by Megan Kenny and Brandon Soderberg
Data analysis by Megan Kenny
Illustrations by Evangeline Gallagher

On the heels of 2023, a year when Baltimore’s annual homicide number significantly declined for the first time in nearly a decade, the Baltimore Police held a press conference to celebrate what public officials and the Department of Justice called “a significant milestone.”

That early 2024 “milestone”: two of the many reforms required by the federal consent decree—the result of a civil rights investigation following the 2015 police killing of Freddie Gray—were recently completed to the approval of the Department of Justice. These completed reforms are related to transporting people in police custody and “officer support and wellness practices.”

At the press conference, City Solicitor Ebony Thompson suggested that 2023’s violence reduction was the result of these reforms. “This milestone is occurring at a time when the city is achieving a recent and historic reduction in violent crime,” Thompson said, calling the reforms “a testament to the effectiveness of constitutional and community focused policing.”

Another way of looking at this “milestone”: over the previous seven years, only around 5% of the consent decree-mandated reforms have been completed. Following the 2015 death of Freddie Gray, a Department of Justice civil rights investigation revealed a staggering pattern and practice of civil rights violations and discriminatory policing. As a result of that investigation, the Baltimore Police Department entered into a federal consent decree in April 2017. Seven years later, the most significant elements of the consent decree, regarding police misconduct (including use of force), have barely even begun. WYPR reported that “about 15% of the decree hasn’t been touched yet.”

This means the claim being made, really, is that murders have declined because police are reducing the number of “rough rides” and also receiving more wellness support—a specious connection, and an example of how reform is regularly misrepresented to the public by political leaders and police. 

As the Baltimore Police Department goes through another year under the consent decree, with changes to the department slow going, TRNN found that Baltimore data transparency and retention has gotten worse and its numbers have become increasingly unreliable.

This is a story of how much we do not know. 

Deeply Flawed Data

The Baltimore City Police Department provides Open Baltimore, the city’s publicly accessible data hub, with data about crime and police activity. Baltimore’s political leaders and police pride themselves on data access and transparency. These datasets are often used as research tools for citizens, reporters, and those in policy development and law enforcement. Indeed, everyone is encouraged to consult Open Baltimore.

But we found these datasets to be deeply flawed in ways that would make any conclusions drawn from them unsound—especially for governance and policing. The arrest data in Open Baltimore demonstrates that, contrary to what would be expected, data gathering by police has become less comprehensive and more faulty since the implementation of the federal consent decree.

Specifically, there are significant differences between Open Baltimore arrest data and Uniform Crime Report data (UCR). UCR is provided to the FBI by law enforcement offices all over the country each year and was, for decades, the most referenced and most frequently cited dataset about crime. There are flaws with UCR, including the problem with all law enforcement data: it is self-reported by law enforcement. 

That said, UCR data for 1990-2020 was provided to TRNN by Baltimore Police via a public information request, making it the most comprehensive data set available for such a long period of time. 

The number of arrests recorded in Open Baltimore data varies significantly from the numbers in UCR, often by thousands. Baltimore Police provide data to both the FBI and Open Baltimore, making the cause of differences between the two datasets especially confounding. Additionally, there are a significant number of arrests not included in the Open Baltimore dataset, and the differences between the numbers recorded in UCR and Open Baltimore data have widened over time. Arrests seemingly disappear from Open Baltimore.

In February 2023, we pulled an arrest data file from Open Baltimore. In the arrest data between the years 2010-2020, a total of 335,805 arrests were shown. 

That same arrest file was pulled four months later in June 2023. There were 386 fewer arrests. 

An additional data analysis was completed in January 2024. The same trend continued, at a much greater rate. In the course of nearly a year, more than 4,300 arrests were removed from the total for 2010-2020.

When we spoke to Baltimore City employees, including representatives from Open Baltimore and Baltimore Police, their reason for removing previously-recorded arrests from Open Baltimore’s data was unclear. Arrests that are documented but do not result in a charge, or are accidentally duplicated or inaccurately entered are removed during reviews by police. Additionally, the police explained that expungements may have something to do with the lower numbers of arrests. They could not tell us how frequently arrests are removed for either of those reasons.

This arrest data is frequently cited. One recent example of Open Baltimore’s flawed year-to-year data being cited is the Baltimore Banner’s 2022 analysis of arrests. At the end of 2022, the Banner reported that arrests had increased for the first time in nearly a decade. While the broad conclusions are correct—based on the data, arrests did slightly increase in 2022—the year-to-year arrest numbers cited by the Banner are quite different from past UCR numbers and contemporaneous reporting because the number of arrests recorded in those years in Open Baltimore have declined.

Whatever the reason for the lowered arrest numbers, it means that Open Baltimore provides an increasingly incomplete picture of police activity from the past as each dataset gets older. It is not a record of those people who were handcuffed and arrested at a specific point in time—their lives put on hold for weeks, months, or years—but a record of how some of those arrests were processed long after that, based on an unknown and unnamed number of factors.

A recent review of Open Baltimore shows that, months after our year-long analysis, arrest data continues to decline.

TRNN also looked at geographic location data within Open Baltimore’s arrest data. Over the past 13 years, Open Baltimore’s arrest data is missing locations in, on average, 37% of arrests. That percentage increased from 4% in 2010 to as high as 61% in 2022. 

The percentage of missing data has increased significantly since 2015 when the city police were put under increased scrutiny following Freddie Gray’s death (46% missing location data) and in 2017 (49% missing data) when the consent decree was implemented.

It is unclear whether this location-based data is missing from police records as well, or if police records maintain this data with locations and, for reasons unknown, it was not given to Open Baltimore. 

One more example of how poor data entry has been in Baltimore: throughout the ’90s, there are entries in Maryland Case Search in which the officer name is “Officer, Police” or “Police, Officer.” Over 500 of these results are for arrests in Baltimore City where the last name is “Officer.” There are over 300 where the first name is “Police” and nearly 300 where the first name is “Baltimore.”   That data entry in the ’90s was poor is hardly a surprise. That these “Officer, Police” permutations have stood for decades in the database shows that data cleansing and validation has never been prioritized.

Representatives from city government, including Open Baltimore, seemed entirely unaware of these problems with Open Baltimore’s data until we brought them to their attention. After months seeking comment or explanation, Open Baltimore was not able to provide a thorough explanation.

In a city where policing is scrutinized for bias and professionalized for data gathering, and police enforcement itself is informed by targeting “microzones,” the lack of comprehensive location data (nearly 40% is missing) available to the public is troubling.

A History of Dirty Data

While there are problems with the police records provided to Open Baltimore, the unreliability of Baltimore crime data has been a decades-long problem. Collection and reporting of crime data has been a hotly contested issue in Baltimore and the data provided has been frequently insufficient, unsound, and in some cases, manipulated.

In the ’90s—the decade leading up to “zero tolerance”—then-Councilperson Martin O’Malley and others accused Mayor Kurt Schmoke of adjusting statistics to make crime seem lower than it actually was. Police Commissioner Thomas Frazier’s report in the mid-’90s about nonfatal shooting reductions was also challenged. 

After O’Malley was elected mayor in 1999, he commissioned an audit which found violent crime was frequently downgraded. As a result of the audit, thousands of felonies were added to the official number for 1999. This also had the effect of making any decrease in crime during the first year of the O’Malley administration even more dramatic.

O’Malley would later be accused of the same sort of stats manipulation. In 2001, O’Malley said there were 78,000 arrests, but the official number was 86,000. Official arrest numbers for 2005 are around 100,000, while the ACLU claimed the number was 108,000. 

In 2006, WBAL Investigative Reporter Jayne Miller (a TRNN contributor) revealed that police were simply not counting all of the violent crimes reported. For example, Miller found that “police wrote no report of a shooting… despite locating and interviewing the intended target, who was not hurt. Instead, the officers combined the incident with armed robbery that occurred earlier that night in the same area—a practice known as duplicating.”

After 2006, the department shifted away from mass arrest towards what they framed as more “targeted” styles of policing, focused on violent offenders rather than low-level offenders. In Part Two of this series, we noted that the data from these years showed a decrease in low-level offenses but did not show an increase in the enforcement of violent crimes. A policy of greater focus on guns and gun possession during this period is also not reflected in the data. Gun seizures were much higher in the ’90s than in the period where gun policing was supposedly the focus.

Here We Go Again

The short history and long tail of Baltimore’s “zero tolerance” policing.

In our reporting, we also learned that gun seizure data—another metric often cited by the police to illustrate how hard police are working to get guns “off the street” and reduce violence—includes guns given to the police during gun buyback programs. For example, in 2017 there were 1,917 gun seizures. In 2018, there were 3,911. The reason for that jump was not the result of increased enforcement or a jump in the rate of illegal gun possession, it was because the city resurrected its gun buyback program. That 2018 buyback resulted in 1,089 guns handed over to police.

Willingly handing over a gun to police in exchange for cash is most likely not what the public imagines BPD is describing when they announce the total of gun “seizures” in a year.

Baltimore Police do not provide data about nonfatal shooting numbers before 1999 because, police told us, the department does not have the ability to easily extract this number from the broader aggravated assault category that shootings were once categorized under. This means that the police department, whose strategies are often informed by data on shootings and murders, does not have information about the number of nonfatal shootings that occurred before 1999. There is seemingly no way to easily look at how that crucial number has historically changed.

“We Have No Idea What Is Happening”

These problems with data and the lack of transparency are costly. Baltimore spends more per capita on its police department than any other major American city, but the city and department have consistently failed in their oversight of how that money is actually spent, especially on police overtime. Exorbitant overtime is a commonly used indicator when searching for problem police officers and police corruption. For example, members of the infamous Gun Trace Task Force were among the officers who were nearly doubling their salary with overtime. And, as Baltimore Brew reported, the same overtime offenders appeared year after year; the Maryland State Office of Legislative Audits recently found that Baltimore Police “failed to effectively monitor $66.5 million in overtime.”

Police quarreled with the auditor’s conclusions and assured overtime practices would now be reformed and ready by the end of May 2024. They were not. Since 2016, the Baltimore Police has failed overtime audits each year—and each year, police explain that the department needs a little more time to fix overtime.

Melissa Schober, a community advocate, has been calling attention to the failed overtime audit by the Baltimore Police for years. She told TRNN that her concerns extend to the broader metrics used by police, not just overtime. Metrics remain oblique and undefined and, according to police, cannot improve because they are contingent upon a police budget they claim is inadequate. The Baltimore City police budget is nearly $600 million per year, Schober stressed.

“My fury isn’t just at the overtime overspending. It is that years after the Fiscal Year 2016—that’s July 1, 2015, so nearly a decade ago—we are still somehow ‘in progress’ on documenting metrics because carrying those things out are ‘budget dependent’ but they never manage to say how much they’re short and when they expect to complete the work,” Schober said. “Until and unless the BPD can say, ‘Here’s our outcome and here is the numerator and denominator and here’s how we validate those numbers (or counts), here’s our data dictionary and here’s how we train our folks to count things,’ we have no idea what is happening with money.” 

While the city celebrates the “progress” police are making with the federal consent decree, data remains incomplete. Some data-gathering related to the consent decree has not even begun.

The consent decree requires the police to record stop and search data, but, as the Baltimore Banner reported, that has not even started, even though it is perhaps the most crucial way, data-wise, to get a sense of discriminatory and unconstitutional policing. The Baltimore Sun recently reported that Baltimore Police do not keep track of how often their officers get in police chases. Soon after the Sun published their story, police released the data they previously said they did not track.

The refusal to properly share, let alone collect, this data also enables police misconduct. There is no way to determine how often questionable stops occur, because it is only when police stops result in arrests that they are recorded. For defense attorneys, this is not only a gap in data, it’s a convenient way for police not to account for constitutional violations.

The lack of stop and search data means constitutional violations are revealed only when they happen to someone arrested for a crime—at which point the constitutional violation is often ignored by prosecutors and judges because the arrestee was found to have broken the law. 

“Police are never discouraged from crossing the line when they stop and search someone without probable cause—and they are actually encouraged to cross the line any time they find a gun,” defense attorney and former public defender Natalie Finegar told TRNN. 

Since 2017, Baltimore Police have relied on an expansive—and controversial—plainclothes policing unit called DAT (District Action Team) whose primary job is gun and drug interdiction. They do this in part by searching people they deem “suspicious” or representing “characteristics of an armed person.” The Baltimore Police argue that this kind of “proactive policing” and these types of questionable stops are vital to violence reduction. The police lack data to back up this claim.

“While it can be difficult to correlate officer proactivity and visibility to what crimes have been prevented, we have seen that when these units are deployed, they have an impact on crime suppression and calming for the community,” Baltimore Police spokesperson Lindsey Eldridge told TRNN.

According to Schober, the problem is not only the inability of police to provide data, but to even explain why certain data points such as “proactive policing” were even analyzed. 

“When auditors looked at percent of time spent on proactive policing, the BPD was unable to produce documentation detailing how and why they selected that as a performance measure, and then how they monitored, controlled, and analyzed data,” Schober said.

Data’s Inconvenient Truths

Last year, Baltimore recorded 262 murders, a decline of 70 from 2022—a “historic” reduction. This drop in murders is notable and important. Far fewer people died in Baltimore from gun violence last year compared to previous years, and these declines have continued into 2024—as of June, murders had declined by another 36%. 

Our data analysis in Part Two noted that, due to population decline, the current drop in murders puts the city’s murder rate—people killed per 100,000—at almost the exact same place it was in 1990. The use of that 300 number as a benchmark, as we explained in Part One, dates back to the early ’90s when the city first surpassed 300 murders per year, and also had a significantly higher population. When accounting for population decline, 1990’s 300 murders-per-year number is around 240 murders.

In 2024, Baltimore will likely have far fewer than even 240 homicides. At the end of June, Baltimore had recorded 89 homicides, which makes the city on track to endure fewer than 200 murders for the first time since 2011.

The mayor and others have already credited the one-year reduction to its Group Violence Reduction Strategy (GVRS) and other interrelated initiatives. But there is simply no way to look at one or two years of data and make any serious determinations as to what caused that decline—especially when violent crime is “dropping fast” nationwide. In 2024, homicides have declined at rates that are even more impressive than last year’s reductions. 

As we saw in the ’90s, New York City’s violence reduction was prematurely credited to “zero tolerance” policies. Within a couple of years, the supposed success of “zero tolerance” meant it was exported to cities such as Baltimore and New Orleans. While many scholars have since questioned if “zero tolerance” had much to do with crime reduction, the policy itself, which led to Baltimore police arresting hundreds of thousands for low-level crimes, inarguably caused irreparable harm—especially to Black communities.

Baltimore’s crime numbers game

For decades, “common wisdom” regarding violence reduction has failed a city that regularly surpasses 300 murders a year and spends the most per capita on policing.

Data informs policy creation, so the data should be vetted. During our conversation with city employees who handle and publish data, they described themselves as “like Uber,” which is to say, they are a neutral transporter of data from one place to another. The police send Open Baltimore data and they post it, no questions asked.

So, returning to our initial question, why are arrests being removed from Open Baltimore? If part of this gap between Open Baltimore and UCR data is actually due to expungements, as police claimed, that still creates a problem in the data. An expungement does not mean the arrest did not occur. It means the person who was arrested went through the lengthy process of removing an arrest or charge from their personal criminal record in order to gain employment, rent an apartment, or apply for a loan. 

If recorded arrests are leaving Open Baltimore because of expungements (or any other reason), police who provide data to Open Baltimore and Open Baltimore itself should account for the change by maintaining a record of removed arrests in the data provided to Open Baltimore. When someone consults Open Baltimore for arrest numbers, they reasonably assume they are getting a record of those arrests for that year, not how those numbers look currently, with arrests removed for reasons that Baltimore Police cannot adequately explain. 

With nearly 40% of arrests lacking location data and Open Baltimore’s removed arrests, the data contains too many unknowns. 

Past policies have been built upon incomplete and frequently flawed data. Data collection begins with fingers on a keyboard. Data-driven policies are only effective if the data collection and cleansing processes are logical, consistent, and thoroughly understood. Poor data collection, for example, can lead to sloppy data entry, which, in turn, leads to dirty data, which then, in turn, leads to potentially wildly inaccurate conclusions—and, therefore, faulty and ineffective policy decisions. 

Recent changes to data input methods and analysis—that is, changes in the system used to record and categorize this data—make comparisons between years much more difficult. This means residents, reporters, and other members of the public cannot easily fact check claims by city officials and law enforcement. 

Cities sometimes change the methods they use to measure crime. In 2021, the FBI retired UCR and began using the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) instead. NIBRS categorizes data quite differently than UCR. This means that certain crimes may appear to increase or decrease as an effect of recording them in the NIBRS system, not because of a difference in the number. “This does not mean that crime has increased; it just means the way crimes are reported has changed,” Baltimore Police explain on their website. 

Recent changes to Baltimore’s police districts mean even short-term comparisons between years or areas of the city are going to be much more difficult. The redistricting of Baltimore’s police department’s districts—for the first time in over 50 years—makes it “impossible” to easily compare police metrics going forward. Indeed, at a Public Safety Committee hearing in late 2023, the data on homicides and nonfatal shootings by district that was presented simply stopped in early July because of redistricting. 

Data does not lie, but it often reveals inconvenient truths. But data can only be as truthful as it is complete and accurate. Interrogating the city’s publicly available data reveals ongoing and historic systemic flaws in collection and reporting to such an extent that it’s likely not possible to derive reliable or even usable conclusions from the information shared in the name of transparency.

Epilogue: ‘Excessive Force’

It was May 23 around 1PM when members of Baltimore Police Department’s District Action Team, looking for a robbery suspect, ran up on 24-year-old Jaemaun Joyner. Tackled by police, Joyner lay on his back on the pavement gasping, arms and legs pinned. One of the cops announced that Joyner reached for something. “I ain’t reaching for nothing,” Joyner screamed. “I can’t breathe.” 

Police went through Joyner’s pockets. He asked what they were doing. That’s when Detective Connor Johnson grabbed Joyner by the throat and pressed his service weapon against Joyner’s temple. “He put something in my pocket! He put something in my pocket,” Joyner screamed over and over again with a gun to his head. 

Joyner was arrested on gun and drug charges.

Joyner’s lawyers said that a detective holding a gun to someone’s head was clearly an example of excessive force, and outside the bounds of anything acceptable by a police officer, especially one in a city under a consent decree. “I’ve read the consent decree and BPD policy, and nowhere does it say it’s reasonable for an officer to hold a gun to someone’s temple,” defense attorney Jessica Rubin told the Baltimore Banner. “Point blank, period. That’s the most egregious thing an officer can do.” 

Joyner’s lawyers stressed that the statement of probable cause—a police officer’s written and sworn description of an arrest—did not describe Johnson holding a gun to Joyner’s head at all.

Had the stop not resulted in an arrest, there likely would have been no documentation of the incident.

The police report also suggested Joyner remained a suspect in the robbery even though the victim confirmed he was not involved. After spending 54 days in jail, Joyner was released— his charges dropped only after his lawyers showed the shocking body-worn camera footage to the Baltimore City State’s Attorney’s Office.

