<a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2018/07/12/baltimore-police-not-noticing-crime-after-freddie-gray-wave-killings-followed/744741002/">A new report from USA Today </a>suggests that Baltimore police officers &#8220;stopped seeing crime&#8221; after facing harsh criticism &#8212; even from their own mayor &#8212; following the 2015 death of a man in their custody, Freddie Gray.
Gray died after receiving injuries in the back of a police transport vehicle; three officers were put on trial for the incident and later acquitted. Prosecutors dropped their case against three other officers. The Justice Department opened an investigation into Baltimore&#8217;s police department at large and accused &#8220;Baltimore&#8217;s police of arresting thousands of people without a valid legal basis, using unjustified force and targeting black neighborhoods for unconstitutional stops,&#8221; according to USA Today.
Civil rights activists say they had hoped the DOJ&#8217;s findings would encourage Baltimore&#8217;s law enforcement officials to improve their policies and adopt a kinder and gentler form of policing. Instead, fearful that they might be indicted for any wrong move, Baltimore&#8217;s police force stopped moving at all.
&#8220;These guys aren&#8217;t stupid. They realize that if they do something wrong, they&#8217;re going to get their head bit off. There&#8217;s no feeling that anybody&#8217;s behind them anymore, and they&#8217;re not going to do it,&#8221; a retired officer told the paper. &#8220;Nobody wants to put their head in the pizza oven when the pizza oven is on.&#8221;
&#8220;Police questioned fewer people on the street. They stopped fewer cars,&#8221; USA Today reports. &#8220;Police officers reported seeing fewer drug dealers on street corners. They encountered fewer people who had open arrest warrants.&#8221;
The breakdown correlates with a rise in Baltimore&#8217;s murder rate. Since Freddie Gray&#8217;s death, Baltimore has become the nation&#8217;s most dangerous city, and last year it set an all-time record with 342 homicides.
The data seems to indicate that law enforcement officers are still responding to calls and following up on investigations instigated by crime victims or witnesses, but they&#8217;re taking a less proactive approach to fighting crime. They don&#8217;t seek out criminal behavior and instigate fewer investigations on their own.
&#8220;Millions of police records show officers in Baltimore respond to calls as quickly as ever. But they now begin far fewer encounters themselves. From 2014 to 2017, dispatch records show the number of suspected narcotics offenses police reported themselves dropped 30 percent; the number of people they reported seeing with outstanding warrants dropped by half. The number of field interviews &#8211; instances in which the police approach someone for questioning &#8211; dropped 70 percent,&#8221; USA Today reports.
The Baltimore Police Department acknowledges the change, but also says fewer people want to be out on the beat, and that they&#8217;re suffering from a shortage of patrol officers. Drug dealers now &#8220;rule the streets&#8221; and the murder rate has skyrocketed, and &#8220;police hands are tied,&#8221; they say.
The report underscores a problem Attorney General Jeff Sessions identified at the beginning of his own tenure: that letting the ACLU run police departments has disastrous consequences, and that protests against police officers &#8212; the vast majority of whom do not engage in racial discrimination or violent behavior &#8212; makes Americans less safe.

