Who knew that the desk officers in Baltimore City police stations aren't always armed? Or that visitors don't have to pass through metal detectors to enter the building? Or that unless you're reeking of marijuana and acting as if you're high you can stroll into a station house carrying a loaded pistol along with enough illegal drugs to stock a small pharmacy — and no one will be the wiser?
An incident this week at Baltimore's Northeastern District station house suggests that security arrangements at Baltimore police stations may be little better than those at the local public library. On Tuesday, an alleged member of the Black Guerrilla Family prison gang, Jason Armstrong, showed up at the station to meet his parole and probation agent. Mr. Armstrong, who had pleaded guilty to a drug distribution charge in 2013, was supposed to stay in regular contact with his parole officer as part of the state's Violence Prevention Initiative, a program run by the Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services that provides close supervision for about 1,000 ex-offenders who are considered at risk for committing violent crimes. Most of the state's 60,000 paroles and probationers meet their supervising agents at other offices.
According to police reports, Mr. Anderson seemed nervous when he presented himself at the front desk exuding a strong smell of "fresh marijuana." The desk officer became suspicious and asked other officers in the room for assistance because he was on "light duty" and therefore may not have been carrying a gun. When they confronted Mr. Anderson, he tried to run out of the station but was stopped and wrestled to the ground by a detective, who discovered a .22-caliber handgun in his pockets along with more than two dozen plastic baggies of what appeared to be crack cocaine, heroin and marijuana.
City Police Commissioner Anthony Batts later said Mr. Armstrong told officers he was forced by gang leaders to bring the loaded gun and drugs into the station in order to test police security. (A likely story, which, of course, there's no way of verifying.) But the fact that the FBI had recently warned police departments that gang members might be targeting Maryland police officers was enough to prompt the department to rethink its security procedures.
Among the policy changes that resulted were the assigning of armed officers to the front desks of every station and temporarily suspending the Violence Prevention Initiative that had been run out of local police stations. Offenders on parole or probation will still have to meet regularly with their case officers but they'll do so at other parole and probation facilities in the city rather than at police stations. That's not a change without consequences; holding VPI meetings at police stations was designed to increase coordination between the parole agents, who work for the state, and police officers, who work for the city, to ensure that potentially violent criminals don't fall through the cracks.
The officers in the Northeastern District appear to handled a difficult situation well, but they should never have faced such a risk in the first place — particularly at a time when a spate of assaults on police, including one in Baltimore last month, have made officers feel vulnerable nationwide. Moreover, it was at least the second time someone was able to smuggle a gun into a Baltimore police station this year; a suspect taken to the Southeastern District in August in connection with an attempted murder concealed a high-caliber handgun for hours while he was questioned by officers. The gun was only discovered when the man fatally shot himself.
While we don't want to see police stations hardened to the standard of military outposts, there are steps departments can take to beef up security without cutting the police off from the communities they serve or preventing parole and probation officers from continuing to monitor the state's most violent offenders.
The department needs to explore common-sense measures such as metal detectors at the doors, routine searches of visitors and enhanced surveillance systems. That won't guarantee no one will ever bring a gun into a police station again, and we should be thankful that no one was seriously injured or killed in this case. Nevertheless, last week's incident should serve as a wake-up call for the department to take nothing for granted in ensuring its members' safety.