Johnson has made the news before. He was involved in a fatal shooting last year. Residents have complained about his questionable traffic stops and searches. His Internal Affairs summary, obtained by TRNN, shows a complaint marked “sustained” for failing to properly seatbelt someone who was arrested. 

In a moment when officials celebrate consent decree “milestones” such as proper seatbelting, Baltimore’s criminal defense attorneys see a department reverting to the very tactics that got the department investigated by the Department of Justice nearly a decade ago.

“This is what we’ve been trying to get away from since Freddie Gray,” defense attorney Hunter Pruette told TRNN. “And they’re trying to walk it back. I think these are the same tactics that led us to the problem we had before.”

Baltimore police appear unconcerned. Police said they had been aware of the incident and saw no reason to suspend Johnson while it was being investigated. When Commissioner Daryl Worley was asked about the incident at a press conference, the 25-plus-year veteran of the department defended Johnson’s behavior.

“He was out there doing his job, in an area where we want him to be, and going after individuals with guns,” Worley said.

Earlier this month, the Baltimore City State’s Attorney’s Office announced they would not criminally charge Johnson for holding his service weapon to a restrained man’s head.

This investigation was supported with funding from the Data-Driven Reporting Project. The Data-Driven Reporting Project is funded by the Google News Initiative in partnership with Northwestern University | Medill.

Both Maryland’s governor Larry Hogan and Maryland’s comptroller Peter Franchot are boasting about how they didn’t spend the state’s entire budget during the last fiscal year—a world-changing twelve months that left many Marylanders on edge about the pandemic and their economic futures.

It was announced this week that Maryland has a $2.5 billion surplus for last fiscal year. That’s more than 5% of the state’s $48 billion budget. That surplus, by the way, can be directly attributed to aid Maryland and Marylanders received from the federal government, which included three stimulus checks, extended unemployment benefits, advanced child tax credit, and more. And yet, Hogan is seizing on the opportunity to take a victory lap, framing the budget surplus as a result of his “fiscally responsible” Republican governance.

“I was elected governor to rein in years of out-of-control spending in Annapolis, to eliminate the $5.1 billion structural deficit we inherited, and to turn around our state’s floundering economy,” Hogan said in a press release. “This historic surplus is further proof we have done exactly that.”

Franchot, the state comptroller—who is running for governor—also touted the budget surplus, though he focused on how that money could be used in the future as opposed to celebrating the fact that it wasn’t used at all.

“The state’s surplus is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to invest in programs that lift all Marylanders and help stabilize housing and other critical expenses for our lower- and middle-income families,” Franchot said. “In order to accomplish this, we should put most of the surplus in the state’s Rainy Day Fund and create a proper structure for addressing these urgent needs that our current systems are failing to do effectively. We must deliver this money quickly to those who need it most and not into the hands of fraudsters.”

Neither Hogan nor Franchot acknowledged how they could have spent that $2.5 billion during the last fiscal year, when communities desperately needed it. Baltimore Twitter, on the other hand, certainly did.

“So what you’re saying is we can afford the new HVAC systems in crumbling schools,” one Twitter user said, referring to the frequent heating and air conditioning problems in Baltimore City’s severely underfunded schools.

“A state surplus is not a good thing,” another Twitter user said. “The government exists to serve the needs of the people, a government is not a for profit business trying to stay in the black. there are plenty of needs neglected and unaddressed where this surplus should be spent.”

In response to a news story about the $2.5 billion surplus, Baltimore City Public Defender Todd Oppenheim called attention to a law that waived home monitoring fees for people with low income that went into effect in July. The law requires Maryland to pay for home monitoring for some defendants using federal pandemic relief funds. However, as Maryland Matters reports, “the state had made no payments on behalf of eligible Marylanders as of Sept. 20.”

“All this $$. And there’s $5 million allocated for pretrial indigent defendants’ home detention fees that was to be available on July 1,” Oppenheim tweeted. ”But we’re still waiting (w/court delays, hardships, bills adding up).”

City Schools Cops Monitor Students’ Laptops

Amid a push to divert mental health crisis response to trained mental health professionals and away from police, Baltimore City Councilperson Ryan Dorsey called attention to the fact that Baltimore City Schools sometimes send police to respond when students use keywords on their district-issued laptops that could indicate self-harm.

“[Baltimore City Schools] monitors students’ chrome books for keyword searches indicating interest in self-harm, and then sends police—not qualified professionals—to intervene,” Dorsey tweeted on Sep. 29. “This is crazy.”

Khalilah Harris, acting Vice President for K-12 Education Policy at the Center for American Progress, was disturbed by the fact that students are being surveilled and said that surveillance could potentially lead to an encounter with the police.

“It is unconscionable for any school district to be surveilling their students through technology meant for schoolwork. Likewise, no school district should be inviting police to show up at the homes of their students, and particularly students experiencing mental health crises,” Harris told Battleground Baltimore. “Thrusting children into the school-to-prison pipeline who need medical care is a disgrace.”

André Riley, Director of Communications for Baltimore City Public Schools, explained the process to Battleground Baltimore. City schools, like many school systems around the country, use GoGuardian, a monitoring service that allows others to see how students are using their laptops.

“Clinical supervisors, school police, principals and designated school staff receive all GoGuardian alerts. During the school day, alerts are forwarded to respective school-based clinicians to respond. Students are assessed for lethality, parents are contacted, referrals are made, and resources are provided,” Riley said. “In cases where the student is not in school and contact cannot be made, wellness checks are conducted by school police and follow up with school-based clinicians.”

School police also monitor GoGuardian after school hours, including on weekends and holidays, and they can choose to do wellness checks, which, Riley explained, “include school police advising parents of the alert, speaking to students and making referrals as needed.” Riley also explained what happens after the initial response to the GoGuardian alert.

“School police also are able to conduct emergency petitions for those students who demonstrate at-risk behaviors,” Riley said. “During the following day, school-based clinicians follow up with students and families to further assess student support needs.”

The number of times the Baltimore Police Department or Baltimore School Police have transported youth under emergency petition was not known until school advocate and public school parent Melissa Schober obtained the information via public information request. Between 2016-2019, Baltimore Police detained students 280 times. School Police assisted with 1,273 emergency petitions from 2016 to March 2020. 

For Schober, what Dorsey called attention to raised more questions than it answered: What happens when school police conduct wellness checks? Do they use screening tools? Do they follow up with the district?

“To me, this is a huge nightmare of accountability when you have unlicensed individuals responding to computer alerts unannounced,” she said. 

When questioned, City Schools did not disclose how many times School Police have been deployed since March 2020, when students switched to remote learning and were given take-home laptops.

School psychologist and Baltimore Teachers Union Special Services Vice President Brittany Johnstone explained that City Schools are using School Police instead of paying trained staff to work outside regular hours or relying on third party mental health services such as Baltimore Child and Adolescent Response System (BCARS).

“School psychologists, counselors and social workers respond during school hours but after hours District Leadership has designated School Police to respond. They could work with outside agencies to have BCARS or other qualified mental health services to respond but nope,” Johnstone tweeted.

As Battleground Baltimore previously reported, Baltimore Police responded to what the department themselves labelled a “mental health crisis” back in August by fatally shooting 40-year-old Marcus Martin, who was armed but alone in his home, leaving his family searching for answers. Police responded because the incident happened in the evening and BPD’s crisis response team only operates between the hours of  11:00 am and 7:00 pm.  

Dorsey learned of the School Police interventions after questioning City Schools about a citizen’s report that a School Police vehicle was parked outside of Power Plant Live, a hub for downtown bars and nightclubs, on a Friday night. In an email obtained by Battleground Baltimore, City Schools said School Police were investigating the Power Plant incident, and explained the unit was part of the Night Response Unit that monitors school facilities after hours. The email also explained that, since the pandemic, the Night Response Unit had begun conducting wellness checks on students: “When a student conducts a search related to self-harm, it activates ‘GoGuardian’ alerts, which are then funneled to School Police.”

This information raised even more questions for Dorsey and he emailed City Schools officials.

“Is there any evidence that 3-5 people … monitoring 150 buildings (~37.5 to 1?) is actually producing any result? I’d like to see data on that. Is there any monitoring of these activities?” Dorsey questioned in an email. “I’m actually floored that in 2021 we’re directly linking the mental health of students to a police response. That seems about as misguided as can be.”

For Dorsey, School Police monitoring students’ computers—and possibly arriving at a student’s home based on what that student has searched or typed—runs counter to the numerous conversations about implementing non-carceral solutions to social issues and providing trauma-informed care. 

In January, Baltimore became the first city to require officials to train on trauma-informed care through the Healing City Act. But as Baltimore Teachers Union Vice President Zach Taylor tweeted, City Schools are exempt from the Healing City Act: “Unfortunately, as an independent state agency @BaltCitySchools is not required to follow the Healing City Act, but it could still sign-on, engage in the trainings, agree to follow the protocols, etc… but they’ve been silent on the matter and appear uninterested.”

“Everybody in public service should undertake trauma-informed training, but school police should simply not exist,” Dorsey said. 

Concern about Clearance Rates

In Baltimore, reported incidents of sexual assault are up nearly 25% since last year. That’s according to the Baltimore Police Department, which provided updates on crime statistics during a quarterly oversight meeting with the City Council held on Sept. 29.

Police told the Public Safety and Government Operations Committee that there have been 246 rapes reported in 2021. At this time last year, there were 196.

Pundits are always quick to weaponize Baltimore’s homicide rate as a national talking point—most recently, it has been pinned to a larger, fraught “crime spike” narrative, but not even police have expressed alarm regarding the rape numbers. The Baltimore Police Department’s Colonel Richard Worley said the number is higher because the department is getting better at documenting sexual assaults.

“Numbers are up because of better reporting systems,” Worley said. “It means rising rates but that’s what we want to do, we want to capture every single incident.”

As for making arrests in those incidents, the department’s success is unclear. When Councilperson Kristerfer Burnett asked Worley for the department’s clearance rate on rape cases, Worley said he did not have that information readily available but would get it soon.

At a hearing on March 31, 2021, the department provided clearance rate data that said police had not cleared any rape cases. When Burnett brought that up this week, Worley dismissed it as an obvious error. Burnett pushed back, reminding Worley that he had asked about the zero number back in March.

“We did have a pretty extensive conversation about it in the last hearing,” Burnett said. “I asked about it at the last hearing and the department stood by that number.”

Other crime statistics discussed included homicides (253 this year, 244 last year at this time), non-fatal shootings (524 this year, 531 last year), carjackings (316 this year, 359 last year), commercial robberies (488 this year, 405 last year), and street robberies (1,221 this year, 1,528 last year).

The clearance rate for non-fatal shootings in Baltimore is 26.7%. The national average is 26.1%.

The clearance rate for homicides is 40.5%. The national average is 54.7%.

Group Violence Reduction Strategy has its first meeting 

During the first Group Violence Reduction Strategy meeting on Monday, Sept. 20, Mayor Brandon Scott acknowledged the previous failures of the very same strategy—first by former Mayor Kurt Schmoke in the late ’90s and then by former mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake in 2014. 

This time, however, the program—which involves 75 different organizations in the city and is central to Scott’s crime plan—is going to work, according to Scott. At the center of this strategy is “focused deterrence,” an approach that involves telling “at-risk” people believed to be involved in many of the shootings in the city that law enforcement is aware of what they’re doing and encourages them to stop while offering resources to help them do so.

As WYPR reported, the previous failures are, according to Director of the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement Shantay Jackson, attributable to precisely what readers would expect: not enough political will, not enough services to help those who want help, and a dysfunctional police department.

Those reasons for the Group Violence Reduction Strategy’s previous failures reflect what LeVar Michael, who ran a focused deterrence program called Operation Ceasefire from June 2014 to April 2015, told Battleground Baltimore’s Brandon Soderberg last year.

“Focused deterrence is a carrot and stick approach,” Michael said. “It consists of enforcement on one hand and social services on the other.”

Michael said that police mocked the program and called it “hug a thug.” He recalled sitting with police in one district while they called the residents they were supposed to be helping “mutants.”

“Think about the psychology of that,” Michael said. “When you dehumanize people to that extent that you’re referring to them as ‘mutants.’ That’s a serious culture problem.”

Police in Baltimore are known for sabotaging violence prevention efforts. 

With little funding for the social services side of Operation Ceasefire and police who saw the program as a waste of time, focused deterrence, Michael said, became “all stick and no carrot.”

“We needed outreach workers,” Michael said. “we needed a social service agency that could handhold folks through the system and none of that was established. I pleaded for more resources.”

A lack of funding meant Michael was pretty much doing all of the organizing and often trying to point people towards services at the same time. When someone who was at risk that Michael had been working with for months was murdered, he felt like the underfunded program had failed the type of person it was supposed to help. 

“This guy attended a call-in, he really wanted to change his life. I would have conversations with this guy as I’m bathing my six-month-old. He was desperate to get out and he needed resources to do that and he ended up getting shot and killed—shot in the head actually—and that was just a real turning point for me,” Michael said. “I was building a relationship with this individual and I knew if we had the apparatus in place I was asking for, we could have possibly saved his life. It was a turning point where I said, ‘I can’t do this anymore if we’re not going to be serious about it.’”

Michael often warned the city of his concerns and first threatened to leave in December 2014. He finally left Operation Ceasefire in April 2015. By 2017, the program had ended entirely.

“I just realized they weren’t serious about implementing this program,” Michael said.

According to Mayor Scott, however, things will be different this time with the Group Violence Reduction Strategy. 

“Implementing a Group Violence Reduction Strategy is a cornerstone of my Comprehensive Violence Prevention Plan, and shifts the primary responsibility for violence prevention from law enforcement to community-based organizations,” Scott was quoted as saying in a meeting recap.

Scott is one of the most engaged elected officials in the city when it comes to taking violence reduction seriously—and understanding it as a public health issue that policing cannot fix. But under his administration, the police department has had its budget increased, with the demands by residents to shift the police department’s massive budget towards community organizations ignored.

And a quote from Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby included in the recap recalls past, “all stick” criticisms of focused deterrence.

“We recognize that while we need the hammer of the criminal justice system for violent offenders,” Mosby said, “we also need community outreach and programming to reach people before they reach the justice system.”

Anti-police reform prosecutor in the county has a progressive challenger

Baltimore County State’s Attorney Scott Shellenberger, notorious for his opposition to criminal justice and police reforms, is facing a primary opponent for the first time since he took office 15 years ago: Robbie Leonard, an attorney and activist, will face off against Shellenberger in next year’s Democratic primary.

“When George Floyd’s murder inspired so many activists to take to the streets and fight for meaningful justice reform and police reform, I saw Scott Shellenberger being the singular force trying to stop any kind of progress,” Leonard told Battleground Baltimore, referring to Shellenberger’s opposition to many of the police reforms introduced last summer. “[Shellenberger] testified against police reform legislation in Baltimore County. He testified against police reform legislation sponsored by Speaker Adrienne Jones in Annapolis, and he’s just completely out of step with where the Democratic Party is right now.”

Leonard is an attorney and activist who serves as the secretary of Maryland Democratic Party, and recently represented plaintiffs who successfully sued Gov. Larry Hogan for illegally ending federal unemployment benefits for thousands of Marylanders. Before starting a private practice last year, Leonard represented hundreds of lead poisoning victims seeking remuneration from their landlords. Leonard also worked at the Office of the Baltimore City Public Defender from 2008-2012.

“Scott and I were on opposite sides of every piece of legislation 10 years ago, when I was in the Public Defender’s Office working on their government relations team,” Leonard said. “He wanted to keep the death penalty. I wanted to repeal it. He wanted to send people to jail for marijuana. I wanted to legalize it, and the list goes on.”

Shellenberger opposed making allegations of police abuse public, and penalties for cops who refuse to use their body camera to record interactions with civilians. He also opposed a measure that would require the state prosecutor to investigate allegations of excessive force and criminal misconduct among police. He argued against reducing sentences for inmates sentenced to prison before the age of 25, or are over 60 and had already served lengthy prison terms—and he has defended charging juveniles as adults.

In 2015, Shellenberger called for Hogan to reinstate the death penalty, which was abolished in 2013 after advocates exposed it was deeply racist in its application.  

Local activist and artist Duane “Shorty” Davis has long been a critic of Shellenberger, after Shellenberger’s office charged Davis with making a bomb threat after Davis left one of his pieces of art—the kind of decorated toilet he often leaves in public to, as Davis says, “potty train politicians”—in front of a county courthouse. Davis was ultimately found not guilty.

Leonard says he fundamentally disagrees with many of Shellenberger’s positions, and would take a drastically different approach to being state’s attorney.

“Instead of focusing on petty offenses and saddling somebody with a criminal record that’s going to affect the rest of their lives, we need to be focusing our attention on the crimes that actually matter where there’s victims involved, specifically in areas of sexual assault, sexual violence, child abuse, child molestation,” Leonard said. 

In 2018, Shellenberger was part of a federal class action lawsuit from rape surviors for allegedly obstructing justice, and sending police to a victims’ house to threaten them with arrest if she continued to press charges, as the Baltimore Brew reported. 

Leonard told Battleground Baltimore he has been meeting with women’s groups who advocate for sexual assault survivors.

“They know that it’s time for a change and they support my candidacy,” Leonard said.

Baltimore’s single-use plastic bag ban begins in October

Baltimore should soon have fewer plastic bags strewn across streets, sidewalks, parks, and waterways. That’s because after years of grassroots activism, Baltimore’s ban on some types of single-use plastic bags finally goes into effect on Oct. 1. 

“This will be an adjustment for all of us, but I know it’s a step that will help us move Baltimore forward towards a zero waste future,” Mayor Brandon Scott said at a press conference on Wed. Sept. 22. 

Retailers will be required to charge $0.05 for single-use alternatives, such as paper bags, and the city will be distributing a limited number of reusable bags to residents. 

Eight states (California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, New York, Oregon, and Vermont) have banned single-use plastic bags, but 15 states have enacted laws backed by industry groups such as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the fossil fuel industry that prevents cities from banning their use. Throwaway plastic bags are made from fossil fuels, are not recyclable, and are a major source of environmental pollution and waste. 

In Baltimore, plastic bags and plastic film make up more than a third of non-recyclable plastic that ends up being burned at the city’s incinerator or landfill, according to a report by the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA) released in August. The report also found Baltimore burns more than 20 times the plastic it recycles, which releases toxins that disproportionately harm working class communities and communities of color.

“While residents’ and workers’ call for Zero Waste has never been louder, we also face an unprecedented challenge in the plastics production boom that imposes toxics into our daily lives from the moment we are born,” Shashawnda Campbell of the South Baltimore Community Land Trust (SBCLT) told Battleground Baltimore.

The ban was supposed to go into effect in January of this year, but Scott twice delayed its implementation, citing the economic hardships resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic and stating that more time was needed to educate the public.

Retailers can face a $1,000 fine for their third violation of the ban, which does allow the use of plastic bags for certain uses, such as goods purchased at a farmers market, or goods that contain fresh food, ice and more. 

