The First Trial of Police who killed Freddie Gray in Baltimore began this morning.
We like to believe that Police in our major cities have the best interests of the public as their primary goal, that they haven’t become a highly belligerent occupying force ready to dish out pain, punishment and death at the drop of a pin.
That’s a nice pleasant daydream to have.
But as we’ve seen repeatedly with the way not just with the Officer who shot Laquan McDonald 16 times, most of whom after he had already hit the ground, the Officer that shot Samuel Dubose in the face then lied claiming he was being “dragged” by his car, the Officer who shot Walter Scott in the back while claiming he felt “threatened” and the Officers who refused to do anything as Freddie Gray begged and pleaded for “Help” after he suffered a broken neck in their custody.
The biggest challenge and the largest problem isn’t just these few officers, the sad and infuriating fact is that none of these officers were completely alone. There were other Officers there who were witness to these events and in every case they all either backed up the lies and distortions generated by the primary perpetrator or worse as we’ve seen with Chicago PD they appear to have actively destroyed video evidence that would have shown what really happened to someone like Laquan McDonald.
There’s only one or two current or former police officers I’ve seen who’s been willing to come forward and explain why other police don’t immediately arrest their “rogue” officers on the spot. One of those officers is former Baltimore police veteran Michael A. Wood. Jr.
In this video Michael Wood drives a reporter from Slate through the streets of Baltimore and explains step by step how he became a “typical” cop who would simply turn his head as he witnessed violence and brutality and how only after he had to retire due to a shoulder injury did he finally start to come out about his experiences via twitter.
Wood when asked by the Washington Post how he joined and then left the Baltimore PD.
Wood: Eleven years. I joined in 2003. I was a sergeant when I retired. I started by walking the Western District on foot. That’s where Freddie Gray was killed. That was my first beat. I also worked in the Southern and Northern districts for a while. Then I was promoted to the Violent Crime Division. I did street work with a narcotics division for six months. Then I was promoted to Major Crimes. I left in January 2014 due to a shoulder injury. I wish I could say my injury came with an interesting story, but it’s pretty boring.
Some of the things he describes are suspects who are already caught and handcuffed being kicked directly in the face while they lie on the ground. Other officers who defecated in the apartment of a suspect, or peed in their plants or even in their beds or on their furniture just to “make a mark”.
Shutting off surveillance cameras when a suspect is caught so that what’s about to happen to them won’t be recorded.
Or randomly slapping a woman who simply bumped into an Officer.
Why didn’t he do anything about it? Simple: he wanted to keep his job.
To an extent, I’m totally guilty. I should have done more. My excuse isn’t a good excuse, but it’s reality: You report that stuff, and you’re going to get fired. I mean, of course you’re going to get fired. Or they’re going to make your life miserable. I mean, look what happened to Joseph Crystal.
It all goes back to this whole us versus them thing. You suit up; you get out there; you’re with your brothers. You’re an occupying force. Your job is to fight crime, and these are the guys you do it with. So you just don’t see the abuse. It doesn’t even register, because those people are the enemy. They aren’t really even people. They’re just the enemy. This is the culture. It’s a s—– excuse. But it’s the reality.
Joseph Crystal was a Baltimore Detective who for a time had actually worked with Michael Wood, but when he came forward and reported the beating of an already apprehended suspect that resulted in breaking his ankle, he was hounded and harassed by his fellow Officers to the point that he had to abandon the force.
In 2011, Crystal witnessed two fellow cops beating down a drug suspect after the suspect, fleeing from the officers, kicked in the door of a home belonging to another officer's girlfriend.
For reporting the officers’ actions to the State’s Attorney’s Office, Crystal was labeled a "snitch" and a "rat cop." The threats and intimidation -- which included someone putting a dead rat on Crystal's windshield -- are outlined in a multimillion-dollar lawsuit that Crystal filed against Commissioner Anthony Batts and the BPD.
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“You know that sickening feeling you get when someone is after you?” Crystal asked. “That’s how I felt every day.”
Once Crystal reported what his fellow officers had done, he was no longer “One of us”, he was “One of them” so committing criminal acts of intimidation and stalking in order to get him to comply and conform with the blue line of silence was absolutely not beyond the pale.
Wood on why his views eventually changed:
Oh yeah, I had an awakening. I remember it very well. I was doing narcotics work. And so I was spending a lot of time doing surveillance in a van, or in some vacant building. You have a lot of time on your hands with that kind of work. You’re watching people for hours at a time. You see them just going about their daily lives. They’re getting groceries, running errands, going to work. Suddenly, it started to seem like an entirely different place then what I had seen when I was doing other police work. I grew up in Bel Air[, Maryland]. I didn’t have exposure to inner cities. And when you work in policing, you’re inundated early on with the “us vs. them” mentality. It’s ingrained in you that this is a war, and if someone isn’t wearing a uniform, they’re the enemy. It just becomes part of who you are, of how you do your job. And when all you’re doing is responding to calls, you’re only seeing the people in these neighborhoods when there’s conflict. So you start to assume that conflict is all there is. Just bad people doing bad things.
But sitting in the van and watching people just living their lives, I started to see that these were just people. They weren’t that different from me. They had to pay rent. See their kids off to school. The main difference is that as a white kid growing up in my neighborhood, I was never going to get arrested for playing basketball in the street. I was never going to get patted down because I was standing on a street corner. There was no chance I was going to get a criminal record early on for basically being a kid. As a teen, I was never going to get arrested for having a dime bag in my pocket, because no one would ever have known. There was just no possibility that a cop was ever going to stop me and search me.
So the challenge that faces the nation in many of it’s most challenged urban environments isn’t just weeding out the few singular officers who have shown a track record of excessive aggression and violence, it’s also addressing the culture of conformity that makes all the other officers around him remain silent when they witness these outbursts.
Even if we do make a dent with the first problem, it’s going to be largely for naught unless we simultaneously address the second problem effectively.