stokes expressed dissatisfaction with Harrison’s remarks

“You just gave me statistics,” he said. “I asked for a plan about the open drug market. You told me about arrests. People in the community want to know ‘What is the plan?’ Not how many people were arrested.”

Conway asks Commission Harrison what are his pressing challenges. Harrison cited:

-Staffing
-Swift and certain consequences (court outcomes)
-'Systemic issues and root cause issues'
-Officer morale

Stokes says officers say they're hindered by the consent decree. Harrison: "That's code language for, 'I can't do things the way we used to do it.' Harrison then said that is code for, 'I can't be brutal and drag people off and make them do what I want them to do.' ” Really? So what defines a “good cop?” Does the city want aggressive constitutional proactive policing or tie hands behind the back of the officers on the beat?

Commissioner Harrison’s micro zone patrol strategy in areas of high crime was called out as being disingenuous given staffing shortages and a history of crime displacement resulting from past micro zones.

This is why front line officers must be nimble and emboldened with reasonable autonomy to react more swiftly to fluid situations and changes in criminal activity than as a result of a weekly micromanagement analysis and strategy. Trying to micromanage something that office based commanders don't fully understand, through data driven policing not at the post officer level via weekly Compstat meetings with stale data, is no substitute for real-time database deployment in the field.

If enhanced public safety and crime reduction are the desired results then perhaps commendation and bonus compensation for crime reduction should be based upon achievement of those goals from the police commissioner through the ranks down to the post patrol officer who has their finger on the pulse of their primary area of responsibility?

After the recent incident where a Baltimore city police sergeant who was doing his job and was dragged by a vehicle operated by an armed fleeing traffic violator, a repeat violent offender with a lengthy rap sheet of at least 19 arrests as an adult, Baltimore media pressed the police commissioner to call out problems in the judicial system specifically prosecutorial issues with Marilyn Mosby and her office but he stopped short of criticizing her. While Commissioner Harrison said the his department provides the prosecutor with quality cases he wouldn’t call her out on lax prosecutorial actions saying he didn’t do her evaluations and that the department doesn’t always know what goes into the prosecutor’s decision making process on cases.

One thing’s for certain, wrong-headed thinking by “progressives” of varying degrees has gotten us to where we are today. If law enforcement officers displayed the temperament of an AOC, Maxine Waters or others of the same ilk, they would be fired and deemed unworthy of continued employment in the pursuit of law and order… and rightfully so.

Police must be once again emboldened to enforce the law and the most reasonable and honest of the politicians and law enforcement leaders must support those law enforcement efforts, be guided accordingly, and boldly say so.

 Joel E. Gordon is a former Field Training Officer with the Baltimore City Police Department and is a past Chief of Police for the city of Kingwood, West Virginia. He has also served as vice-chair of a regional narcotics task force. An award winning journalist, he is author of the book Still Seeking Justice: One Officer's Story and founded the Facebook group Police Authors Seeking Justice. Look him up at stillseekingjustice.com