In the first two weeks of the 2021-2022 school year, two dozen Baltimore City Schools that lack functioning air conditioning closed early five times due to high temperatures. The rising threat of COVID-19 variants, which are becoming increasingly transmissible in indoor unventilated spaces, has created a new sense of urgency in Baltimore among educators and activists who are calling on elected officials to support a bill they say would finally address those long standing issues.

The Green New Deal in Public Schools is a ten-year, $1.43 trillion dollar proposal introduced by former public school principal Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) in July. The goal of the legislation is to fight climate change by upgrading every public school in the country with green infrastructure, addressing historic inequities by focusing resources on high-need schools, providing resources to create culturally relevant curriculum, and funding the training of hundreds of thousands of additional educators. 

“The Green New Deal for Public Schools represents the level of school infrastructure investment that is urgent and necessary to heal the harm from decades of disinvestment, redlining and cycles of poverty and trauma, particularly for Black and brown children,” Bowman said in a press release.

School districts like those in Baltimore, which have long faced systemic underfunding, would stand to benefit from the proposal. Hundreds of Baltimore public school students have already lost instructional time due to failing infrastructure this year, and an estimated 1.2 millions of hours were lost over the previous five years, a 2019 Johns Hopkins report found: “Extremes of temperatures are associated with difficulty concentrating, asthma attacks, and the worsening of other health conditions,” the report said.

West Baltimore’s Coppin Academy has a working AC and didn’t dismiss early due to high heat, but 12th grade teacher Madeleine Monson-Rosen, says she and her students still feel the impacts of underfunding, something the proposal’s $250 billion in Resource Block Grants could help address.

“My school doesn’t have enough classroom space, so I teach in a different room every period. I intrude on other teachers’ meeting and planning time, and I don’t have space to work closely with students who need it. I carry my supplies around in a crate and have to use class time to get myself situated in each classroom,” Monson-Rosen told Battleground Baltimore.

Monson-Rosen is a member of the Greater Baltimore Democratic Socialists of America (GBDSA), which has urged elected officials to back the Green New Deal for Public Schools. 

“When I think about what the legislation means to me, it actually just means the space to do my job,” Monson-Rosen said. “I know many other teachers in Baltimore in similar—or worse—situations.” 

Activists have launched a letter writing campaign to win the support of Rep. Kwesi Mfume, the representative for Maryland’s 7th Congressional District and a  member of the House Committee on Education and Labor. Mfume has publicly backed the  Democrats’ $3.5 trillion dollar infrastructure package that allocates just $100 billion for public schools. 

Divided among the nation’s 100,000 K-12 schools, that equals $10,000 per school. Baltimore City Schools estimates it needs an additional $350 million in capital and maintenance spending annually to maintain national standards.  

“Across the country our public schools are underfunded, segregated, toxic, and crumbling. The story is no different here in Baltimore City. Teachers’ working conditions are students’ learning conditions,and every parent knows a child’s environment is critical to their health,” Matt Lewis, co-chair of the Green New Deal Campaign Committee of the GBDSA told Battleground Baltimore. “Throughout this pandemic teachers and support staff have shouldered a large burden for our communities.  This legislation would ensure our schools are safe classrooms and safe workplaces.”

Lewis noted that Mfume’s district contains 62% of Baltimore schools that would qualify for a portion of the $446 billion in Climate Capital Facilities Grants and low interest loans from the federal government—if the Green New Deal for Public Schools were to pass.

The legislation could be transformative, Monson-Rosen explained. 

“Our schools are overcrowded and under-resourced in terms of curriculum and materials. Artists, teachers, and scholars could get good union jobs, and students could be exposed to cutting-edge work in every field, and real, vital curricula anchored in their experience and their communities. Every part of education could truly be transformed,” she said. “Students really feel that the poor infrastructure means that Baltimore doesn’t care about its students. The Green New Deal for Public Schools is just a way of saying we care about children.”

ARPA Funds Soon Available For Baltimore Nonprofits

Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott and City Council President Nick Mosby spent this week signaling that they are ready and willing to spend the city’s allotment of the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds, money from the federal government that is intended to address the huge financial strain the COVID-19 pandemic put on the nation. 

Baltimore will receive $641 million in funding. The first infusion of the money happened this past spring. The rest of the money will come in mid-2022. 

Earlier this summer, Scott announced that he was establishing the Mayor’s Office of Recovery Programs which, his administration says, will work to make sure the money is properly overseen and distributed. This Monday, he announced that starting Oct. 1, Baltimore nonprofits will be able to apply for ARPA funds. 

“In a city like Baltimore with deep systemic challenges even before the pandemic, we must be strategic and targeted in our approach—with an eye toward making a definitive, measured impact on our city through a lens of equity,” Scott said. 

Also this week, Mosby introduced legislation that he said would add another layer of oversight to ARPA spending. 

“The Council will review the investment strategy by the Mayor’s Office of Recovery Programs and the Department of Finance to ensure this one-time infusion of federal funding stands the best chance of creating transformative change in our communities,” a press release sent out by Mosby’s office said. “The oversight will focus on whether the investment is being used effectively to address our city’s inequities, as well as to guarantee the spending is administered in a timely manner. The legislation also calls for the funding to be tracked and for frequent spending statements to be issued publicly.”

We know that both Scott and Mosby are versed in nonprofit-speak, but will the right organizations actually get the money?  Battleground Baltimore has already addressed the ongoing conflict of interest presented by the City Council president’s marriage to State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby, and that conflict has only gotten worse with the announcement of a federal investigation into the couple’s financial dealings. They recently launched a fundraiser to pay for anticipated legal bills as a result of that investigation. Scott has said as little as possible about this issue. 

Considering Baltimore’s long history of financial mismanagement and corruption, it will take a village of journalists and citizens to make sure that this money is actually used effectively. 

Speed Camera Revenue Used To Fund the Police

The Baltimore Police Department just got some more money. Another $6.5 million was approved at the Board of Estimates meeting held on Sept. 15. The funds will balance the police budget for the 2021 fiscal year and account for hazard pay.

The city actually has a surplus of nearly $9 million for this past fiscal year (which ended on June 30) mostly thanks to federal funding. But the city chose not to use federal funding to account for this $6.5 million they say is needed for the police budget. Instead, the $6.5 is coming from revenue generated by speed cameras—a decision Jed Weeks of the organization Bikemore spoke out against during Wednesday’s Board of Estimates meeting.

Weeks pointed out that the city has been through all of this before. Last year, Bikemore spoke out against $2 million for the city’s free bus, the Baltimore City Circulator, being used to further fund the police instead.

“Here we are a year later with the knowledge of the pandemic and related expenditures, we continue with yet another supplemental appropriation for the police department,” Weeks said.

As Battleground Baltimore has reported, the Baltimore Police Department received an additional $22.5 million in funding back in June, despite growing calls from residents to defund the police. Moreover, speed and red light cameras are a way to enforce the law that reduces police responsibilities. Many defund advocates have argued that getting the police out of traffic enforcement both frees police up to focus on other crimes and reduces the likelihood of police harming or killing people. Instead, Baltimore is now using speed cameras to generate more money for the police.

“Speed and red light cameras have been well-studied across the country and in our state, and they are clearly shown to reduce injury crashes and deaths of people walking, biking, riding, transit and driving,” Weeks said. “They’re a proven effective enforcement tool that can be deployed without racial bias and without threat of armed police escalating traffic enforcement into a violent encounter.”

The use of speed camera revenue to fund the police is especially egregious because this revenue is intended, Weeks argued, to fund safer streets for drivers and pedestrians alike.

“Revenues generated by speeding red light cameras under state law are to be used for public safety improvements, including pedestrian safety programs,” Weeks said. “The intent here is clearly for revenue of cameras to be used for physical improvements to infrastructure that slow down cars, make roads safer, and reduce the need for cameras to exist for enforcement altogether.”

The $6.5 million for the police was approved, with City Budget Director Robert Cenname arguing that since the funds can be used for “public safety,” that includes the police.

As Battleground Baltimore reported last month, Baltimore police make a disproportionate number of traffic stops in some of the city’s least wealthy, majority Black neighborhoods. 

“We can’t accept the continued theft of desperately needed transportation dollars by the Baltimore City Police Department,” Weeks said. “If approved, this transfer will disproportionately harm our poorest Black and Latino residents.”

Back in June, the Baltimore City Council approved a $22 million budget increase to the Baltimore Police Department’s budget, going against the demands of hundreds of Baltimoreans who showed up for two taxpayers’ nights to tell Mayor Brandon Scott and members of Baltimore City Council, “defund the police.” 

“That the City of Baltimore has to scramble together on two nights to say something and hope that it changes is not a participatory process,” Rob Ferrell of Organizing Black said at the time.

As Battleground Baltimore previously reported, the budget increase was, at least in part, a done deal before Taxpayers’ Night. That’s because even if the council and the mayor had been motivated to vote “no” to an additional $22 million for the police, the federal consent decree likely would have fined the city for defunding. It is just one more example of how police are rewarded for their corruption and dysfunction, and the rest of the city loses. A consent decree imposed on the city after Freddie Gray died in police custody in 2015 now nullifies the will of the people and gives elected officials who don’t actually want to defund a convenient excuse. 

None of this is exactly new—police officers in Baltimore are often failing miserably to keep people safe while burning through their department’s $500 million-plus budget—but the stranglehold police have over the city and its elected officials has been made especially stark over the past month or so. The month of August, especially, offered up a laundry list of dysfunction and misconduct by Baltimore Police that made a strong case for defunding. 

The department’s crime lab is backlogged, among many other problems, as the Baltimore Sun reported. The police are disproportionately enacting traffic stops in majority Black neighborhoods, as The Real News reported. As Baltimore Brew reported, it was only last month that it was publicly revealed that a police officer who killed a teenager in 1993 had remained with the department for years despite being stripped of his duties, collecting a paycheck and racking up overtime for almost three decades. The BPD’s move to the former Baltimore Sun building continues to skyrocket in cost, as Baltimore Brew reported. The Baltimore City State’s Attorney’s Office indicted Baltimore police officer Christopher Nguyen for reckless endangerment. It was also only last month that the longstanding practice of allowing police officers to work overtime shifts even if they were on vacation ended.  

And the Baltimore Police union’s stance on vaccination is not encouraging.

On Aug. 31, Baltimore City’s Fraternal Order of Police and the Baltimore City firefighters’ union released a joint statement, commenting on Mayor Brandon Scott’s policy requiring all city employees to either be vaccinated or take a weekly COVID-19 test.

“It is our desire to remain engaged in collective bargaining over the implementation of this policy,” the statement said. “We look forward to working amicably with members of Mayor Scott’s administration to ensure this policy and its associated procedures are implemented fairly, equitably while protecting our member’s [sic] personal concern and autonomy.”

In April 2020, towards the start of the pandemic, a Perkins Homes resident recorded a Baltimore Police sergeant intentionally coughing on people after they greeted him with, “Hey Officer Friendly with the cherry cheeks.” The name of that sergeant, who was suspended, was never released by the police. In Jan. 2021, Baltimore Police Sergeant James Rhoden used his influence to get the then-hard-to-obtain COVID-19 vaccine for a family member. He is no longer with the police department.

In other cities, the police have aggressively negotiated against vaccination. In Portland, police were simply exempted from the citywide mandate for vaccination. In a scene that might seem familiar to Baltimore residents who are used to a Democratic mayor regularly caving to police, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler said, “I am disappointed that we can’t hold all of our City employees to the same vaccine requirement.” 

COVID-19 is the leading cause of death for cops in 2021, killing 110 police officers nationwide so far.

COVID-19 Concerns and No AC as Students Return to School

Baltimore City public school students didn’t only have to worry about returning to school in person amid a surging pandemic—many also stepped into schools without functioning air conditioning. Temperatures upwards of 90 degrees forced the early dismissal of hundreds of students at two dozen schools without working AC when schools reopened on Aug. 30. 

Despite their school closing early on the first two days of class, Baltimore City College High School senior Samreen Sheraz told Battleground Baltimore that school is off to a good start. 

“Students are getting the ‘normal’ school environment back, which means they have motivation, and support from peers and teachers,” Sheraz, a member of Students Organizing a Multicultural and Open Society (SOMOS), said. “It is much easier to get it in person rather than online.”

While Sheraz approved of the district’s mask mandate and social distancing policies, they said a better job could be done enforcing it.

“The safety protocols are implemented efficiently in classrooms only,” Sheraz said. “The protocols get a little ignored during lunch and dismissal, which can be dangerous to many.”

In cities like Baltimore with a large digital divide, being able to learn in person again has been a helpful; 200,000 mostly low income Baltimore households with school-aged children lack access to high speed internet or a computer, a May 2020 Abell Foundation report found. 

“Being in school helps the brain to be focused on studying and the improvement of our grades,” Sheraz explained.

The district’s COVID-19 dashboard reports a .15% COVID prevalence rate among 88,000 students and staff. 132 positive cases have been reported in the past 10 days, according to the district, which says 80% of staff and 90% of principals are vaccinated.  

“There could be much better communication with the schools, staff, and students, because as of now I don’t believe that Baltimore City Schools has been very transparent about their plans, if cases keep rising,“ Blanca Rosalez, a SOMOS member and high school junior, told Battleground Baltimore.

Some parents and teachers have taken to social media to express frustration over the lack of a district-wide plan for students who are forced to quarantine when weekly testing of all unvaccinated students and staff begins next week. 

​​“There is no plan for quarantined kids; instead there is only school-by-school, teacher-by-teacher. More inequity for kids. Likely to worsen as asymptomatic testing begins and more kids are quarantined,” public school parent Melissa Schober said.

Brittany Johnstone, a school psychologist and special services vice president of the Baltimore Teachers Union, tweeted: “We’re just at the tip of the iceberg. Testing beginning on 9/13 will mean a rapid increase in known positive cases (which the district admitted to in their email to staff) and we have absolutely no clarity on how to educate students who are required to be at home.”

This past week, Gov. Larry Hogan called the lack of AC in some city schools “unbelievable.” Back in 2018, City College students protested Hogan’s lack of funding for city schools when high heat forced students that attended schools without functioning AC to be dismissed early. 

With its history of disinvestment, Sheraz worries about whether city schools will have enough resources while the pandemic continues with no end in sight.

“School funding is a recurring issue and it has been repeating over the years,” Sheraz said. “Schools would need more resources such as hand sanitizer, clorox wipes, and tissues to maintain the safety of students and staff.”

Cannabis Legalization and Racial Equity in Annapolis

This week, the House Cannabis Legalization Workgroup had its first meeting to discuss how legalization and regulation of cannabis would be implemented and how legalization could be implemented in a more racially equitable way.

During the meeting, the workgroup noted the tax revenue generated in Colorado, the first state to establish a legal, regulated industry and a state whose demographics reflected Maryland. Colorado has gone from generating around$600 million in 2014, when the regulated industry began, to more than $2 billion in 2020. 

But racial equity was the workgroup’s focus.

“We will do this with an eye towards equity and in consideration to Black and Brown neighborhoods and businesses that have been historically impacted by cannabis use,” Delegate Luke Clippinger, the chair of the workgroup said.

Maryland has remained woefully behind on cannabis. In 2014, cannabis was decriminalized if a Marylander was in possession of 10 grams or less, and as of 2017, there is medicinal cannabis, but legalization has yet to happen. Actually, even increasing the decriminalization threshold to the more-common one ounce has not happened. A legalization workgroup in Maryland announced in 2019 that it would not recommend legalization during the 2020 session, and so, the energy happening right now is welcome but also falls woefully behind where many advocates believe the state should be at this point. Getting legalization “right” has long been a concern in Maryland, and even now, the workgroup is discussing a referendum in 2022 with the regulated industry arriving, if that passes in 2023.

In the meantime, as those in Annapolis figure out how to get legalization and racial equity right, Maryanders continue to be arrested on cannabis charges, and those who are arrested are disproportionately Black. 

A 2020 ACLU report noted that a Black Marylander is more than two times as likely to be arrested for cannabis as a white Marylander, and possession arrests still made up 50% of all drug arrests.

“They prepare your meals in filth”: Food in Maryland Prisons

When The Maryland Food & Abolition Project asked J.G., someone who was incarcerated during COVID-19, about the food situation inside the Maryland Correctional Training Center in Hagerstown, Maryland, he did not hold back.

“It’s not like it’s sometimes you get a pretty good meal now and then. No, this is consistent. This is an everyday situation. And the kitchen—I don’t think they’ve ever passed an inspection. Because OSHA would close the place down. That’s how bad it is,” J.G. said. “Roaches and mice and other insects and stuff crawling all over the place. So they prepare your meals in filth, basically.”

That comes fromthe first part of the Maryland Food & Abolition Project’s “I Refuse to Let Them Kill Me: Food, Violence, and the Maryland Correctional Food System,” a shocking report on how poor the food given to prisoners is, released earlier this week. The report was published by the Maryland Food & Abolition Project on Sept. 9, the 50th anniversary of the Attica Prison Uprising, and just a couple of weeks after their report “Violence, Hunger, and Premature Death: How Prison Food in Maryland Became Even Worse During COVID-19.” 

“For lunch, you get a bag, and everything in the bag tastes and smells the same. You get a juice box. You get a sandwich, which is two pieces of bread, some cheese, and a slice of meat,” Mark, who was formerly incarcerated at Eastern Correctional Institution in Westover, Maryland, said. “The meat is bad. They call it sweaty meat, because lunch meat sweats, it gets the oily skin on it or stuff on it and then it turns white. You also might get a piece of fruit and a pack of cookies, but everything tastes the same. It tastes like the sandwich. And that’s lunch.” 

These reports offer the kind of deep dive into the cruelty endured by Maryland’s prisoners that local press rarely covers at all—let alone comprehensively. As journalist and political prisoner Mumia Abu Jamal observed in 2013, far too often, “the media offer the episodic, while they ignore the systematic.”

You can read the first part of The Maryland Food & Abolition Project’s “I Refuse to Let Them Kill Me” here and “Violence, Hunger, and Premature Death” here. Over the next two weeks, the Maryland Food & Abolition Project will release the next five parts of “I Refuse To Let Them Kill Me.” 

Last weekend, the Baltimore Police Department (BPD) tweeted out a series of photos of its officers and commanders participating in the beloved anti-violence event Baltimore Ceasefire. Along with the photos—which showed a child flanked by smiling police while holding a “Baltimore Ceasefire” sign, and Ceasefire co-founder Erricka Bridgeford receiving a hug from Police Commissioner Michael Harrison—the tweet posted on Saturday, Aug. 7, read: “Celebrating @BmoreCeasefire weekend with our community! #Unity #CommunityPolicing #MyBmore,” 

A little more than a day after celebrating Baltimore Ceasefire and boasting of its dedication to “community policing,” the BPD shot and killed someone. 

His name was Marcus Martin, he was 40 years old, and at around 3:00AM on Monday, Aug. 9, Officer Jeffery Archambault of SWAT shot him. A cousin of Martin’s widow took to Twitter to ask why it happened the way it did.

