![]() What the drug war did, though, was make this all a function of social control. ![]() ![]() Some African American officers seemed to feel no such pause. Something had been removed from the equation that gave white officers - however brutal they wanted to be, or however brutal they thought the moment required - it gave them pause before pulling out a nightstick and going at it. It was as disturbing a dynamic as I could imagine. It was simply safer to be brutal if you were black, and I didn't know quite what to do with that fact other than report it. You take out your nightstick and you’re white and you start hitting somebody, it has a completely different dynamic than if you were a black officer. Back then, even before the advent of cell phones and digital cameras - which have been transforming in terms of documenting police violence - back then, you were much more vulnerable if you were white and you wanted to wail on somebody. But when you have African-American officers beating the dog-piss out of people they’re supposed to be policing, and there isn't a white guy in the equation on a street level, it's pretty remarkable. I think the two agendas are inextricably linked, and where one picks up and the other ends is hard to say. If I had to guess and put a name on it, I’d say that at some point, the drug war was as much a function of class and social control as it was of racism. The guys who would really kick your ass without thinking twice were black officers. What did Tom Wolfe write about cops? They all become Irish? That's a line in “Bonfire of the Vanities.” When Ed and I reported “The Corner,” it became clear that the most brutal cops in our sector of the Western District were black. How does race figure into this? It’s a city with a black majority and now a black mayor and black police chief, a substantially black police force. Think about that for a moment: It was a permission for the police to become truly random and arbitrary and to clear streets any way they damn well wanted. They literally declared maybe a quarter to a third of inner city Baltimore off-limits to its residents, and said that if you were loitering in those areas you were subject to arrest and search. The city council actually passed an ordinance that declared a certain amount of real estate to be drug-free zones. And they basically decided that even that loose idea of what the Fourth Amendment was supposed to mean on a street level, even that was too much. ![]() Then at some point when cocaine hit and the city lost control of a lot of corners and the violence was ratcheted up, there was a real panic on the part of the government. When I came on, there were jokes about, “You know what probable cause is on Edmondson Avenue? You roll by in your radio car and the guy looks at you for two seconds too long.” Probable cause was whatever you thought you could safely lie about when you got into district court. It’s a tenuous thing anywhere, but in Baltimore, in these high crime, heavily policed areas, it was even worse. Probable cause from a Baltimore police officer has always been a tenuous thing. “If I had to guess and put a name on it, I’d say that at some point, the drug war was as much a function of class and social control as it was of racism.” It was done almost as a plan by the local government, by police commissioners and mayors, and it not only made everybody in these poor communities vulnerable to the most arbitrary behavior on the part of the police officers, it taught police officers how not to distinguish in ways that they once did. It happened in stages, but even in the time that I was a police reporter, which would have been the early 80s to the early 90s, the need for police officers to address the basic rights of the people they were policing in Baltimore was minimized. Probable cause was destroyed by the drug war. The part that seems systemic and connected is that the drug war - which Baltimore waged as aggressively as any American city - was transforming in terms of police/community relations, in terms of trust, particularly between the black community and the police department. "The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood" 1"The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood" by David Simon and former Boston homicide detective Ed Burns, 1997īK: What do people outside the city need to understand about what’s going on there - the death of Freddie Gray and the response to it?ĭS: I guess there's an awful lot to understand and I’m not sure I understand all of it.
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