Police Commissioner Anthony Batts says violence is out of control in the Western District in part because his officers find themselves surrounded by people with video cameras every time they show up to do even the most routine police work. To give him some credit for his first significant public remarks about the three-week-long spate of drastically increased murders and non-fatal shootings, he did not appear angry or mystified at this phenomenon. Rather, he recognized it for what it is: evidence of a community whose relations with the police have passed the breaking point in the wake of Freddie Gray's death and the ensuing riots. Mr. Batts is promising more community engagement as a result, and that's good, but he has been promising that since the moment he arrived in Baltimore nearly three years ago. That his efforts have only brought us to this point calls into question whether he can ever achieve his goals.
While Mr. Batts may have been exaggerating in saying officers are being videotaped by "30 to 50" people on every call, it's clear that the dynamics on the street have changed. Officers are not only being taped but also frequently berated by residents angry not just over what happened to Freddie Gray but also about what they say is a long history of abuse by police officers. Even with the passage of three weeks since the riots, passions have not cooled. Nor is the anger — or the recent violence — contained to West Baltimore. On the same day that Mr. Batts made his remarks, five people were shot, one fatally, along Linwood Avenue in East Baltimore. The city saw its 100th homicide of the year the next day.
From his very first public appearances in Baltimore, Mr. Batts preached the need to foster a "a police organization that remembers that we serve our community." He had a reputation for engaging closely with the community during his tenure as police chief in Long Beach, Calif., and he pledged to take time to learn the culture here. In his confirmation hearing in 2012, he pledged "marked improvement in our systems and our commitment to community." He went on ride-alongs, attended community meetings and chatted up residents on the streets.
On a substantive level, he disbanded the Violent Crimes Impact Section, a plainclothes unit that had generated significant community complaints, and he put more officers on patrol to respond to 911 calls. He created a new community policing division and beefed up internal affairs to investigate police uses of force and allegations of misconduct. He promised to give officers "the tools... so they can be more empathetic." In a Sun op-ed two years ago, Mr. Batts explained his strategy: "Simply put, we continue to target illegal guns and violent offenders, and we have added two factors — additional police presence for the comfort and safety of the community and community engagement, in an effort to build bridges and communication between police and the community." At his one-year anniversary, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said she was "proud of his emphasis of getting in the community and making sure everyone understands it's not them against us, which is for far too long what people felt."
But 2014 saw the commissioner and mayor on the defensive about police misconduct after a Sun series on the city's history of police brutality settlements, which came around the same time as a widely publicized video of an officer beating up a man at a bus stop — a video the department had for two months but did nothing about. Mr. Batts and the mayor requested that the Justice Department conduct a "collaborative review" into allegations of brutality and misconduct. "I didn't break it, but I'm here to fix it," he said at the time. By this spring, even before Freddie Gray's arrest and death, Mr. Batts was lamenting the "1950s-level black-and-white racism" in Baltimore and a "visceral hatred of the police department" in the community. After Freddie Gray's death and the riots, the mayor requested that the Justice Department upgrade the collaborative review to a full-scale civil rights investigation.
The commissioner has always been a candid observer of the breakdown in Baltimore's police-community relations. We appreciate that, but acknowledging the situation isn't the same as resolving it. When he first arrived here, Mr. Batts said he would keep driving violent crime down and start driving community trust up. Now violent crime is up — murders by 40 percent and non-fatal shootings by 70 percent over last year — and community trust is perhaps as low as it has been since the 1968 riots. At what point do we stop saying Mr. Batts needs more time for his reforms to work and at what point do we concede that they don't?