“I’m still at loss as to why @BaltimorePolice responded with a swat team. A mental health crisis is a mental health crisis regardless of whether the individual has a weapon or not,” the cousin of Martin’s widow tweeted.

According to police, BPD were called to the home around 9:00PM on Sunday because of an assault. There were people inside the home along with Martin, and they told police Martin had assaulted them and that he was armed. When police arrived, they were able to leave the home which left Martin alone with a shotgun, his house surrounded by cops. Days earlier, Martin had lost his job. 

The initial call to police was for an assault, and therefore it was not diverted to mental health professionals. BPD’s own “crisis response team” was also not present because it only operates between the hours of 11:00AM and 7:00PM. 

Over the next six hours, police remained outside of the home. Police said Martin shot at them: “Shortly after 3:00AM, the individual came to the door and fired his weapon. At that point, I can confirm that at least one officer returned fire, striking the individual one of our SWAT medics provided aid to the individual who was later pronounced deceased,” Deputy Commissioner Sheree Briscoe said during a press conference.

Martin’s family, however, suggested that he fired when police attempted to enter the home. A GoFundMe set up by Martin’s daughter to help with funeral costs also provides the family’s version of what happened. “THERE WAS NO HOSTAGE SITUATION NOR DID HE SHOOT IN THE DOORWAY!,” the GoFundMe reads, explaining that Martin fired at a SWAT robot sent into the home. “THEY BUSTED THE DOOR DOWN AND SENT THE ROBOT WHICH HE THEN SHOT THE ROBOT AND THEY OPENED ARMS ON HIM. THE NEWS IS A LIE!”

The language deployed by BPD is worth noting because local news was quick to run the police version of events. The shooting was described by police as an “officer-involved shooting,” a phrase that obfuscates the plain facts (police shot someone) and is regularly repeated by reporters. Martin’s shooting by police was the result, local news channel WBAL wrote, of “Martin discharg[ing] a shotgun in response to SWAT measures.” Those “SWAT measures” were not described further. The police and many news outlets also described the incident as Martin experiencing a “behavioral crisis,” something that the cousin of Martin’s wife criticized on Twitter.

“The media is misreporting this as a ‘behavioral’ crisis rather than a ‘mental health’ one to justify the fact that my cousin’s husband was murdered by a swat team after they were asked to send a mental health specialist in the midst of his mental breakdown,” he tweeted.

This was not the only police shooting in Baltimore this week. On Thursday, Aug. 12, BPD shot a man who they said had a gun during a fight in downtown’s red light district, “the Block.” BPD headquarters is just 0.1 miles from where the fight and shooting took place. 

As residents waded through all of the “copspeak” related to the week’s two shootings by police, a police killing from nearly 30 years ago reentered the news.

Baltimore City’s Inspector General Isabel Cumming released a report this week that called attention to the fact that an officer who shot a teen in the back and killed him in 1993 has remained on BPD payroll. In 2002, BPD stripped the officer, Edward Gorwell, of his police powers and then put him to work on a number of gigs, such as working communications and working 311. He has continued receiving benefits and often receiving significant overtime. 

“Between 2016 and 2020, for example, he received $158,804 in overtime pay on top of his regular salary, which pushed his total pay over five years to nearly $600,000,” the Baltimore Brew, who first revealed Gorwell’s identity (he was not publicly named in the IG’s report), reported.

The report was provided to Mayor Brandon Scott and Commissioner Harrison three months ago. Gorwell was terminated on August 1. 

This story, which has been something of an open secret for years—especially among frustrated Baltimore cops—has been mentioned by an anonymous Twitter account that highlights problems with BPD, especially as they pertain to discrimination within the department: “Dear @BaltimorePolice: Gorwell was a low value target, but consider him a warning. You have plenty more you that you are hiding, promoting, etc. that should of been fired years ago.  The next exposure will be higher in rank, and it will climb from there. Right your wrongs now,” they tweeted. 

At Rally, Advocates Criticize Stopgap Fixes To Eviction Crisis

A coalition of housing advocates and their allies rallied in front of Baltimore City Hall on Aug. 11 to demand Gov. Larry Hogan expand the state’s eviction moratorium instead of letting it expire on Aug. 15. They held signs that read “homes not graves,” “housing is a human right,” and “cancel the rent,” and chanted, “no more evictions.”  

“I am handicapped, and my sister, who I live with, was laid off during the majority of the pandemic,” Monique Dillard, a tenant in Northeast Baltimore, said through her attorney during the rally. “Despite the CDC order, our landlords tried to evict us at least half a dozen times over the last year. We applied for eviction prevention funds, but are still waiting for the assistance to come through. This is why we need more protections for renters. I feel bullied by my landlord.”

Multiple tenants like Dillard, who are facing the threat of eviction, shared messages through their attorneys, urging city and state officials to protect those who have fallen behind on rent and could be left homeless during a surging pandemic. 

Caitlin Goldblatt of Baltimore Renters United, a key organizer in preventing the city from approving a predatory scheme presented as “security insurance,” stressed that the current eviction concern should have been handled months ago. 

“Before we ever saw a huge surge of infections due to the Delta variant, our state legislature failed to pass lifesaving tenant protections prior to their end of their sessions,” Goldbatt said. “We know the policy as it exists doesn’t cover all renters, and we know it’s just delaying a more urgent eviction emergency than the one we are facing right now.”

Mayor Brandon Scott has increased the pace at which rental assistance is distributed, and is using the city’s eviction diversion program, but these efforts are limited and hampered by a lack of infrastructure.  

“[We want] a moratorium that is informed by how long it will take to put in place infrastructure to get renters relief funds released to those in need,” Tisha Guthrie of Baltimore Renters United said.

Last week, progressives successfully pressured President Joe Biden to extend the Center for Disease Control (CDC) eviction moratorium for areas facing high levels of transmission of COVID-19, which now covers every Maryland jurisdiction except Carroll County. The state and CDC moratorium falls short, activists explained, because landlords can refuse to accept rental assistance, and then the burden falls to renters to prove they qualify for the moratorium. 

“Renters will face eviction unless they come to court and prove their eligibility for protection under the order,” said attorney Zafar Shah of the Public Justice Center, who represent tenants in court. 

Shah told Battleground Baltimore that a rental court judge advanced an eviction proceeding against his client the same day as the rally. The reason: They had not yet started the paperwork to receive rental assistance. Shah said his client did not know of the assistance program and CDC moratorium until he informed them of this morning. 

“Failure to pay rent cases continues in the state of Maryland. People are being evicted today, they will be evicted tomorrow. And those numbers will continue to grow unless our state and local governments do something,” housing attorney Carisa Hatfield of the Homeless Persons Representation Project said. 

Hatfield stressed that she represented a client who was scheduled to be evicted the same day as the rally.  

In Maryland, 129,000 households are behind on rent, including over 25,000 in Baltimore City, according to census data compiled by National Equity Atlas.

Walters Art Museum Workers Demand Museum Recognize Union

Members of Walters Workers United (WWU) rallied on Thursday, Aug. 12, to demand the nationally-renowned Walters Art Museum voluntarily recognize their union drive and stop union-busting. 

“We know that by standing together in one union across all departments we can help create a more inclusive transparent institution, with more equitable pay and compensation, that values our health and safety and job security and builds ladders of opportunity and clear pathways to success,” a member of WWU told Battleground Baltimore. 

During the pandemic, the workers at Walters (a free art museum located in Mt. Vernon), joined a nationwide surge of frontline workers who organized for better working conditions, pay, and benefits. According to WWU, a supermajority of the roughly 90-member bargaining unit have signed union cards. 

Battleground Baltimore requested comment from the Walters on the unionization efforts but did not initially receive one. An internal email accidentally sent to Battleground Baltimore by the Walters read, in part, “Just got a follow up email from Real News Network. Just making sure you think my inclination to continue to not respond is right.” 

Eventually, the Walters provided Battleground Baltimore with a response:

“The Walters Art Museum supports its employees’ right to consider forming a union and we have taken no steps to interfere with that process. We urge the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees to file a representation petition with the National Labor Relations Board, which would set in motion the process for employees to vote on whether to unionize,” the statement reads in part. “The Walters closed at 5 p.m. [on Aug. 12, the day of the rally] in order to make it possible for any Walters staff who would like to attend the Walters Workers United rally to do so.”

What follows is a Q&A with WWU about their unionizing efforts and their issues with the Walters.

Battleground Baltimore: Nationally, there seems to be an uptick in workers organizing during the coronavirus pandemic. How has COVID-19 affected employees at the Walters, and your determination to improve your working conditions?

Walters Workers United: Issues at the Walters predate COVID-19, but the pandemic helped shine a light on concerns that were previously easier to hide or obscure. For example, the mistreatment of essential staff (i.e. Maintenance and Security) was even more noticeable while they were the only ones working on campus, and safety precautions did not center their health as a top issue. We have united around shared concerns, regardless of what department one is in. 

BB: What has been the response from management to your concerns and organizing drive? 

WWU: The museum director, Julia Marciari-Alexander, and the museum’s board of trustees have refused to voluntarily recognize our union or even meet with us. They have signaled publicly that they are committed to a “non-adversarial process” all the while employing a known union-busting law firm, Shawe Rosenthal. Management has refused to acknowledge or give space for union conversations with staff. If they had, they would find that we have many of the same values at heart. We love the Walters, and we know that a seat at the table will allow the museum to live up to its full potential for our city. 

BB: To WWU, “Walters Workers United” means all workers at the museum, correct?

WWU: We want to have a union that includes all workers across the museum, regardless of the department they work in. Often, the most vulnerable positions are the ones forgotten. We cannot let the museum dictate where we have a union election. By doing so, we would let them remove gallery officers and monitor room officers from our bargaining unit. These workers are among the essential staff who keep our museum running. Their department has high turnover, poor communication, unfair implementation of policies, and overall disrespect. If the Walters would meet with us, we could share our concerns about excluding part of the workforce that we all value and come to a resolution that would include all workers in a union.

BB: The Walters is a revered cultural institution in Baltimore. What message do you want to send to patrons and supporters of it, as well as people who want to support your cause?

WWU: We know that by organizing a union it will benefit all of us. Recently, the museum closed to staff and visitors due to unsafe levels of volatile organic chemicals during construction work on the roof. Individual requests for safety information or guidance on protective measures were not adequately addressed.  It was only after a letter of concern signed by nearly 50 workers was delivered to the administration that safety measures were put in place to protect workers and the public. The workers of the Walters Art Museum are largely Baltimore City residents. We are part of the community just as much as anyone who visits. We are unionizing because we love our jobs, just as much as visitors love coming to the museum. It is because we care about the museum and its collection that we unionize. It is possible, and encouraged, to love the art and love the people that take care of it. 

To learn more about WWU’s efforts, you can read WWU’s mission statement here.

According to car stop data for June and July of this year, the Baltimore Police Department is making the most car stops in the city’s poor, Black neighborhoods. 

In total, in June 2021, police made a total of 2,933 car stops, and in July 2021, 3,046 car stops.

In Baltimore City’s majority Black and heavily-divested Ninth District in West Baltimore, police made 516 car stops in June 2021 and 557 car stops in July 2021. 

Those Ninth District stops make up approximately 18% of each month’s stops. These are by far the most stops in the city. The second highest number of stops during the past two months were in the Seventh District, which had 324 stops in June 2021 and 462 in July 2021. 

The Ninth District contains some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods, which are often less walkable and bike-able than other whiter parts of the city and are beholden to the city’s poor transit infrastructure—which puts more people into cars in areas where police are more apt to make traffic stops. 

The 2016 report “Over-Policed Yet Underserved” by the West Baltimore Commission on Police Misconduct and the No Boundaries Coalition details the disproportionate policing West Baltimoreans experience.

“If the theory of law enforcement is that it acts as a deterrent to crime, the problem in West Baltimore seems to be that the legal response to crime is not being applied fairly and consistently,” the report said. “Many witnesses who experienced the police’s excessive use of force, who were subjected to unreasonable stops and searches (‘stop and frisk’), and/or who were even detained were not committing any crime at the time of their encounter with police.” 

The Ninth District includes the Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood, which is where Freddie Gray was stopped, transported, and killed by Baltimore Police. In the Ninth District this year there have been 68 homicides and 208 shootings. Earlier this year, residents of the Ninth District’s Harlem Park neighborhood settled with the city as a result of the neighborhood-wide, unconstitutional lockdown of that neighborhood by police, following the fatal shooting of a Baltimore Police Detective Sean Suiter.

“When they locked down Harlem Park after Suiter’s death it was actually horrible. You couldn’t even go in and out of your house without showing ID,” a Harlem Park resident told Battleground Baltimore. “They want to search your car every day and they want to know who you are and why you’re down here. They just was harassing people for no reason, you know, kicking in people doors.”

A 2018 report about the racist enforcement of cannabis laws from Baltimore Fishbowl co-authored by Battleground Baltimore’s Brandon Soderberg showed that the area code that includes much of the Ninth District had the most misdemeanor cannabis possession arrests in the years following 2014’s cannabis decriminalization (486 of nearly 3,200 arrests).

This information comes thanks to Third District Councilperson Ryan Dorsey, who provided the traffic stop data to Battleground Baltimore. Dorsey requested the information from the Baltimore Police Department, he explained, because constituents in his district were upset about a lack of traffic enforcement as it pertained to speeding, running red lights, and other moving violations which make pedestrians, bikers, and other drivers less safe.

“Residents in my district want far more traffic enforcement. It’s their greatest and most consistent policing request by a wide margin,” Dorsey told Battleground Baltimore. “Meanwhile they see police sitting in patrol cars staring at their phones, or socializing with another, and they feel this is time that could easily be spent to positive effect on traffic enforcement, but isn’t. The community feels it’s being ignored. I requested information I knew would corroborate the constituent concern.”

Dorsey’s district, the data shows, has some of the lowest number of traffic stops in the city. In June 2021, there were 74 stops there, and in July 2021, there were 59 stops.

“Not surprisingly, the information not only affirmed residents’ beliefs that police aren’t policing what people feel is important, but that police are continuing the same disproportionate over-policing of Baltimore’s poorest, Blackest neighborhoods just as they were four years ago when the City entered into the consent decree,” Dorsey said.

The full numbers for car stops are below:

Additionally, there were 50 uncategorizable stops in June 2021 and 53 in July 2021, BPD explained, “likely due to a bad address or format.”

This week, President Joe Biden extended the Center for Disease Control’s federal eviction moratorium, which covers 90% of renters facing eviction, caving to pressure from progressive Democrats such as Missouri Rep. Cori Bush. 

Bush, who has experienced homelessness herself, slept on the steps of the Capitol building for five days to highlight the cruelty of evicting as many as 7 million people during a pandemic.

While celebrating the 60-day extension, which carries sharp fines for landlords who defy it, housing advocates are also drawing attention to the fact the moratorium does not halt evictions entirely. The extension is intended to protect renters from eviction for falling behind on rent payments who live in areas the CDC deems to have “substantial” or “high” risk of  COVID-19 exposure, and that includes Baltimore City.

It does not include Baltimore County, which is experiencing “moderate” transmission. Catonsville resident Falon T,  a preschool teacher (who requested anonymity because she felt uncomfortable making her financial difficulties public) who lost her job during the pandemic and fell behind on rent is one of the thousands of Marylanders who still faces eviction when the state’s eviction moratorium expires on Aug. 15. 

She resumed working in June, but fell three months behind on rent and was unable to access rental assistance.

“I’ve applied for assistance. They were responsive at first then basically ghosted me,” T told Battleground Baltimore. “Unemployment went towards rent and other bills until it was exhausted and now I’m behind.”

T and her boyfriend are among the 129,000 Maryland households who are behind on rent, according to Census Household Pulse Survey data compiled by the National Equity Atlas. 
“I’m honestly nervous. I really don’t have anywhere to go,” T said. “It’s just really unfair and inhumane what they’re doing. They failed us. 1000%.”

The majority of Maryland residents behind on rent are people of color and low income. Over 40% are unemployed. They owe an estimated $543 million in rent to landlords. Maryland has been allocated $700 million in federal funds for emergency rental assistance, but only $49 million has been distributed to renters  so far, according to the Associated Press.

Carol Ott, tenant advocacy director of the Fair Housing Action Center of Marylander told Battleground Baltimore what has happened to T is “a common story.” 

Ott said that this year she already has 800 clients looking for help. In 2020, Ott had 939 for the entire year. 

She says that if you are facing eviction, reaching out to a local legal aid society or an organization like hers is a good idea. She also encourages people not to ignore the court order.

“You have to go [to court],” she told renters. “And you have to take all your documentation to show you have made a tremendous effort to prevent the eviction.”

Eviction court in Baltimore usually favors the landlord. In a city with some 150,000 eviction cases annually, a recent report found 96% of landlords have lawyers in eviction cases, compared to  only 1% of tenants. Legal representation would help 92% of clients avoid displacement.  

Baltimore also passed right to counsel legislation, which will provide tenants with legal representation during the eviction proceedings, which will go into effect in October. pay rent due to COVID-19, but that hasn’t stopped landlords and courts from evicting 537 families between August and November of 2020, according to the Public Justice Center. 

Maryland has banned evictions since last spring for tenants who can demonstrate an inability to pay.

On Wednesday, Aug. 11, renters facing eviction and the group Baltimore Renters United will be speaking out at City Hall. They’re demanding Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan extend the state’s moratorium for areas not covered by the CDC’s extension, and to provide protections for tenants who are falling behind on rent and being threatened by landlords.  

Almost 60% of all Maryland residents are vaccinated, but the rise of the Delta variant has fueled a 200% jump in the state’s positivity rate over the past two weeks. During this same period, cases in Baltimore—where just under 50% of the population is fully vaccinated—have increased by 194%, according to the New York Times. Nearly all hospitalizations and deaths in Maryland are among unvaccinated populations, but the small number of breakthrough cases among those who are vaccinated is growing. 

“The evictions are extremely concerning. It’s a moral tragedy, what we’re facing right now—it’s a death sentence, COVID is out here still, it’s stronger, and people are going to be put back out into the street to die,” Mark Council, lead organizer of Housing Our Neighbor, told Battleground Baltimore. “The evictions need to stop. This is preventable. This doesn’t have to happen, our elected officials are choosing to let it happen.” 

“Baltimore City has spent a total of $20 million in state and federal funds and processed over 4,000 applications through the City’s eviction prevention program, managed by the Mayor’s Office of Children and Family Success,” the office of Mayor Brandon Scott told Battleground Baltimore in a statement. “The City is also working with the Sheriff’s Office to receive the information on families that have an eviction schedule so that the City can intervene and settle cases with landlords before families are evicted.” 

On Thursday, Aug. 5, Scott announced Baltimore City’s indoor mask mandate would be reinstated on Monday, Aug. 9.

“We must all do our due diligence to protect ourselves and our neighbors,” Scott said during a press conference. “While we know that masking is a sure way to slow the spread of COVID-19, we cannot stress enough the importance and urgency of getting vaccinated so that we can beat COVID-19 for good.”

“The Delta variant is here, and it poses a serious threat to our unvaccinated residents,” Baltimore City Health Commissioner Dr. Letitia Dzirasa said at the press conference.

