Gene Ryan, president of the Baltimore City Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 3, would have us believe that the rank and file of the Baltimore City Police Department are not to blame for the findings of the Department of Justice report ("President of Baltimore City FOP responds to Justice Department's report," Aug. 10).
Mr. Ryan would have us believe that officers were just following orders, and those orders were the cause of the systematic racism that this report finally puts into cold, hard numbers. Blaming the department's leadership is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
Zero-tolerance policing has repeatedly proven to be a failed policy, but there also is much in the report that falls squarely on the shoulders of the officers on the street, not the policy makers at headquarters.
One need only read the excerpts of the report to come up with these questions: Where in zero-tolerance policy does it say officers should strip search citizens out in the open on a street?
Where in the policy does it say officers should use unnecessary force, especially with juveniles and people with mental health issues?
Where does it say that officers investigating sexual assaults should blame the victim and accuse her of trying to mess up the suspect's life?
Where does it say that officers should violate citizen's First Amendment rights or adopt the same "stop snitching" environment within the department that they routinely condemn on the streets?
At 164 pages long, the DOJ report is the lengthiest such report produced to date, and there is plenty of blame to go around, not just in the police department but among city politicians, current and former, and the many white citizens of Baltimore who refused to believe what their black fellow citizens were telling them.
Instead of trying to wiggle out from under the report, Mr. Ryan would do well to issue a mea culpa for the BPD's role in the findings of the DOJ. The members of FOP Lodge 3 need to take the first step toward fixing the problems identified there, which is to admit that they exist and that they are real — something Mr. Ryan's response fails to do.
Daniel Goodman, Baltimore