So now Baltimore's mayor is threatening police officers with disciplinary action if they don't start "doing their job." Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, with help from Baltimore State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby, is responsible for demoralizing a police force that she now, in a panic, is insisting help save her administration ("Do your job, too, Madam Mayor," June 18).
She wants line officers to start doing the exact thing which ultimately lead to Ms. Mosby prosecuting six officers — specifically, proactive policing. Her threat demonstrates just how out of her depth she is. Never mind running afoul of the Law Enforcement Officers Bill of Rights, which she apparently doesn't understand, I'd like to know how Mayor Rawlings-Blake will determine who is or is not doing their job. Line officers need only respond to radio calls and take reports to be "doing their job." Most things beyond that are discretionary. Self-initiated patrol activity is what reduces and prevents crime and, by the way, is what often generates confrontations — confrontation that can sometimes go wrong like the Freddie Gray incident.
Ms. Rawlings-Blake and Ms. Mosby want proactive policing but not confrontations and have shown a willingness to turn on officers when they go bad. Besides that, proactive policing is not immediately observable to the mayor or anyone else. In the simplest terms, who is to say whether the cop saw you run that stop sign? What metric will the mayor use to judge what an officer might see or suspect while on patrol? A solution might be to have a member of Ms. Mosby's office ride along in every police car so they could determine who should or should not be stopped, approached, questioned, handcuffed or arrested. This might prove expensive, but it's the only way to properly micromanage police activities as the mayor and state's attorney seem determined to do.
One last thing. Commissioner Anthony Batts is on borrowed time in his tenure with the Baltimore City Police Department. All in local law enforcement know it. He has allowed people with absolutely no training in policing or, apparently, even the laws of arrest, to dictate how to run a police department that he is suppose to be directing. By abdicating that authority, he has lost all credibility among the rank and file, a situation that cannot continue. After a decent interval, you'll hear an announcement that he is leaving to seek "other opportunities" as city police head in a "new direction" under new leadership. The next commissioner will wrest back authority to manage the police department from the politicians in City Hall as part of his or her employment contract. By that time, the crime situation will be so bad that Mayor Rawlings-Blake and State's Attorney Mosby will be happy to cede control back to where it belongs. In the meantime, Baltimore will continue to bleed.
Len Brewer, Severn