At a press conference that began around the same time as Scott’s presser,  Hogan announced he would not be instituting a statewide mask mandate, and instead told Marylanders who aren’t vaccinated to “get the damn vaccine.”

Hogan Announces $6 Million More To Fund The Drug War

The Delta variant surge isn’t the only public health problem Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan seems to fundamentally misunderstand—there’s also the overdose crisis. 

This week, Hogan announced $6 million in grants to fund the Maryland Criminal Intelligence Network (MCIN) and the Heroin Coordinator Program, and, as his office puts it, “to address [the] heroin and opioid crisis.”

“Addressing” it however, mostly means arresting and incarcerating people who sell and use drugs and through that, perpetuating the racist war on drugs, the Baltimore Harm Reduction Coalition (BHRC) told Battleground Baltimore: “This Administration relies on fear-mongering drug war tactics designed to shut out common-sense, compassionate strategies. Governor Hogan’s six million dollar plan highlights such tactics, such as over-funding and militarizing law enforcement,” BHRC said in a statement.

Baltimore City will receive $821,785 from MCIN and $83,000 from the Heroin Coordinator Program. These programs primarily focus on arresting and prosecuting people who sell drugs while also moving people who use drugs who are arrested into treatment—a typical, fraught approach to drug use which assumes everyone who uses drugs has substance use disorder. Many people who use heroin do not have substance use disorder and studies show that forced treatment is ineffective even for those who might benefit from it. 

Nevertheless, Hogan talked-up these carceral solutions in a press release: “This funding will support a statewide effort to address the heroin and opioid public health crisis in an integrated investigative manner, and to stop criminal organizations from bringing illegal guns and drugs into our communities,” Hogan said.

Last year, there were 1,028 fatal overdoses in Baltimore City—the highest number in the state.

As Battleground Baltimore has previously reported, drug war-style approaches to gun seizures are similarly unsuccessful and perpetuate many of the same problems the war on drugs perpetuates—namely, racially discriminatory policing that continues to fuel mass incarceration. These approaches also do not keep people safe.

Just a few months ago, Hogan vetoed a decriminalization of paraphernalia bill, Senate Bill 420 (SB420). The veto by Hogan in late May arrived with plenty of scaremongering from the governor with claims about “drug dealers” being able to stock up on paraphernalia—a claim we still don’t understand, to be quite honest. 

In reality, decriminalizing paraphernalia keeps people who use drugs safer and helps prevent the spread of disease and in general, keeps people healthier. For example, someone might throw away a clean needle or a cooker instead of carrying it with them so that they can reduce the possibility of arrest. As a result, they have to locate those items again and again, if desperate, become more apt to share or reuse needles.

“SB420 [which would] decriminalize possession of paraphernalia was the only bill passed by our 2021 Maryland Legislature designed to significantly curb the overdose epidemic,” BHRC said. “Governor Hogan vetoed this potentially life-saving bill while we continue to lose lives to overdose and other preventable public health crises. This winter, Maryland legislators must override Hogan’s veto decision and finally decriminalize drug paraphernalia in Maryland.”

Baltimore City is not interested in making the necessary, community-focused changes to the Baltimore Police Department. While most of that is due to a lack of political will, some of it is because police reform is designed to empower and enrich the very department many have called to defund. Supporting changes to police means ensuring nothing drastically changes when it comes to policing—but so many things need to drastically change.

Just this week, Johns Hopkins University announced it was continuing with its years-long plan to form its own armed private police force to patrol its campuses, nearby areas, and the numerous areas of the city under control of the university, including majority-Black neighborhoods the university has had a hand in redeveloping and gentrifying.

In response to this plan, introduced in early 2018, Hopkins students and residents in the area that would be policed by Hopkins began organizing against the private police force. The bill to allow Hopkins to establish its own police force was approved by the Maryland Senate in April 2019. In response, students occupied a Hopkins building, Garland Hall, for more than a month in protest—until Baltimore Police were called in to break down the doors, pull the remaining activists out, and arrest them. Plans for the university’s police force continued moving forward until June 12, 2020, when the university, in response to the police murder of George Floyd on May 25, announced that said plans would be put on a two-year pause.

Well, those plans have been unpaused—and the university even hired Branville Bard, Jr., the police commissioner for the Cambridge Police Department in Massachusetts, as the “vice president for safety.” Last year, around the same time that Hopkins announced it was pausing its police force, Bard told the citizens of Cambridge that his department did not have any “military equipment.” In August of the same year, the Boston Globe revealed that, in fact, Cambridge Police was in possession of 64 M4 assault rifles, sniper rifles, and an armored vehicle.

The Coalition Against Policing at Hopkins (CAPH) criticized renewed plans to form the armed private police force. 

“This is clearly an abuse of the [two]-year ‘pause’ and the dismantled community advisory board,” CAPH told the JHU Newsletter. “To create a special internal board for this hire while eliminating mechanisms for accountability is a direct attack on the community members who have stood up in opposition of the creation of [the] JHPD.”

The return of Hopkins’ private police force arrives a month or so after the Baltimore City Council voted to increase the Baltimore Police Department budget. As Battleground Baltimore has reported, this year’s Taxpayer’s Nights saw over 100 citizens telling the city not to increase the BPD budget by $28 million. The City Council, however, didn’t listen to residents, voting unanimously to provide that budget increase. Even if the council had voted to reduce the police budget, the federal consent decree the city has been under as a result of the death of Freddie Gray in police custody in 2015 could force them to maintain the planned police budget. It’s something members of the council have told organizers and activists privately (often after they’ve been publicly criticized for not defunding) and was recently echoed by Councilperson Zeke Cohen in the press.

“The court can levy fines against your city,” Cohen told Baltimore Magazine. “And you’re forced to pay.”

Judge James K. Bredar, who oversees the implementation of the consent decree, has become especially vocal lately, criticizing Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby’s decarceral policies. Earlier this year, Mosby’s announced that her office will not be prosecuting drug possession, sex work, trespassing, and a number of other low-level crimes. The implication by Bredar, who has claimed that these policies reduce police “authority,” is that progressive policies are bad for police which is bad for the consent decree.

At the same time, the city has asked for federal agents to assist the BPD in its policing operations, and the department has continued with its plan to encrypt the police scanner—reducing the public’s ability to see how its frequently out-of-control department operates.

The department’s storied history of corruption, meanwhile, continues. In June, a police officer who has not yet been named ran over a 16 year-old teen with a police vehicle, and earlier this month, Baltimore police officer Eric Banks was charged with the murder of his teenage son, whose body the officer also hid in the wall of his home.

On July 16, BPD officer Maxwell Dundore was indicted for assaulting a 17 year-old by throwing him to the ground, choking, and kicking him.  

“I will choke you. I will kill you,” Dundore told the teen. 

Sergeant Brendan O’Leary was also charged for lying about the incident involving Dundore. 

The mayor’s violence prevention plan

Mayor Brandon Scott held a series of press events last Friday related to the release of his violence prevention plan.

“Never before has Baltimore developed a holistic public safety strategy, one that aims to treat gun violence as a public health crisis,” the plan reads. 

At the same time, the plan states that “policing, prosecution, and prisons cannot stem the tide of violence on their own,” nodding to Scott’s understanding of gun violence as a public health crisis. The plan lays out so-called social determinants of health: economic stability; education; health and healthcare; neighborhood and built environment; and social and community context.

These are all things that Black people in Baltimore have been systematically denied for generations. 

There are details in the plan about community building, providing additional support for victims of violence, developing effective community-based approaches to public safety such as violence intervention programs (Scott plans to triple the number of violence intervention programs from 10 to 30), and the like. According to the mayor’s office, the plan’s success will be measured by (1) the percentage of 911 calls diverted away from the police, (2) the number of Black youth diverted to alternatives to the prison-industrial machine, (3) the number of Black youth given additional social supports, and (4) the number of mediations performed by violence interrupters.

Scott has given himself roughly five years to achieve some measures of success—including a promised 15% reduction of violence each year: “The Mayor undertakes this work with a sense of urgency and commitment to making improvements along the way,” the plan states, “while building the systems, structures, and relationships necessary for the successful implementation of this 5-year plan. While this work will not be complete by Year 5, we expect that instances of violence will be rarer and non-recurring, relative to today.”

It would be easier for us to believe that this could happen (and we do want this to happen) if we had not already seen evidence that this administration remains committed to dancing around the need to substantively address policing rooted in anti-Blackness.

The plan ignores the fact that violence committed by the police and the State’s Attorney’s Office still counts as violence. When the police hit a suspect they are pursuing with a car, that is violence. When young people are held without bail, that is violence. And that violence extends beyond the individual who is victimized by the violence—it reaches into their families and communities. 

The plan does give a nod to the fact that police can be problematic, but provides the same limp solutions that have been tried again and again. There is, of course, no mention of taking funds away from police to put toward other things that could help stop violence in more tangible ways. According to the report, much of the funding for the measures suggested would come from American Rescue Plan funding, the state, and philanthropy. Here’s a list of all the mechanisms that are planned to keep police accountable:

“Integrity test report outs, audit findings, community engagement on matters of accountability and transparency, diversity numbers in employees that are working on the consent decree, caseload numbers for the Public Integrity Bureau (PIB), status of investigations within the established timelines, categories of investigations, tallies of how complaints are being made, timely responses to community members, training all officers in internal affairs, top 50 officers with complaints, internal responses to frequently complained-of officers, frequency of early intervention systems (EIS), rate of mediations offered/accepted, and the number of internal affairs cases that missed investigation deadline 90-day, 180-day, and one-year cut-offs.”

As abolitionist and organizer Mariame Kaba has written, there are no mechanisms that can end the kind of policing that harms Black people. There is no Officer Friendly.

“I know that indictments won’t and can’t end oppressive policing, which is rooted in anti-Blackness, social control, and containment,” Kaba wrote in her blistering 2014 In These Times essay “Whether Darren Wilson is Indicted or Not, the Entire System is Guilty. “Policing is derivative of broader social justice. It’s impossible for non-oppressive policing to exist in a fundamentally oppressive and unjust society.” 

Baltimore’s State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby was front and center at the first press event held to announce the launch of the plan. The online version of the plan includes cheerful visuals of Police Commissioner Michael Harrison fist-bumping citizens. Much like a toxic family relationship, Scott’s plan asks citizens to embrace the very entities that have harmed them. 

Baltimore’s plastic recycling rate is abysmal, new report finds. 

Baltimore burns more than 20 times the plastic it recycles, according to a new report by Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA). Using publicly available data, researchers found the city recycles just 2.1% of plastic waste and incinerates nearly 50%, while the rest is landfilled. 

The oil industry scammed and misled the public into believing more plastic can be recycled than is actually possible, but the rate at which Baltimore is able to recycle its plastics is far lower than the national average or the four other cities researchers surveyed: Detroit, MI; Long Beach, CA; Minneapolis, MN; and Newark, NJ. The #BreakFreeFromPlastic campaign has launched a petition that calls for non-recyclable plastic to be banned, the banning of waste incineration, and for plastic manufacturers to be held responsible for disposing of their products. 

“While residents’ and workers’ call for Zero Waste has never been louder, we also face an unprecedented challenge in the plastics production boom that imposes toxics into our daily lives from the moment we are born,” Shashawnda Campbell of the South Baltimore Community Land Trust (SBCLT), which help release the report, told Battleground Baltimore.

SBCLT tweeted “Look forward to reviewing the findings of the new report on plastic waste pollution with @BaltimoreDPW, @MayorBMScott and City Council. Burning and burying 96% of plastics in Baltimore is a major problem for all of us. #ZeroWaste.”

In response to a request for comment, the city shared the overall recycling rate, but did not respond directly to the findings of the report. 

James Bentley, Director of Communications Department of Public Works, said via email that “21.55% is the 2019 recycling rate as measured by the Maryland Recycling Act (MRA). Our data on private recycling is dependent on voluntary reporting from private entities, so this is not a very accurate measurement and actual numbers may be higher.”

Bentley also claimed the report falsely asserts Baltimore does not have a citywide recycling collection program. It doesn’t quite say that, though. Page 33 of the report criticizes the efficacy of the plan, stressing that the program does not “guarantee access” for all of Baltimore: 

“Baltimore does not have a citywide recycling collection program that guarantees access to all residents and results in more plastic that could be recycled going to the incinerator.”

But Greg Sawtell of SBCLT noted that “many public housing residents do not have the option to participate in the city’s recycling program and many renters are excluded due lack of enforcement of city requirements for landlords to provide recycling at their units.”

According to the report, more than a third of non-recyclable plastic in Baltimore is plastic “film,” primarily plastic wrap and plastic bags. The city has a ban on plastic bags on the books, but earlier this year, Mayor Brandon Scott delayed the city’s plastic bag ban until October, citing the economic hardships resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic and stating that more time was needed to educate the public. 

In June, in the hopes of increasing the percentage of plastic and other materials that are recycled, Baltimore launched a $9.5 million dollar public-private partnership to modernize the city’s recycling program, to educate the public about what can be recycled, and to provide households with free recycling carts. But activists say that’s not enough—they want the city to stop burning plastic and end its contract with the BRESCO incinerator. 

Producing and burning plastic contributes the equivalent pollution of 189 new coal-burning power plants every year, a 2019 study by the Center of International and Environmental law found. The U.S. is a leader in generating and burning plastic waste, according to a 2020 study published in ScienceAdvances.

“When [plastics] are burned, residues go into the air just like the exhaust from cars, trucks, and smokestacks. Besides contributing to climate change, this leads to a range of health issues from asthma to heart disease to cancer to developmental disorders in children,” Dan Morhaim of Chesapeake Physicians for Social Responsibility said in a press conference launching the report. “Is it any wonder that these diseases are all on the rise?”

Incinerating plastics poses an environmental hazard, especially to the South Baltimore neighborhoods that border Baltimore’s BRESCO incinerator, which activists have long campaigned to close down, citing disproportionate public health impacts on Black and working-class residents. One in five Baltimore school students have asthma, twice the national average. 

The SBELT’s Campbell called for an end to burning plastics.

“With new information coming to light on the particular public health harms caused by the burning of high volumes of single use plastics, now is the time to end this reckless practice,” Campbell said in a press release. “In Baltimore, we are calling for a ban on burning plastic at the BRESCO incinerator as we work alongside a global movement of communities, workers and governments to end the production of single use plastics that pose unacceptable risks to our ecosystems and the planet future generations have a right to call home.”

Ghost Guns in Baltimore, Explained

Earlier this week, the Baltimore Police Department (BPD) and US Department of Homeland Security announced the arrests of four men involved in a significant drug dealing operation, boasting that “1200 grams of suspected ecstasy, over 1900 pills of suspected fentanyl, cocaine, heroin, scales for drug distribution, [and] 15 firearms and parts to manufacture 40 additional handguns also known as ghost guns” were seized.

The “ghost guns” displayed during the presser were polymer kits—boxes of plastic, unserialized gun parts that can be ordered online by anybody and usually cost between $300-$500.

‘Ghost gun’ is the catchall term for guns that do not have serial numbers (and are untraceable, as a result), that have been privately made, though it most often means guns that have been personally 3D-printed or assembled from a kit.

During the press conference for the raid, BPD Commissioner Michael Harrison explained that “[ghost guns] have found themselves in the hands of criminals, prohibited convicted felons, and gun traffickers because they know we cannot track them back to their origin.” 

Last month, Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Prevention and Policy held a virtual event where Deputy Police Commissioner Sheree Briscoe emphasized the increase in ghost gun seizures and warned of a rise in these untraceable guns. Some of these guns have already been connected to homicides, and more of these guns are being seized by police each year, she explained.

“We’re on pace to surpass last year’s numbers and potentially come in between 250 to 300 privately made firearms that will make their way to the streets of Baltimore,” Briscoe said last month.

The major talking point, and one repeated the most by local news back in June, was that ghost gun seizures increased by 400% between 2019 and 2020. WBAL wrote, “there’s new evidence to suggest that ghost guns are Baltimore’s newest crime epidemic.” That 400% increase, however, was from just 30 guns to 128 guns—in a city where police officers regularly seize thousands of guns each year. And the increase in ghost guns is hard to convincingly connect to an increase in violent crime.

For some perspective, Battleground Baltimore reached out to the Baltimore Police Department for the number of ghost guns seized each year since 2018, as well as the number of guns with the serial numbers “obliterated” (the old-fashioned way of making a gun untraceable) and the total number of gun seizures.

“A legitimate weapon will always have a serial number per Federal Law. A weapon in which the serial number has been removed, regardless of method of removal, is referred to as ‘Obliterated,’” Lindsey Eldridge, director of public affairs and community outreach for BPD said. “Some obliterated serial numbers are able to be ‘Raised’ either fully or partially in which case, the department can then run the serial number.” 

According to BPD, in 2018, the department seized 9 “ghost guns” and 46 obliterated guns out of a total of 3,910 guns.

In 2019, BPD seized 30 ghost guns and 43 obliterated guns out of a total of 2,202 guns.

In 2020, BPD seized 128 ghost guns and 59 obliterated guns out of a total of 2,242 guns.

This year, as of May 19, 2021, BPD seized 140 ghost guns and 60 obliterated guns out of a total of 823 guns.

Easy access to these guns which cannot be traced is troubling. However, the increase in the number of ghost guns seized each year, as gun seizures overall decrease, has not had a discernible impact on crime. Daniel Carlin-Weber, a Maryland-based firearms instructor and founder of C-W Defense, explained:

“Baltimore City has seen multiple years now with murders exceeding 300 people and assaults with firearms roughly three times that number, yet there does not seem to be an obvious correlation with how many guns the BPD are taking versus how many lives are being lost or violence committed with guns,” Carlin-Weber said of the gun seizure data. “Three years ago, BPD took nearly 4,000 guns and a year later, almost half that number. Baltimore violence did not double from 2018 to 2019 despite the dramatic drop in gun seizures.” 

The focus on ghost guns is primarily “political,” Carlin-Weber argued. In particular, he explained, “ghost guns” are often invoked as part of the world of right-wing militias. But as the “ghost guns” seizure by BPD illustrates, it is primarily, as it is with all gun law enforcement, Black men who are targeted, arrested, and incarcerated for gun possession.

“While [politicians] portray that white supremacists, extremists, and only those with hate in their hearts would want a privately-made firearm, the people being arrested on the streets will overwhelmingly and disproportionately continue to be Black men,” Carlin-Weber said. “We may hear that there exists a desire to demilitarize police departments or decrease the prison population, but that’s not the reality caused by the laws so focused on guns that we currently have and it will only get worse with more of them.”

Carlin-Weber reflects a growing number of gun rights advocates who stress the racist elements of gun enforcement and how gun policing in cities such as Baltimore is another way to target Black men. Gun laws and how they are policed in racially disparate ways in cities such as Baltimore, Carlin-Weber argues, creates the underground market for ghost guns.