REPORT: Baltimore Cops ‘Stopped Noticing Crime’ After Freddie Gray Incident

ACLU

Baltimore

Black Lives Matter

Crime

Department of Justice

Freddie Gray

Jeff Sessions

Police

Murders in the U.S. rose nearly 9% last year, and one-third of that increase came from just a few neighborhoods in Chicago, according to a Wall Street Journal <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/murder-in-america-what-makes-cities-more-dangerous-1514293200" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">analysis</a> of the FBI&#8217;s annual 2016 publication, <a href="https://ucr.fbi.gov/ucr-publications" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Crime in the United States</a>.
While violent crime (homicide, rape, assault, and robbery) also rose nationwide from 2015 to 2016 &#8212; over 4% &#8212; the data show the increase was not uniform, but rather concentrated in cities like Chicago and Baltimore. 
Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., meanwhile, saw &#8220;meaningful declines in violence [that] have been sustained since the 1990s.&#8221;
Interestingly, the paper&#8217;s neighborhood-by-neighborhood analysis claimed that areas where homicides spiked had a &#8220;lighter street presence by police following officers&#8217; high-profile killings of young black men.&#8221; 
A Pew Research Center <a href="http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2017/01/11/police-fatal-encounters-and-ensuing-protests/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">poll</a> from January 2017 showed that an overwhelming number of police officers say widespread protests following high-profile killings of black suspects have made police less willing to conduct basic police work, such as stopping and questioning suspicious people in high-crime neighborhoods, and using an appropriate level of force to diffuse a situation.
In Baltimore, violent crime rates were going down until 2015, when police officers &#8220;pulled back from a more proactive approach&#8221; following widespread city riots after the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man who suffered a severe spinal injury while being transported in a police van on April 1, 2015, and died one week later.
Gray had a long criminal record and was arrested for possession of an illegal knife after running from a bike patrol officer who made eye contact with him. State Attorney Marilyn Mosby filed charges against the six officers involved. Each officer was either acquitted or had charges dropped.
Violence in Baltimore has stayed historically high following the riots, with arrests plummeting, shootings soaring, and the police force itself getting smaller.
In Chicago last year, homicides jumped to 771, 58% higher than in 2015, and more than the number of murders in Los Angeles and New York combined. Half of that increase, the analysis showed, came from just five neighborhoods, and is largely attributable to gang warfare. In a &#8220;roughly four-mile radius of West Garfield Park,&#8221; for example, there are at least 30 gangs.
In 2015, David Weisburg, a George Mason University criminologist, released a <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1745-9125.12070/full" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">study</a> that established the &#8220;law of crime concentration,&#8221; which states that a disproportionate amount of any city&#8217;s violent crime occurs in a small geographic area of the city.
Weisburg found that in large cities, 50% of crime occurs on just 4% to 6% of a city&#8217;s streets, while 0.8% to 1.6% of streets produce one-quarter of all crime.
In Chicago, as in Baltimore, police became less proactive following protests against the fatal 2014 shooting of a black teenager, Laquan McDonald, by a white police officer, Jason Van Dyke, who has been charged with first-degree murder.
A FiveThirtyEight <a href="https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/chicago-police-are-shooting-fewer-people-since-an-officer-killed-laquan-mcdonald/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">analysis</a> found that in Chicago and other cities with high-profile deaths of black men involving police officers, a &#8220;pullback in policing was accompanied by a sharp increase in gun violence.&#8221;

ONE-THIRD Of U.S. Homicide Spike Coming From 5 Chicago Neighborhoods

Chicago

Homicide

Murder

Federal prosecutors will not charge six Baltimore police officers in Freddie Gray&#8217;s death, according to a breaking news <a href="https://twitter.com/AP/status/907689488486424576">report from the Asscoiated Press</a>.
The Department of Justice has been investigating the case since 2015, when Gray, a 25-year-old, black Baltimore resident, died of injuries he sustained while in police custody. After being confronted by law enforcement and arrested for having a switchblade knife, Gray was placed in the back of a police van. At some point in the ride, Gray fell over, hitting his head, breaking his neck, and damaging his spinal cord &#8212; injuries that led to his death.
The city of Baltimore erupted in a week of riots over the incident. Six of the officers involved in Gray&#8217;s arrest were charged &#8212; one, Officer Caesar Goodson, the driver of the van, with depraved heart murder &#8212; by Baltimore prosecutors, but none of the officers were convicted.
The DOJ began looking into the case in 2015, at the behest of Baltimore authorities. But two-and-a-half years later, the DOJ says it could find no evidence that Gray&#8217;s civil rights were violated during the arrest, and while officer conduct might have been reckless &#8212; they make no judgment on the subject &#8212; none of the officers had the &#8220;specific intent&#8221; required for the DOJ to press charges.
The DOJ did not look into the criminality of any individual officer&#8217;s conduct. The DOJ did, however, conduct a review of the Baltimore Police Department, and found that BPD officers did disproportionately target black individuals when conducting traffic stops and searches.
And although the six officers won&#8217;t face federal charges, at least five will face internal discipline. Goodson, Lt. Brian Rice and Sgt. Alicia White will face a hearing later this month that will determine if they should be fired from the force. The remaining two officers could face several days suspension without pay.

