Baltimore's top cop on Tuesday warned against "race-baiting" amid rising tensions across the nation, citing the Trayvon Martin case and cautioning that a video generating outrage on the Internet of a tourist being beaten and stripped in downtown Baltimore doesn't appear to depict a hate crime.
Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III, appearing on WBAL's C4 program, said the attack on a 31-year-old Arlington, Va. Caucasian man appears to be nothing beyond "drunken opportunistic criminality." The comment came in response to a caller who said if the victim were African-American and the assailants white, civil rights leaders would be descending on Baltimore and the attackers would be charged with a hate crime.
Bealefeld, the white police commissioner of majority-black Baltimore, warned against "fear-mongering."
"There's no doubt it's a crime. We need to vigorously hold criminals accountable, and we have to be careful not to be pulled into this race-baiting," he said.
"I want to caution people, because, I think there will be ample national noise as we progress through the Trayvon Martin and the [Oklahoma shooting] cases," Bealefeld continued. "As these things get going, I will urge caution of Baltimoreans to distinguish between criminality and racially motivated crime."
Protests continue over the shooting in Florida of Martin, an unarmed teenager shot by a neighborhood watch volunteer, and a prosecutor said this week that the case would not go before a grand jury. The Sanford mayor has called his town a "kindling box," with the New Black Panther party offering a bounty for the shooter's capture and reports of neo-Nazis on patrol. In Oklahoma, several people were killed in a shooting spree that authorities say may be race-based retribution.
Hate crime charges are rare and used as a sentencing enhancement for underlying crimes, and local law enforcement officials say they require evidence that race was the determining motivation in the attack.
Recent high profile hate crime cases include the beating of a transgender woman at a Rosedale McDonald's, and an attack on an elderly black fisherman in South Baltimore by a white man with a Hitler tattoo who told the victim the beating "wouldn't have happened if he was a white man."
The Baltimore beating video went viral after first being uploaded to social media and popular shock video websites. It showed a seemingly disoriented white man standing with a group of young black people. As a woman dances against the victim, someone takes an item from his pocket, and when he moves to recover the item, he is punched in the face and falls to the pavement. The victim is then stripped of his clothing by laughing assailants.
Police initially said they did not have a report on the incident. Then, with the video gaining mass attention, police were able to connect the incident to a report taken March 19 from a man who said he was assaulted and robbed of a watch, car keys and cell phone but could not remember where the attack occurred.
Outraged viewers of the video then tracked social media to pinpoint an apparent suspect, who had discussed the incident on his Twitter account before shutting it down. A call to the man's phone indicated his voicemail may have been hacked, with a message from someone claiming to be the suspect and boasting of the attack.
No charges have been filed against the man — identified in social media accounts as a 20-year-old from Rosedale — but Bealefeld said the investigation was ongoing.
"I'm confident [detectives] are following procedures, dotting i's, crossing t's, and working with the state's attorney's office to develop a good, solid prosecutable case and the evidence we need," Bealefeld said.
Of the efforts by citizens to track down the suspect, Bealefeld said in the radio interview: "I thought they were very creative in some of the things they did, but there's a difference between what private citizens do and what detectives do in the legal construct of developing a case."
Bealefeld also addressed recent reports that officers had gone into a school to handcuff and arrest a group of 8- and 9-year-old who were charged with assaulting classmates off school property. The ACLU said police had overstepped their boundaries, and relatives of the juveniles said the arrests were mishandled.
Bealefeld said the arrests "have raised a number of questions inside the Police Department that we're working through. I hope people have confidence in us that if we made mistakes, we're going to address that and work to avoid it."
But he also said debate over the arrests distracted from the crimes committed and ongoing problems in the Morrell Park community. The students were accused of holding another youth's head under water and another's against train tracks during a fight. Television reports said the children referred to themselves as "The Hit Squad."
"Sure we could've done it better. But at the end of the day, we can't lose sight of why we were there to start with. … We twist away from what's happening with bullying, what's going on in that neighborhood. What's going on in that neighborhood that these violent assaults are happening? They didn't wake up one day and say, ‘I'm putting my friend's head under water'," Bealefeld said.