“Maryland law in general sets forth a complicated and expensive regime to legally purchase handguns and legal carriage of a gun in public is out of reach for most Marylanders, whether they’re prohibited by law from owning guns or not,” Carlin-Weber said. “It should come as no surprise that so many decide to acquire or carry a gun illegally in a place where the police have a less than poor reputation and the impoverished conditions pervasive in Baltimore help to fuel so much violence.”

Baltimore Courtwatch, a watchdog group that tweets out court proceedings, told Battleground Baltimore, they have noticed more cases involving ghost guns, and prosecutors and judges using the same kind of rhetoric used by the police to make the guns seem especially nefarious.

“They’ll say, ‘A polymer gun was recovered and we know this is a rising issue especially in Baltimore City and we can’t trace these guns,’” Baltimore Courtwatch explained. “They try to make it a bigger thing than it is.”

Baltimore Courtwatch is also worried about the ease with which police could be planting these guns on people. In Baltimore especially, where the city has had to pay large settlements to residents who had guns planted on them and where the police are incentivized to increase their gun seizure numbers, this is not an outrageous accusation. Courtwatch noted that they often hear of ghost guns being found by police in cars and in houses much more than they find them on people.

“That raises the red flag for me,” Baltimore Courtwatch said. “You hear that the gun was hidden in the trunk of the car and the lawyer swears up and down that their client has never seen it.”

For Carlin-Weber, the focus on gun seizures is not only ineffective in reducing violence, it is “futile.”

“Serialized handguns made by licensed manufacturers still comprise the majority of firearms taken by police,” Carlin-Weber said. “We are in a country with more than 400 million firearms in private hands. Even if one could not physically make their own gun, the supply of guns in general makes prohibition more than futile.” 

During the BPD press conference, BPD Commissioner Harrison also argued for harsher sentencing for those caught by police possessing a weapon, calling for “real consequences… for gun offenders and those illegally possessing firearms within our city.”

Carlin-Weber noted that Harrison’s rhetoric was ostensibly more of the same, with one difference: Now, he is able to invoke “ghost guns” in his argument for more incarceration.

“The city cannot confiscate their way out of mitigating violence in Baltimore,” Carlin-Weber said.   “Yet Commissioner Harrison pleaded yesterday in his press conference for more police resources and made ghost guns a big part of that plea.” 

Baltimore County Tries To Reduce the Power of its Inspector General

Baltimore County can have a little bit of accountability, as a treat. That’s pretty much what Baltimore County Executive Johnny Olszewski said earlier this week when he helped introduce a bill that would have severely limited the powers of the county’s inspector general, Kelly Madigan. 

As first reported by Baltimore Brew, Olszewski, a Democrat who ran as a progressive, introduced a bill on Tuesday, July 6, that would put the inspector general under the oversight of a board that includes three people appointed by Olszewski and two appointed by the County Council Chair Julian Jones Jr., and two that would be agreed upon. The result would have the IG overseen by some of the most powerful people in county government—the kind of people the IG is supposed to be holding accountable.

Olszewski even claimed the bill he introduced was approved by IG Madigan, though Madigan said this was untrue. She said her office “identified several issues with the proposed legislation that would affect the independence and undermine the ability of the office to perform its mission.”

Back in May, Madigan was attacked by Council Chair Jones and Middle River Councilwoman Cathy A. Bevins for, well, doing her job. Bevins said the Inspector General’s Office was “giving Baltimore County a black eye.”

These attacks and attempts to legislate away accountability measures recalls elected officials in Baltimore City—primarily City Council President Nick Mosby and State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby—criticizing Baltimore City IG Isabel Cumming for, again, doing the job of the inspector general. That job is to investigate local government for corruption, fraud, and waste.

The county’s attempts to control the IG’s office were quickly condemned, and Olszewski put a pause on the bill.

“Our administration is proud to be the most open, accessible, and transparent in Baltimore County’s history. In just a few years we have taken unprecedented steps forward, including creating and expanding the County’s first-ever Inspector General,” a statement released by the county said. “We remain committed to filling gaps in the current law to provide appropriate accountability measures, but we want to ensure all concerns are thoughtfully considered. In the coming weeks, we will engage a diverse group of expert stakeholders to review and strengthen proposed policies so that we can help ensure the success of this important office.”

Also: Score another one for Baltimore Brew, which is consistently breaking news and getting scoops such as this one and then reporting the hell of it, making sure readers and the people in charge don’t forget about it.

“From Poppleton to Cherry Hill”

There’s a deal in the works that could avert the eviction of Cherry Hill Urban Community Garden  for six months, according to a video posted to Twitter by Black Yield Institute, the Black-led group that administers the space. Last month, Housing Authority of Baltimore City (HABC) issued an eviction notice to Black Yield Institute, only to spark public outcry over the targeting of the garden, which is the only source of fresh food for the Cherry Hill neighborhood. 

Servant Director of Black Yield Institute Eric Jackson said Black Yield has a “very promising opportunity” to remain at the community garden for the next six months, averting immediate eviction. 

The HABC echoed what Jackson said: “We had a positive & productive meeting with BYI and hope to reach a resolution as soon as next week,” HABC said to Battleground Baltimore in a statement.

On Saturday, July 3, activists from across the city gathered in the South Baltimore neighborhood of Cherry Hill to call attention to the eviction. An online petition has received 44,000 signatures to date to oppose the eviction of the garden. 

HABC previously said the Cherry Hill Urban Community Garden was occupying the land without permission and the city had “long term” plans to build affordable housing on the site. But with over 8,000 vacants controlled by the city, and a large vacant lot across the street from the farm, many were left wondering why the HABC wanted to develop that specific lot. 

Jackson said public pressure was successful in preventing the garden’s immediate eviction, and bringing the city to the table to negotiate a long-term home for the garden.

“We’re grateful for the mayor’s office, and the Housing Authority or any other agency that’s willing to help us, as Black Yield Institute is committed to continuing to provide food and opportunity for agriculture and opportunities to address food apartheid,” Jackson said. 

Westport resident and Westport Neighborhood Association President Keisha Allen, who frequents the community garden because her neighborhood also lacks a grocery store, told Battleground Baltimore the impacts of unhealthy food are compounded by local environmental hazards. 

“Weight, diabetes, hypertension, we already live near an incinerator and a landfill and other pollutants,” Allen said. “So most people here have asthma, or some kind of breathing issue. So it just makes us sicker and sicker. And this is just one more thing.” 

Allen, also the chair of the Harbor West Collaborative, said that the community garden  negotiating their eviction is a testament to the power of collective action.  

“What we do know is our elected officials, as well as our city agency, don’t like negative attention, and they don’t like pressure,” she said.

Westport is no stranger to the struggle against displacement and harmful development. In 2018, Allen helped win a ban on oil trains in Baltimore. She is also currently fighting Maglev, a high-speed and high-priced connection from Washington D.C. to Baltimore.

“There is nothing beneficial about coming into a majority Black neighborhood once again, and putting some fancy bourgeoisie rail line running through the middle of it,” Allen said.

At Black Yield’s rally last weekend, a group of residents held a banner that read “From Poppleton to Cherry Hill #Black Neighborhoods Matter” and “Community Control of Land Now.” They were there to raise awareness of their fight against a private developer displacing residents in Poppleton neighborhood located just northwest of downtown Baltimore. 

“One of the issues is that this is a farm that they’re fighting for land rights. And we’re doing the same thing in Poppleton, fighting for land rights,” said Sonia Eaddy, a longtime Poppleton resident and organizer. 

The group Organize Poppleton is seeking a meeting with city officials over their fight against  developer La Cité Development, which received $58.3 million in tax increment financing (TIF) in 2015, but has displaced the community instead of serving it, activists say. 

“We just have a small portion, like a block that’s left,” said Eaddy. 

Eaddy said the city used eminent domain to target individual homeowners before the community could organize collectively: “These laws allow the city the power to come in, and take private property for public use. But this is not the reality, these luxury apartments are not for public use, that’s a private investment for a private developer to benefit, this development is not going to benefit the community as a whole.”

Allen said Cherry Hill, Westport, and Poppleton have all become targets for displacement because they are located on prime real estate.

“City governments and special interest groups are too comfortable with just coming and bulldozing Black neighborhoods,” she said. “All because they don’t want us to be here.”

Organize Poppleton is holding a rally to “Save Our Block”  Saturday, July 10, from 6 – 8 pm at the Sarah Ann Street park (1100 Sarah Ann St.).

Hogan Fights To End Federal Unemployment Benefits 

Attorneys for the state of Maryland and plaintiffs suing the state for ending federal unemployment benefits head back to court on Monday, July 12 at 9:30 a.m. after a judge placed a temporary restraining order blocking Gov. Larry Hogan from halting unemployment payments.

Hogan faces two lawsuits for seeking to end the enhanced benefits before they expire in September. He is among 25 Republican governors who have sought to end the payments, arguing they have created a “worker shortage,” a claim challenged by numerous economists and shown to be untrue by business owners who pay a living wage and provide benefits to their workers.

“I’ve given 40 years of my life to my job,” said one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. “I can’t find anything comparable, and my old employer isn’t able to hire me back just yet. I’m very worried about losing benefits next month. I don’t know if I will be able to afford prescriptions for high blood pressure and diabetes, and fear that my wife and I will lose the home we’ve lived in the past 20 years.”

This week, judges rejected three immediate attempts by Hogan to overturn the restraining order, which is set to last 10 days and will be reviewed on July 9.

Obtaining unemployment benefits in Maryland has not been easy. Unemployed workers sounded off at a July 6 protest about the difficulties they continue to face getting unemployment. As of Tuesday, agents with the Maryland Department of Labor were denying unemployment claims on the false basis that benefits expired on July 3, but the state says employees have since received updated instructions. Robbie Leonard, one of the attorneys suing the state on behalf of plaintiffs, tweeted that as of July 7 there were currently no available in-person appointments to review unemployment claims.

At the protest, longtime community activist Rev. Annie Chambers urged “every legislator in Annapolis” to protect benefits for the unemployed, which many are clinging to as a lifeline. 

President Joe Biden so far has backed the efforts of Republican governors like Hogan to end unemployment benefits before they expire, but over 34,000 people have signed an online petition by the progressive group MoveOn urging Biden to reconsider. 

“Instead of focusing on addressing the real problems that harm working people and businesses every day, such as starvation wages, poor benefits that limit access to health care, and union-busting by large corporations, Republicans are trying to take unemployment benefits—that are already low to begin with—away from the people who need them,” the petition says.

Black-Led Community Garden in Cherry Hill Faces Eviction, Poppleton Challenges Developers

The remote, deeply segregated Black neighborhood neighborhood of Cherry Hill does not even have a grocery store, but the Cherry Hill Urban Community Garden has been remedying that problem, providing fresh food to a community that has little access to it—and now they’re facing eviction. 

Last month, The Housing Authority of Baltimore City (HABC) issued a notice to vacate the land where Cherry Hill Urban Community Garden exists. People at the Black Yield Institute, who have been running the farm since 2017, have been organizing in opposition to the eviction. Over 30,000 people have signed an online petition opposing the eviction, and Black Yield Institute is holding a rally on July 3, 2021 to call attention to the issue.

A spokesperson for the HABC said that the Black Yield Institute never had permission to use the land. 

“We cannot overlook the fact that the Black Yield Institute is occupying the land without permission. Our hope is they will be able to relocate and continue their farming elsewhere. Importantly, in keeping with our mission, HABC’s longer-term plans call for building badly needed affordable housing on the property.”

The Cherry Hill CDC at one time had a now-expired agreement to use the land in question. A July 8 meeting has been scheduled where the HABC, the Cherry Hill CDC, and the Black Yield Institute will meet to discuss the issue. 

Eric Jackson, Servant Director of Black Yield Institute, said it’s unclear why the HABC wants to eviction them now. He said it will only hurt fresh food access in Cherry Hill.

“Until there is affordable housing, the land will be unoccupied,” Jackson said. “I don’t see a reason why the people can’t use it for good use. We’re not over here doing vandalism. We’re providing jobs, we’re providing opportunities for young people to learn agriculture, we’re providing opportunities for people to laugh and have joy on this space.”

Jaisal Noor, Cameron Granadino and Brandon Soderberg produced this report for Battleground Baltimore this week.

Cherry Hill was born from one of the ugliest episodes of white rage in Baltimore’s history, resulting in the relocation of a proposed public housing project for African Americans after World War II to the city’s southern tip—a move that civil rights groups protested because of environmental hazards. Today, Cherry Hill has shocking levels of poverty and inequality. People living there have a life expectancy some 20 years shorter than their wealthier counterparts in other parts of the city.

In a recent video, Black Yield noted they played a key role in neighborhood food distribution when the pandemic deepened existing food insecurity issues, and said they expect to produce 4,000 pounds of produce this season. Representatives say they have produced and distributed 110,000 tons over the past decade, a significant contribution to a neighborhood with few options for healthy food.

Black Yield is looking for city leaders to step in and stop the eviction. “We haven’t been able to connect directly with Mayor Scott, but we do have reason to believe the mayor’s office is in support of [Black Yield],” Jackson said.

On July 1, a Safe Streets outreach worker named Kenyell Wilson was killed in Cherry Hill. Safe Streets seeks to interrupt violence before it turns deadly. The murder happened just days after the neighborhood celebrated one year without a fatal shooting, highlighting just how precarious life can be in one of Baltimore’s disinvested neighborhoods—and one that could soon lose its community farm.

Black Yield Institute and others in Cherry Hill are not the only ones currently fighting against the capricious and discriminatory policies in Baltimore.

Residents and allies of Southwest Baltimore’s Poppleton neighborhood are also fighting displacement; in this case it’s due to a luxury development they say will force longtime Black residents from their homes. For decades, Baltimore has sought to stimulate the economy, create jobs, and build housing by offering subsidies to wealthy developers, but many residents argue those policies have done far more harm than good.

“In Poppleton, the City of Baltimore is exploiting eminent domain laws and failing to protect Black families. We demand that the City of Baltimore stop enabling La Cité Development’s displacement of longtime residents in the name of a wasteful redevelopment project,” reads a Change.org petition started by the group Organize Poppelton.

The historic Black community, which dates back to the 1860s, is fighting to keep their homes, and for their own vision of development.

“We ask the City and the developer Dan Bythewood of La Cité/Center West to meet with the community and housing activists to provide transparency and accountability. The community is long overdue for transparency on a redevelopment project that has frozen the neighborhood’s revitalization for over fifteen years and led to disinvestment and decline,” said UMBC Professor of American Studies, Nicole King in a press release. “The development is heavily subsidized by public funds—including a $58.3 million in tax increment financing (TIF) in 2015. The developer and the City must be accountable to the public.”

Poppleton residents and allies are holding a rally to Save our Block on Saturday, July 10 from 6-8 p.m. at the Sarah Ann Street Park (1100 Sarah Ann St.).

A fight over green spaces is also happening in the East Baltimore neighborhood of Waverly. An op-ed by Battleground Baltimore’s Jaisal Noor, co-authored with numerous local residents of Waverly and Ednor Gardens, was published in The Baltimore Sun this week, calling for greater transparency from the Weinberg Y of Waverly after it fenced off the community’s primary green space on June 27, for a year, with no virtually no notice to residents. The Y controls the land, and is adding a daycare center and pavilion to their 33rd Street campus. But residents wonder if it’s truly necessary to fence off the entire green space for a full year, and question the lack of notice, which could have provided time to find an alternative solution. 

Now known as Stadium Place, the development occupies old Memorial Stadium, where crowds watched Orioles, Colts and Ravens. As the piece notes, the pandemic highlighted disparities in access to green space between Baltimore’s “white L”, and those communities in the “Black Butterfly”, a term coined by Dr. Lawrence Brown to illustrate the city’s deep geographic disparities. 

Twenty years ago, after the stadium was torn down, the community won a rare victory by defeating a bid to turn the area into a satellite campus of Johns Hopkins, the world renowned institution that has earned the distrust of many Black residents. Instead, the community secured badly needed affordable housing for seniors, currently being developed by Govans Ecumenical Development Corporation (GEDCO), a soon-to-be-completed hospice, along with youth facilities provided by the YMCA. But the project did not include a Community Benefits Agreement, so today the community has little leverage to hold the developers to their word if they ever renege on their pledge to include publicly-accessible green space at the site. 

“After the pandemic upended daily life, the Stadium Place green space transformed into an essential resource for the community — a safe space to reconnect with neighbors. Historically, low-income communities of color, like those in East Baltimore, have been denied access to quality green space,” the op-ed reads in part. “Residents say it’s vital to their well-being, and multiple studies have confirmed that green spaces in urban environments can improve physical and mental health, reduce stress, increase life expectancy and provide relief from extreme heat spurred by climate change.”

Residents of Harlem Park Put On Unconstitutional Lockdown In 2017, Receive Settlement

In November of 2017, when Baltimore Police Detective Sean Suiter was killed in the neighborhood of Harlem Park, the West Baltimore community was soon swarming with police and was swiftly locked down. Baltimore City Police claimed it was because of an all-hands-on-deck search for Suiter’s shooter, who they said wore a black and white jacket. 

For reasons that were never quite clear, representatives for the department said they believed that suspect remained in the neighborhood days after the shooting. 

Meanwhile, many people believed that Suiter, who was set to testify against the corrupt cops in Baltimore’s notorious police gang the Gun Trace Task Force, was likely killed by police rather than a resident and the lockdown was a purposeful distraction. The unconstitutional lockdown of Harlem Park lasted days as police officers searched residences and businesses, demanded that people show identification to enter and exit, and instituted what could be seen as martial law. 

Now, Baltimore City has settled with four Harlem Park residents who, with help from the ACLU, sued because their constitutional rights were violated. The settlement totaled $96,000 dollars. For more information about the settlement, check out Baltimore Brew’s coverage.

But the effects of this lockdown were community-wide and not relegated to four people. Battleground Baltimore’s Brandon Soderberg spoke to a Harlem Park resident, who we’ve chosen not to name and who was not part of the settlement, about what it was like living in the neighborhood in the aftermath of Suiter’s death and the lockdown of the community.

“When they locked down Harlem Park after Suiter’s death it was actually horrible. You couldn’t even go in and out your house without showing ID,” he told Battleground Baltimore. “They want to search your car every day and they want to know who you are and why you’re down here. They just was harassing people for no reason, you know, kicking in people doors.”

Many residents didn’t leave their homes or cancelled plans during the lockdown.

“Everybody was on, like, a standstill. People weren’t going out their house. People were staying home. We would stay home. If I wanted to go out to go to my mother house or pick my daughters up I would send for her in a cab,” he said

He said that it was clear to everybody in the community that Suiter was killed by police because he knew something about police corruption or was involved in it himself.

“’The police department had something to do with it, those officers that he was supposed to testify against had something to do with it.’ That’s what everybody in my neighborhood was saying.”

And Suiter’s shooting, he explained, had an even more chilling effect on residents calling attention to police misconduct and trusting the police in general.

“They can’t be trusted, none of them, you know,” he asked. “If they do something like that to their own, you can imagine what they’ll do to us. So, who’s gonna testify against someone like that? Like who’s actually gonna put their family in harm’s way to testify against police? No one.”