REPORT: U.S. Department Of Justice Will Not Charge Baltimore Officers In Freddie Gray’s Death

Conservative commentator and comedian Steven Crowder of &#8220;Louder with Crowder&#8221; took a look at all of the high-profile cases of police-involved shootings that have been used by the Black Lives Matter movement to promote the narrative that racist police officers are deliberately targeting and murdering black people. In a 14-minute video, Crowder walks case by case through the facts and finds that the narrative repeatedly crumbles under scrutiny. But, as Crowder says, unfortunately &#8220;facts don&#8217;t matter.&#8221;
&#8220;The purpose of this video is not to justify nor condemn any of the deaths that occurred during these police-civilian interactions,&#8221; explains Crowder at the beginning, &#8220;but to provide you with the context that MTV News and Vox and HuffPo refuses to.&#8221;
He then moves into the facts that we know so far about the <a href="http://www.dailywire.com/news/7268/7-things-you-need-know-about-philando-castile-pardes-seleh">Philando Castile case</a>, which is <a href="http://www.dailywire.com/news/7263/alton-sterling-and-philando-castile-cases-why-cant-ben-shapiro">still under investigation</a> but which, Crowder highlights, is not simply a case of a man being &#8220;shot for a broken tail-light,&#8221; as some outlets have suggested. Rather it appears to have been a case of the officer believing that Castile was reaching for a gun and firing in self-defense. 
The Alton Sterling case, likewise still under investigation, Crowder underscores, was absolutely not a &#8220;man being shot for trying to sell CDs.&#8221; In fact, police were called to the scene because Sterling had allegedly threatened a homeless man with a gun, which was likely illegally obtained, as he had a lengthy rap sheet, &#8220;including being a registered sex offender and having done time in prison for violent crimes.&#8221; After being tazed, Sterling continued to resist arrest and appeared to be <a href="http://www.dailywire.com/news/7388/breaking-louisiana-cops-say-alton-sterling-reached-hank-berrien">reaching for his gun</a>, at which point he was shot.
Crowder moves on to Jamar Clark, who had assaulted his girlfriend and evidence indicates was trying to reach for the officer&#8217;s weapon. Regarding the Walter Scott shooting, for which the officer involved has been charged with murder, Crowder exclaimed, &#8220;The system worked!&#8221;
Crowder then addresses the Michael Brown &#8220;gentle giant&#8221;/&#8221;Hands up, don&#8217;t shoot!&#8221; narrative &#8212; which has been thoroughly debunked and which even the Obama Department of Justice was forced to admit was utterly false, fully exonerating the officer involved, Darren Wilson. The commentator goes on to debunk the rest of the false popular narratives surrounding Sandra Bland, Corey Jones, and Freddie Gray, underscoring that while some of the deaths were not warranted and might have been avoided, that does not mean the victims were targeted by racist cops, as Black Lives Matter supporters repeatedly claim. 
Crowder&#8217;s findings align with those of recent studies, including a comprehensive Harvard study finding <a href="http://www.dailywire.com/news/7343/new-study-no-racial-bias-police-involved-shootings-james-barrett">no racial bias against blacks</a> in police-involved shootings, a conclusion the study&#8217;s author, Prof. Roland G. Fryer Jr, called &#8220;the most surprising result of my career.&#8221; As the Daily Wire has reported, <a href="http://www.dailywire.com/news/7264/5-statistics-you-need-know-about-cops-killing-aaron-bandler">other studies</a> have likewise found that the narrative of racial bias in use of lethal force by police is largely based on de-contextualized data and false assumptions: 
<blockquote>
In 2015, for example, 50% of the victims of police shootings were white, while 26% were black. Some have tried to argue that this is evidence of racial bias against blacks because they represent only 15% of the population; however, as <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-myths-of-black-lives-matter-1455235686">Heather Mac Donald</a> points out, blacks account for a disproportionate percentage of major crimes, including 62% of robberies, 57% of murders and 45% of assaults. Another example of de-contextualized data is that showing a higher percent of unarmed blacks who are shot than unarmed whites, but as both Mac Donald and Fryer found, when the details of the cases are included, such statistics turn out to be <a href="http://www.dailywire.com/news/7264/5-statistics-you-need-know-about-cops-killing-aaron-bandler">misleading</a>.
</blockquote>
And it is not just researchers concluding that officer-involved shootings are often not cases of racial bias. So far most of the high-profile cases that have been tried have resulted in <a href="http://nypost.com/2016/07/19/judges-and-juries-keep-acquitting-the-cops-that-black-lives-matter-call-racist/">the officers being acquitted</a>, including the officers tried in the deaths of Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Jonathan Ferrell, and Freddie Gray.
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DEBUNKED: #BlackLivesMatter Propaganda Exposed Case-By-Case [VIDEO]