He said that the mobilized response to Suiter’s death illustrates what Black Baltimoreans, who endure the majority of the city’s gun violence, have been saying for decades: The police care about their own but not the residents.

“If it comes to them and theirs, they’re gonna protect their own with all their force. But when it comes to someone who has a family or friend or whatever that’s not part of the force? ‘Oh, we can forget about him, whatever happens to him happens,’” he said. “It’s like animal-eat-animal. ‘You kill each other, we don’t care. We’ll just go down there and we’ll tape the area off and tell your family where the body’s at, in the morgue.’ It’s no care from their perspective. There should be more care—they should be more considerate of that. A person just died.”

Settlement For Korryn Gaines’ Family Still Delayed

Five years after 23-year-old Korryn Gaines was killed by Baltimore County Police after a standoff at her Randallstown apartment, her family still has not been paid the $38 million awarded to them by a jury in 2018, a decision that was overturned by a judge in 2019 and then reinstated by a Maryand appeals court the following year.

Gaines’ son Kodi, who was five at the time, was also injured in the shooting.

Her family, civil rights leader Al Sharpton, and other supporters gathered on Wednesday in Patriot Plaza near Baltimore County’s Circuit Courthouse to bring attention to the case, discuss what the loss of Gaines’ life meant to them, and highlight the fact that Gaines’ family still has not been paid the money they are owed.

“Baltimore County has put my healing process on hold,” Gaines’ mother, Rhanda Dormeus, told the crowd. “It has not allowed me to move forward in my life emotionally, psychologically, which affects my physical [health].”

The case is now back in the hands of Associate Judge Mickey Norman, the same judge who overturned the jury’s decision, a detail which highlights how impossible it is for Black Americans to seek something resembling justice in the legal system. WBAL-TV reported that Norman declined to recuse himself from the case, nor did he set a date for another hearing relating to the money owed to Gaines’ family. That means that, for now, the case remains in limbo.

“A jury that sat for three weeks and listened to harrowing testimonies, these people did not come to this decision on a whim, they heard the testimony, officers stating…we don’t know why this happened,” Dormeus said. “Mickey Norman inserted himself into a jury’s decision, overturned the decision of six people who listened, and now he gets to decide whether he can recuse himself? How does that work?” 

Baltimore County Executive Johnny Olszewski released a statement that seemed to put distance between his own administration and the incident, while also offering a laundry list of reforms ostensibly aimed at ensuring an incident like this doesn’t happen again. 

“This administration created the county’s first comprehensive body worn camera release policy and is finishing the job to bring body worn cameras to all police officers. This administration identified and released concerning data to the public to strengthen transparency, and created an Equitable Policing Workgroup to examine that data and lead a community-driven effort to improve accountability. After the murder of George Floyd, this administration was the first jurisdiction in Maryland to advance police reform legislation, passing a ban on chokeholds among other meaningful reforms. And this administration built on all our work by supporting (Maryland House Speaker Adrienne) Jones’ landmark legislation in Annapolis, now hailed as a national model.” 

It’s important to note, however, that even though decades of attempts at police reform, killings of Black people have not stopped or even slowed. 

Baltimore County State’s Attorney Scott Shellenberger declined to charge any officers in Gaines’ death. Baltimore County police say that the officer who shot Gaines, Cpl. Royce Ruby, is no longer with the department. 

Governor Hogan Sued For Ending Unemployment

Editor’s note: This story has been updated.

On July 3, 2021 a judge issued a last-minute, temporary restraining order blocking Republican Governor Larry Hogan from ending $300-a-week federal unemployment for hundreds of thousands of people at midnight, two months before they are set to expire. Plaintiffs and attorneys are holding a press conference at 12:30PM over Zoom. 

“This is welcome news for the thousands of hospitality workers in Maryland who are still laid off due to the pandemic,” said Roxie Herbekian, President of UNITE HERE Local 7, whose members were part of one of two lawsuits challenging Hogan’s order. “The Convention and Visitor industry has not fully recovered. This will give people a little more time to be recalled or find other jobs.”

“If my benefits are cut off, I don’t know what I’ll do,” said plaintiff Shad Baban in a press release. “I am the breadwinner for my wife and nine-month-old, and I won’t be able to cover my family’s expenses. We’ll almost certainly lose our home, and I’ll lose my car, which I would need to work. I thought these benefits would see me through the next couple of months until I can get on my feet. I can’t eat or sleep with the anxiety this is causing.”

While working people suffered through a public health and economic crisis, the rich saw their wealth skyrocket. Hogan and two dozen other Republican Governors claim ending unemployment will help the economy recover from a so-called “labor shortage”. But many, including the non-partisan Economic Policy Institute, have argued there’s very little evidence that enhanced unemployment benefits have contributed to reported staffing shortages. 

Businesses like worker co-ops, that offer living wage jobs with decent benefits and working conditions, aren’t facing those same challenges.

Cutting off unemployment benefits early will have a far reaching, and disproportionate effect, six Marylanders argued in a June 30 lawsuit filed by Public Justice Center and Gallagher Evelius & Jones LLP. 

“Of the more than 300,000 state residents who receive unemployment benefits, 84.7% will be left with no unemployment assistance at all. In addition, 46,522 Maryland recipients of regular unemployment benefits will have their weekly benefits cut by $300 per week. This will further exacerbate existing inequities laid bare by the pandemic:  the latest data shows that nearly 59% of Maryland unemployment insurance recipients are Black, Latinx, or other people of color. In total, the early termination of unemployment benefits will cost the state of Maryland approximately $1.9 billion that would otherwise sustain people while they look for work, help businesses reopen, and create jobs.”

Now, 860,000 households, or more than 1 in 3 Marylanders were already struggling to make ends meet, before the pandemic, and 1 in 5 Maryland residents are now behind on rent, according to a recent United Way survey. The state’s eviction ban expires in August. 

We blinked and the first six months of the year 2021 passed—or so it seems. There’s always a lot going on in Baltimore, but this year has felt heavier than usual. That’s why we are using this week’s Battleground Baltimore to reflect on what we have been through and highlight what we have learned and how the city has failed its residents.

COVID-19 and Vaccination Inequity

The year began with all of us still very much in the grips of COVID-19. The fight this year was not just to stop the spread of the potentially deadly disease, but over how soon we should resume elements of normal life that the pandemic interrupted. 

The Baltimore Teachers Union pushed back as school administrators looked to reopen in-person education during the pandemic. Corey Gaber, The Baltimore Teachers Union’s Elementary School Vice President, told us that the union has always been firm that in-person learning should only happen when it’s as safe as possible for students and teachers.

“We should not be expanding learning in-person, until it’s safe,” Gaber said. “And we have some very specific ideas of what safety looks like. And they know that we believe they’re nowhere close to meeting those standards, not just our own standards, but their stated standards for what should be in place before moving to in-person learning.” 

Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott has been trying to hold steady here in the city as Gov. Larry Hogan pushed more and more for further reopening. He urged Marylanders to go get a vaccine shot and then head to Ocean City even though, as we noted, “Hogan’s assertion is both untrue and unsafe: with both the Pfizer and Moderna versions of the vaccine, recipients must get two doses of the vaccine and then wait two weeks to be considered fully vaccinated. With the Johnson and Johnson vaccine, recipients are considered vaccinated two weeks after a single dose. If someone was to go to Ocean City after getting a dose, they would still be at high risk of contracting and spreading the virus.” 

As Battleground Baltimore has noted throughout the year, inequitable vaccine distribution has been the primary reason why the city, which is over 60% Black, has continued to struggle.

“If vaccine distribution were equitable, we would expect to see comparable rates of vaccination across racial groups and jurisdictions, but vaccination rates are not tracking with the size or racial demographic of county populations,” Scott said back in March.

Currently, Baltimore’s vaccination rate is at 55%. Scott has said that when the vaccination rate reaches 65%, the indoor mask order will be lifted.

Residents’ Calls to Defund the Police Ignored

Two Baltimore Taxpayers’ Night events—town hall-style events where residents show up and express their excitement, and more often anger, about the city’s proposed budget—were dominated by demands to defund the Baltimore Police Department (BPD). Mayor Brandon Scott’s 2022 budget proposed an additional $28 million for BPD, and in response, the group Organizing Black mobilized, getting residents from all across the city to speak out. It was a powerful public response from a city scarred by decades of police incompetence and corruption.

At the second Taxpayers’ Night in late May, Dr. Gwen DuBois, a primary care physician who lives in the Mount Washington neighborhood and one of more than 50 people who spoke, declared, “I love Baltimore so I must speak out and urge you to reduce the amount of money we are investing in policing while ignoring the root causes of violence.”

Police spending in Baltimore has exploded over the past two decades, and it has not made Baltimore safer: “As the police budget grows each year, homicides and nonfatal shootings increase as well. Baltimore City, with a population of only 600,000, recently surpassed 100 homicides for this year, before New York City, a city of almost 9 million, reached 100 homicides,” we wrote last month. 

This week, however, Scott’s budget passed with no amendments, so BPD got the additional $28 million, putting its annual budget at $555 million. According to Organizing Black, the city spends more than $900 per person on policing. For every dollar spent on policing, 50 cents is spent on public schools, 20 cents on public housing, 12 cents on homeless services, 11 cents on recreation and parks, and 1 cent on mental health services.

The police budget increase has left many residents asking why these Taxpayers’ Night events are even held if the overwhelming majority of residents speaking out against the budget are ignored. Scott praised the passed budget in a statement.

“You can determine a great deal about a city simply by looking through its budget. From immediate necessities to long standing priorities, a budget offers an intimate glimpse into how a city truly sees itself and what it values,” Scott’s statement read in part. “I vowed during the State of the City address to restore faith in City Hall and prove that local government can operate effectively and efficiently in the public’s best interest. The swift, unanimous support in passing this budget is a clear and direct sign of progress.”

The Saga of the Mosbys

We have discussed the Mosbys a lot this year. A married couple, Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby and Baltimore City Council President Nick Mosby both hold high offices simultaneously, an inherent conflict of interest no one in power seemed willing to challenge. But beyond these unaddressed conflicts of interest, it turns out that as of March, as The Baltimore Sun reported, they are both under federal investigation.

We asked: “Should Nick Mosby, who sits on the Board of Estimates, have influence over the way the city spends its money when he himself is under increased scrutiny for his own financial matters? Should Marilyn Mosby continue to work with federal agents as part of her job heading up the Baltimore State’s Attorney’s Office if she is also under federal investigation? Would either Nick or Marilyn be taking a step back while the investigation played out?” 

The announcement of the federal investigation followed months of reporting by Baltimore Brew. The couple responded to the Brew’s reporting by attacking the outlet, and also striking out at the Baltimore Office of the Inspector General, accusing department head Isabel Cumming of racial bias after she conducted a review of travel that Marilyn Mosby requested.

Meanwhile, Nick Mosby has been dividing the city council, shoring up support from some council members, and, Battleground Baltimore has learned, vindictively leaving certain council members out of the loop on key information and slowing down crucial legislation introduced by council members who dared to go against him. As Baltimore Brew reported just this week, Nick Mosby pulled a bill that would benefit the LGBTQ+ community because its sponsor, Councilperson Odette Ramos, reconsidered her position on a troubling renter’s bill introduced with the support of venture capitalists.

We also wrote about Marilyn Mosby’s decision to give the middle finger to a man who asked her to free Keith Davis Jr. Davis’ wife Kelly, along with supporters, have maintained that he is innocent. 

When it happened last month, we said “Mosby is one of the city’s most visible and highest-ranking officials, and her position means that she weighs in on life-or-death matters involving the mostly Black and Brown residents moving through Baltimore’s criminal justice pipeline. It’s imperative that someone in her position be a person who can be trusted to keep their word. That she was able to lie so easily about something so easy to disprove raises the question: what else has she been dishonest about? And if Mosby was willing to use the State’s Attorney’s Office’s social media account, which is supposed to be used to educate the public, to further her own agenda, what other public-facing entities is she willing to utilize to her personal advantage?”  

People Power Stopped Predatory Renter’s Bill

One of the rare examples of people power being able to take down the entrenched power structures of the city (who generally do whatever they want) was the mass mobilization by residents against a “rental security insurance” bill. Pushed by Council President Nick Mosby and Councilperson Sharon Middleton, among others, this bill was highlighted by activists who called it “a scam.” 

Framed as a way of helping renters who cannot afford a security deposit, the bill, we explained back in April, “would allow renters to pay [a security deposit] off in three monthly installments—which few have a problem with—and codifies the option to purchase ‘rental security insurance’—which most housing advocates in Baltimore have a big problem with. That’s because ‘rental security insurance’ is really a surety bond which can easily trap tenants in fees they can never escape.” 

A major problem with the bill was the involvement of Rhino, a venture capital-supported startup in the business of selling security deposit insurance that was for a time lobbying without a license, and has pushed these kinds of “rental security insurance” bills in other states. Battleground Baltimore spoke to an activist who dropped banners around city hall, which called attention to the bill: “Allowing a hedge fund-backed company like Rhino to come into Baltimore and treat us how they like was not a so-called ‘renter’s choice’—it was a choice made for us, by some rather wealthy people who do not face the conditions we do,” the activist told us.

The bill, which passed the council easily, was eventually vetoed by Mayor Brandon Scott. 

“I simply cannot ignore the significant concerns over the security deposit insurance option in the legislation. This provision could potentially hurt the very people this bill seeks to help. In this case, the benefits of an installment plan for security deposits do not outweigh the potential costs of the security deposit insurance provision to already vulnerable residents,” Scott said in a statement.

That veto was upheld when a number of councilmembers who had voted for it, chose not to challenge Scott’s veto.

“The bill’s passage would have harmed the very people its supporters purport to want to protect, and instead would have enriched New York-based venture capitalists at our expense. We do need real solutions for tenants, but what this bill offered was exploitation,” Baltimore Renters’ Union (BRU) said after Scott’s veto.

Baltimore Co-ops Reopened on Workers’ Terms

At the height of the pandemic, the restaurant industry sought to overturn Baltimore’s ban on indoor dining, arguing it was the only way they could stay in business. But studies linked indoor dining with increased COVID-19 infection and death rates, so Baltimore’s cooperatively-owned restaurants Red Emma’s and Joe Squared voted to take a different path: they put the safety of their workers over the need for profits.

In March 2020, Red Emma’s, one of Baltimore’s oldest co-ops, temporarily closed its doors, and lost their primary sources of revenue—a typically bustling bookstore, restaurant, and bar, all of which doubled as an organizing and event space. They then shifted to deliveries, outdoor events, and opened a “General Store” with other local co-ops. 

Around that same time, Joe Squared, which was not yet a co-op, felt like COVID-19 would be a death blow for them. After 15 years as a fixture in Baltimore’s Station North neighborhood, co-owners Joe Edwardson and his mom Kathy Palokoff closed the doors of Joe Squared.

But the former workers and owners began exploring worker ownership. And after receiving a number of pandemic-related grants, loans, and support from other worker-owners, Joe Squared was able to reopen in December of 2020, as a cooperatively run restaurant.

Now, both Red Emma’s and Joe Squared are open once again, and, thanks to their co-op model, were able to protect their workers at a time when very few other workers were protected. Joe Squared is currently open with limited capacity, and Red Emma’s has recently begun limited seating.

This people-first approach stands in contrast to the recent response by nearly 40 business owners in the Fells Point neighborhood who claimed they would not be paying their taxes until the area, a haven for partying and drinking, received additional police and public safety resources. It was the latest example of the decades-old rhetorical battle Fells Point business owners have waged in which they demand far kinder treatment (and far more resources) than most of the city.

“If these Fells Point businesses get away with their tax strike because they want more police and more policing, does that mean we get to stop paying city taxes until the police are defunded? Is that how this works?” Red Emma’s tweeted.

For more coverage of cooperative models in Baltimore and elsewhere in the United States, check out the series on co-ops by Battleground Baltimore’s Jaisal Noor.

Although many Baltimore leaders are adept at paying lip service to the movement to protect Black lives, they still have a long way to go in their efforts to confront the systems that work together to kill Black people. 

This was apparent in the way Baltimore’s Police Commissioner Michael Harrison and Mayor Brandon Scott marked the one year anniversary of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of former police officer Derek Chauvin. 

On May 25, Commissioner Harrison told a group of residents and activists who gathered near Johns Hopkins University for the one year anniversary of George Floyd’s murder by police, that the Lord put him in Baltimore to make a difference.

“I’m here because I was called by God to be here.” Harris, who has been commissioner since 2019, told attendees. 

At the event, Harrison, like a lot of officials all across the country, sought to make Floyd’s violent and public death the exception to policing rather than the rule. Harrison, a police veteran of 30 years, called Floyd’s death “a shock to the conscience.”

During the event, attendees said the names of victims of police brutality all over the country. They said Floyd’s name, of course. They said the names of Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Eric Garner. They said Freddie Gray’s name, but the killings of Black people in Baltimore did not stop with Freddie Gray, and there were others before him. They did not say the name of Tyrone West, whose sister Tawanda Jones has been calling attention to her brother’s death and police brutality since 2013.

Baltimore has already gone through all of this. The one year anniversary of the 2015 Baltimore Uprising arrived with similarly milquetoast panels and town halls and those played out a lot like this George Floyd event. A moment where the revolutionary fervor was fully absorbed by those in power, taken from the people that understood why Baltimore had to rise up, and replaced by reform and accountability talk that played well to news cameras. 

But very little has changed in Baltimore since Gray’s death. The police budget continues to grow. The department remains under a federal consent decree and refuses to reckon with one of the country’s most egregious police scandals, in which the BPD’s Gun Trace Task Force was shown to be robbing residents, dealing drugs, and planting evidence. 

Just this week, Kevin Jones, the sergeant who oversaw the corrupt unit in the months leading up to their indictment, was promoted to chief of patrol.

Harrison took some time to tell the crowd who came out in honor of George Floyd, a feel-good story about a police department that has failed to reckon with its own racism and corruption.

“This is what we now call the greatest comeback story in America,” Harrison said.

“The greatest comeback story in America” is the Baltimore Police Department’s 2019 recruitment campaign slogan, by the way.

Meanwhile, Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott released a statement on the one-year anniversary of Floyd’s death.

“The murder of George Floyd last year provided a gut check for the nation and forced leaders to reimagine the future of public safety and policing,” Scott’s statement said. “Since then, leaders have successfully made strides to improve transparency, integrity, and accountability, but there is much more work to accomplish.”

As he often does, Scott said the right things. And it seems as though he actually means it, though many also bristled at how the statement mostly focused on good governance—how Scott is “committed to approaching public safety as an urgent public health matter” and how “the Baltimore Police Department is addressing long-standing racial and gender disparities in their ranks by issuing a new strategic framework to advance equity.” 

This, as Battleground Baltimore’s Lisa Snowden-McCray noted in a deep dive into Scott’s mayorship, is Scott’s approach: running the city “at a basic level of competency” and at the same time, trying to address “a rising, progressive call for bolder action from dedicated activists.”

“Everyone must accept the moral challenge to be better and do better, and ultimately show Gianna Floyd that her father did in fact change the world,” Scott’s statement concluded.