Law Enforcement

Race

Steven Crowder

Tamir Rice

On Monday, Circuit Judge Barry G. Williams <a href="http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/freddie-gray/bs-md-ci-rice-verdict-20160718-story.html">acquitted</a> Lt. Brian Rice, the highest ranking of the six officers charged in the Freddie Gray case, of all charges in Gray&#8217;s death.
Rice, 42, had been charged with involuntary manslaughter, reckless endangerment and misconduct in office; a second-degree assault charge was dismissed by Williams halfway through the trial, and prosecutors dropped a second misconduct charge at the beginning of the trial.
Rice was the fourth officer to be tried in Gray&#8217;s death; Williams dismissed charges against officer Edward Nero in May and officer Caesar Goodson Jr. in June. Officer William Porter&#8217;s case reached a mistrial last December when there was no jury consensus.
Gray died a week after a 40-minute ride in a police van during which he suffered a severe spinal cord injury. He had been arrested for allegedly possessing an illegal knife. His death triggered <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/baltimore-rally-for-freddie-gray-draws-thousands-1430008841">riots and mayhem</a> in Baltimore.
In dismissing the charges against Rice, Williams said prosecutors did not prove the charges beyond a reasonable doubt, but rather wanted the judge to depend on &#8220;presumptions or assumptions.&#8221; In a possible veiled reference to events that have occurred around the nation as the Black Lives Matter movement has catalyzed protests and police officers have been targeted, he added that the court &#8220;cannot be swayed by sympathy, prejudice or public opinion.&#8221;
Rice&#8217;s attorneys <a href="http://www.wbaltv.com/news/verdict-expected-in-lt-brian-rice-case/40759058">argued</a> that Rice made a 9-second decision that was 100 percent reasonable because Gray was combative, there was little room in the van to move him around, and a hostile crowd was growing around the police. Williams pointed out that he had to take the atmosphere in which the incident with Gray occurred into context; noting that &#8220;emotions and tensions ran high&#8221; that day. He added there was a need for officers to leave the scene quickly because of threats, and that Rice was not aware of a change in police policy implemented only days that removed an officer&#8217;s discretion as to whether to secure a detainee in a seat belt. The new policy required that action.
Williams asserted that Rice did not act in a &#8220;grossly negligent manner,&#8221; which would have indicated a ruling for manslaughter; that Rice did not act unreasonably or ignore substantial risk in placing Gray in a police van without a seat belt, which would have indicated reckless endangerment; that Rice did not act &#8220;corruptly,&#8221; a required for misconduct in office. He acknowledged Rice may have made a mistake, but that was not enough to warrant criminal charges against him. He also pointed the difference between criminal negligence and civil negligence, tacitly acknowledging the already-negotiated deal the Gray family struck with the city in which they obtained $6.4 million in civil damages.
<blockquote>
Williams pointed out that he had to take the atmosphere in which the incident with Gray occurred into context; noting that &#8220;emotions and tensions ran high&#8221; that day.

</blockquote>
Baltimore State&#8217;s Attorney Marilyn J. Mosby has been determined to prosecute all six officers involved with the case; the latest result will not likely deter her from dropping charges against the two remaining officers, officer Garrett Miller and Sgt. Alicia White.
Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, who had <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/baltimore-unrest/mayor-stephanie-rawlings-blake-under-fire-giving-space-destroy-baltimore-n349656">infamously stated</a> about protesters after Gray&#8217;s death, &#8220;It&#8217;s a very delicate balancing act because while we try to make sure that they were protected from the cars and the other things that were going on, we also gave those who wished to destroy space to do that as well &#8230;&#8221; made sure to announce that Rice&#8217;s ordeal was not over yet, asserting, &#8220;Now that the criminal case has come to an end, Lt. Rice will face an administrative review by the Police Department.&#8221;

Highest Ranking Officer In Freddie Gray Case Acquitted Of All Charges