Immediately, many pointed out that Scott’s budget increases the police budget by $28 million dollars. Others noted that Scott, while ready to declare “George’s life mattered,” has been silent about the ongoing prosecution of Keith Davis Jr., a Black man shot by police in June of 2015, later charged with a homicide, and prosecuted four times for the same crime (and likely to be prosecuted a fifth time). Davis Jr.’s case has become a local and national activist cause due to the sheer amount of prosecutorial misconduct and police corruption surrounding the case and the advocacy of Davis Jr.’s wife Kelly.

After Commissioner Harrison spoke, Battleground Baltimore took a moment to ask the commissioner a couple of questions.

When Harrison was asked about the growing demands across the city for Baltimore to defund the department, he said the budget was out of his hands, that he had no control over it.

“There are no operational increases,” Harrison said. “What you’ll see when we do our budget presentation, it’s all things that are out of our control, like pension and healthcare and stuff like that. So there’s no extra money going to the police department for operational costs. It’s just things that are beyond our control that happen in all city agencies.” 

When Harrison was asked about Keith Davis Jr., he said he didn’t know anything about Keith Davis Jr.

“I’m not familiar with that one. So I don’t know that I can speak to it,” he said. 

Taxpayer’s Night

While the May 25 event for Floyd gave Harrison a chance to make a case for himself and provided those who attended a moment to reflect and mourn, the second Baltimore Taxpayer’s Night on May 27 gave Baltimoreans a chance to say what was on their mind: “Defund the police” and “Free Keith Davis Jr.”

“I love Baltimore so I must speak out and urge you to reduce the amount of money we are investing in policing while ignoring the root causes of violence,” Dr. Gwen DuBois, a primary care physician who lives in the Mount Washington neighborhood said.

This Taxpayer’s Night gave resident’s an opportunity to speak to the Baltimore City Council and followed a previous Taxpayer’s Night in April that was directed at Mayor Scott. At that April event, due to the efforts of Organizing Black, nearly 100 people from across the city called in to demand the police budget not be increased. May’s Taxpayer’s Night went similarly.

“That the City of Baltimore has to scramble together on two nights to say something and hope that it changes is not a participatory process,” Rob Ferrell of Organizing Black noted, before stressing that residents in Baltimore want more of a say in how their tax money is being spent.

Organizing Black’s demands are that the police budget be reduced by $100 million. The overwhelming majority of speakers at May’s Taxpayer’s Night event not only called for defunding the police (only two people who spoke praised the department), but also called attention to Keith Davis, Jr.

“These trials have resulted in two mistrials and two overturned guilty verdicts. They have cost the city of Baltimore an estimated $1.2 million dollars,” said Bilphena Yahwon, who has been advocating for Davis Jr. for years. “It is clear that Baltimore residents are directly paying for the unjust prosecution of a police brutality victim.”

The day after dozens of residents declared “Free Keith Davis Jr.” or some variation of that sentiment during Taxpayer’s Night, the Baltimore City State’s Attorney’s Office announced additional charges against Davis Jr. 

The announcement came in the form of a Friday news dump, released around 6 p.m. on May 28, heading into Memorial Day weekend. He was charged with attempted murder due to a stabbing in jail last year. The charges arrived just a couple of weeks after Davis Jr.’s previous conviction was overturned.

Davis Jr.’s growing supporters argued that the timing of the new charges were suspicious and explained that the incident from over a year ago, was in self-defense. 

On the day the new charges were announced, Keith’s wife Kelly spoke out.

“Marilyn Mosby is continuing to be vindictive and retaliate against Keith. Keith is now being charged with attempted murder on a detainee who threatened my life and attacked him,” Kelly Davis said on the day of the new charges. “I just want the city to know this is what we’re dealing with. We’re dealing with this powerful woman who continues to use the criminal justice system she is supposed to be shepherd of, to attack Keith, a police brutality victim.”

“Free Keith Davis Jr.” Rally

On Tuesday, June 2, a group of over 50 supporters gathered outside of the Baltimore City Circuit Courthouse to call attention to the ongoing prosecution—and as defense attorney LaToya Francis Williams said, persecution—of Davis Jr. and more broadly, to the all-encompassing cruelty of the prison system.

“This conference is to show you all that Keith Davis Jr. is not just the case,” Yahwon told the crowd. “Keith Davis Jr. is not just a ward of the state. Keith Davis Jr. is not just a property of a prison. He is a father, a loving father.”

Yahwon again mentioned the economic cost of continuing to prosecute Davis Jr.

“We are saying not only drop the charges against Keith Davis Jr. But that no tax money, no tax payer, none of us should be implicated in the filing of the state,” Yahwon said. 

The event highlighted the voices of young Black people in Baltimore, as well as educating attendees and passersby about the harmful impact the criminal justice system has had on people in Baltimore and how deep its roots go.

Nineteen-year-old activist Solomon Mercer, noted that Davis Jr.  has been prosecuted not once, but five times by “a Black woman herself,” referring to Mosby. Then Mercer asked the question that many Baltimoreans have been asking themselves as they watch, year after year, public officials saying the right thing but rarely doing the right thing.

“How can you claim that you want to change your city and change our system, but do nothing to change it?,” Mercer said.

Marilyn Mosby’s Middle Finger to Keith Davis—and Baltimore

Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby lied this week, by way of the State’s Attorney’s official Twitter account, and that’s a big deal. Mosby was caught on video Wednesday putting her middle finger up at a resident who spotted her at downtown Baltimore restaurant Sandlot and yelled “Free Keith Davis Jr.” The video was quickly shared on social media. In response to a tweet from Davis’ wife, Kelly, someone from the SAO’s office tweeted out: “This is clearly a thumb guys – enough already. Let’s move on.”

The problem was that it was not just a thumb, as reporter Justine Barron pointed out via high-quality screenshots of the video—it was a middle finger.

Kelly, along with other supporters of Keith’s cause, have long argued that Mosby’s pursuit of Davis is personal, not professional. Sinced 2016, Mosby has been trying to convict Davis for the murder of a Baltimore security guard named Kevin Jones. However, the case is a complicated one. Davis was shot by police in June 2015, and near his unconscious body was a gun, which police later claimed Davis used to shoot Jones. Davis’ first trial resulted in a hung jury, as did his third trial. The second trial ended in a guilty verdict—and the State’s Attorney’s office tweeted “victory” afterward—but Davis was granted another trial because the background of one of the prosecution’s key witnesses was not fully disclosed to the jury. In 2019, during his fourth trial, Davis was found guilty again, but that conviction was overturned just last week, and now it’s up to Mosby to take him to trial again or drop the charges.

Mosby is one of the city’s most visible and highest-ranking officials, and her position means that she weighs in on life-or-death matters involving the mostly Black and Brown residents moving through Baltimore’s criminal justice pipeline. It’s imperative that someone in her position be a person who can be trusted to keep their word. That she was able to lie so easily about something so easy to disprove raises the question: what else has she been dishonest about? And if Mosby was willing to use the State’s Attorney’s Office’s social media account, which is supposed to be used to educate the public, to further her own agenda, what other public-facing entities is she willing to utilize to her personal advantage?  

As we have written about before, Marilyn Mosby and her husband, Council President Nick Mosby, are already intertwined in an ugly and unaddressed conflict of interest. They are a married couple that both hold executive-level offices in Baltimore City: Marilyn at the SAO and Nick as president of the Baltimore City Council. Nick is the head of a body that approves the budget for Marilyn’s department. The two are also the subject of an ongoing federal investigation into their financial matters. Neither Mosby has indicated that they would step back from operating in their normal capacities in any way, and no other city officials have indicated that they should. Mosby’s lie makes all of this much worse. 

Security Deposit Insurance Vetoed by Mayor

Tenants’ rights advocates had to wait until the very last minute to learn that Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott had decided to veto the so-called “security insurance” bill which was approved by Baltimore City Council last month. The deadline was Monday, May 17 at 5 p.m., and that’s when Scott made his announcement and published his letter about the veto to Council President Nick Mosby, who, along with Councilperson Sharon Middleton, sponsored the bill, and, as recent reporting revealed, worked closely with Rhino.

“I simply cannot ignore the significant concerns over the security deposit insurance option in the legislation. This provision could potentially hurt the very people this bill seeks to help. In this case, the benefits of an installment plan for security deposits do not outweigh the potential costs of the security deposit insurance provision to already vulnerable residents,” Scott said in a statement.

According to multiple people Battleground Baltimore spoke to, Scott’s decision was not only announced at the last minute, but whether or not he would veto the bill was still being weighed within his office on the evening of Sunday, May 16. Earlier that day, Baltimore Brew released a damning story based on emails received via a public information request which showed, as the Brew said, that Rhino’s “involvement in the months that followed was significant, as Bill 21-0022 was discussed, amended, and finally approved by the Council.”

The bill, which was presented as a way of helping renters pay for their security deposit, was really a surety bond that often ensnares renters in fees and further limits their ability to challenge landlords in rent court.

In response to the veto, Nick Mosby released a statement which ridiculously described the veto of the “security insurance” bill as “modern day redlining,” and claimed, “this is what structural racism looks like in practice: Government’s role turns paternalistic when it comes to poor Black people.” Battleground Baltimore’s Lisa Snowden-McCray characterized the statement as Mosby “weaponiz[ing] identity politics.”

The Brew’s article also shows that Mosby lied when he claimed on local public radio affiliate WYPR that he “had no relationship with Rhino,” the company that would profit from this bill if it went into law and has introduced similar bills in other cities. “The correspondence shows [a Rhino lobbyist] worked closely with a legislative staffer for City Council President Nick Mosby.”

Battleground Baltimore reached out to Mosby’s office the day of his WYPR comments and twice over the past week and received no responses.

The victory here is for Baltimore’s perpetually mistreated renters, but it also illustrates the effect that grassroots organizing and alternative media can have on fraught neoliberal policies that, in the past, Baltimore City has been comfortable rubber-stamping.

Baltimore Renters United (BRU), one of the primary groups organizing against this bill, praised Scott’s decision to veto it.

“If this [bill] had passed into law, it would have harmed real people, including members of our coalition and those of the nearly 50 organizations, representing a huge swathe of Baltimore City, who signed on to our letter urging a veto from Mayor Scott,” BRU said in a statement. “The bill’s passage would have harmed the very people its supporters purport to want to protect, and instead would have enriched New York-based venture capitalists at our expense. We do need real solutions for tenants, but what this bill offered was exploitation. We also want to be clear that a groundswell of solidarity around this bill, from every part of the city we love, will not stop. We will continue to build with our supporters in our ongoing fight for housing justice in Baltimore City, and we hope that the Baltimore City Council will be willing to work with us to protect the right to fair and equitable housing in the future.”

While the City Council could override Scott’s veto, that does not seem likely. 

Baltimore Stands With Palestine

Last week in Battleground Baltimore, we discussed “connecting the deep history of racism, segregation, and brutal, boundary-enforcing police in Baltimore to the decades of Israeli occupation in Palestine,” best represented in chants heard during 2015’s uprising: “From Baltimore to Palestine, Occupation is Not a Crime.” 

At the Baltimore Stands With Palestine rally and march on Tuesday, May 18, more than 200 people gathered at Baltimore’s City Hall, and many of the event’s speakers discussed those connections more deeply. Dana Abushanab, described how a friend told her when she moved to Baltimore, “the streets of Baltimore are like the streets of Palestine.”

“When I talk about the youth here in Baltimore City it’s hard not to get choked up because the reality for us Palestinians is that we don’t get to see our babies, we don’t get to see our young people as a fundamental condition of Zionism, of being a people who live in exile,” Abushanab said. “When I look at the Black youth in Baltimore City, I see Palestine too, I see young Palestinian people and I don’t think they understand … how much it means to me to be able to work alongside the grassroots community here.”

Then Abushanab led the crowd in a chant of, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

Zainab Chaudry, the Maryland Outreach Director for the Council on American–Islamic Relations (CAIR), addressed the United States’ role in supporting Israel and President Joe Biden’s administration approving $735 million in arms sales to Israel.

“Enough is enough. We are heartbroken by the news that has been coming out of Palestine over the last two weeks but not only over the last two weeks but over the last 54 years of military occupation and the last 73 years of ethnic cleansing that has been happening to Palestine,” Chaudry said. “This is a genocide that is happening with our tax dollars. We are here today to call on the Biden administration and our elected officials that we don’t need Eid celebrations brothers and sisters, we don’t need Iftars, we need our government officials to stop funding the dropping of bombs on our brothers and sisters in Palestine.”

Since Tuesday’s event, Biden has announced what he has characterized as “a mutual, unconditional ceasefire,” though many have noted the limits of that, which does not address a potential peace process, Palestinian self-determination, or Israel’s war crimes over the past two weeks. 

Another speaker at Tuesday’s rally was Rabbi Ariana Katz, of Hinenu, the “Baltimore Justice Shtiebl” that provided Battleground Baltimore with a powerful statement last week. Katz continued speaking for Jews who comprehend the realities of Israeli occupation for Palestinians.

“I speak on behalf of a strong and present and growing movement of Jewish people who say the liberation of the Palestinian people is urgent and necessary and a long overdue reality,” Katz said. “Liberation is not only possible but it is on its way. When we look around us here in Baltimore or when we direct our attention to Palestine it feels hard to imagine, but it is our solemn duty. This does not mean acting as if life and death are out of our hands. To believe liberation is possible, to feel it just around the corner is to get ready for it.”

NAACP Baltimore President Kobi Little also spoke.

“I’m here today because I’m a global citizen. I’m here today because I’m a child of revolution. I’m here today because I know the struggle of Black people, I know the struggle of African people, I know the struggle of Indigenous people—I know the struggle for justice,” Little said. “I believe in self-defense, but self-defense is not annexation. Self-defense is not occupation. Self-defense is not genocide. Self-defense is not expansion into other people’s land.”

The crowd, which had grown closer to 300, then briefly marched through Baltimore, waving Palestinian flags, as chants of “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” “Gaza, Gaza don’t you cry, Palestine will never die,” and and “Allahu Akbar” bounced off of buildings downtown, including the hulking, brutalist Baltimore Police Department headquarters.

Among those at the rally was Iranian, Baltimore-based visual artist Taha Heydari, who spoke with Battleground Baltimore about why he attended.

“I didn’t think about why I attended, I just went. It’s just so embedded in my upbringing. I was born and raised in Iran. It was always on TV, Palestine and Israel. So I’ve always been conscious. That’s my personal relationship to it,” Heydari said. “Also I remember my dad holding me and running to shelters while Tehran was bombarded by Iraqi bombs. So I feel that I’m familiar with what’s happening in Palestine—it’s deep in my subconscious. And also, I’m familiar with oppression growing up in Iran, being watched, being controlled. The gaze of the state is always there. I can recognize that gaze when I feel it.” 

For Heydari, a painter whose work often incorporates and explores politically charged, historical images, he was also thinking of how Palestine is represented and covered in the press.

“When I see Israel and Palestine, I think about how I’ve never been there. But I’m left with images, I’m bombarded with images of Israel and Palestine,” Heydari said. “So I question the representation, the platform, the tools and media. So my work investigates these through painting.”

Heydari noted the connections between the occupation of Palestine and activists occupying the lawn in front of City Hall on Tuesday, and back in 2015, protesting police brutality.

“Standing in front of the City Hall building—that has a history,” Heydari said. “That area has been occupied before, for Freddie Gray, for George Floyd.”

On Saturday, May 21 at 5 p.m., there will be a Resistance Until Liberation rally in front of City Hall to “demand that Baltimore City reject all ties to the Zionist state and to show that from Baltimore to Palestine, the fight for liberation continues.”

ELSEWHERE

Cleaning Up City Hall, Baltimore Magazine.

Maryland’s COVID-19 Vaccinations by Zip Code

Trailer for “All Light, Everywhere” directed by Theo Anthony

Update 05/18/2021: After this story was published, Mayor Brandon Scott issued a last-minute veto of the “security insurance” bill at 5PM on May 17th.

From Baltimore to Palestine

“From Baltimore to Palestine, occupation is a crime,” was one of many chants heard back in 2015 during the Baltimore Uprising—a way of connecting the deep history of racism, segregation, and brutal, boundary-enforcing police in Baltimore to the decades of Israeli occupation in Palestine. A 2016 Department of Justice report on the Baltimore Police Department only made the connections even clearer for those paying attention. A 2016 Amnesty International piece connected Baltimore Police behavior to that of Israeli police, military, and security, and noted that American police often receive training by Israeli law enforcement.

“These trainings put Baltimore police and other U.S. law enforcement employees in the hands of military, security, and police systems that have racked up documented human rights violations for years,” Amnesty International wrote. “Amnesty International, other human rights organizations, and even the U.S. Department of State have cited Israeli police for carrying out extrajudicial executions and other unlawful killings, using ill treatment and torture (even against children), suppression of freedom of expression/association including through government surveillance, and excessive use of force against peaceful protesters.”

Now, as the worst violence enacted by Israel since 2014 continues, Baltimoreans are responding. And they’re reflecting a national trend—as evidenced by Thursday night in Congress, when Ilhan Omar called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu an “ethno-nationalist”—of no longer equating the Israel’s offensive attacks with Palestinian self defense. In response to a statement released by the Baltimore Jewish Council and the Associated Jewish Federation of Baltimore, which invoked Hamas only and offered no commentary on Israel’s attacks on Palestinians, Dr. Zackary Berger tweeted, “Only Jews matter to @baltjc and @theassociated. Dead Palestinians are just terrorists to them.”

Meanwhile, Maryland’s Republican Gov. Larry Hogan tweeted his support for Israel two days in a row without addressing any of the violence perpetrated on Palestinians.

“Today, the State of Maryland stands with Israel as Hamas terrorists attack innocent civilians. We pray for all the victims of the bloodshed and that it will soon come to an end,” Hogan tweeted on May 12, along with an image of Hogan sporting a yarmulke and standing at the Western Wall.

Hogan has, over the years, been criticized for his mistreatment of majority Black Baltimore, including his cancellation of the proposed light rail Red Line, which would have radically challenged Baltimore’s long history of systematically segregating Black residents into the east and west sides of the city and effectively keeping them siloed there through lack of public transportation. Hogan himself was accused of “apartheid”—in this case, “vaccine apartheid”—when his vaccine rollout seemed to not account for race and other inequities.

Then on May 13, Hogan tweeted, “Today, I spoke with Israeli Ambassador Gilad Erdan and expressed Maryland’s steadfast commitment to Israel’s security, and right to defend itself against Hamas attacks. We continue to pray for an end to the bloodshed.”

Battleground Baltimore reached out to local synagogue Hinenu for comment on the past week of violence, and the “Baltimore Justice Shtiebl” spoke out against Israel’s attacks on Palestinians in no uncertain terms.

“Hinenu, a Baltimore City synagogue of 250 members, is horrified by the air and ground military offensive that Israel is launching in Gaza against people captive in an open air prison; by the violence at Al-Aqsa, the third holiest Muslim site, during the sacred month of Ramadan; by the continued displacement of Palestinians and dispossession of Palestinian homes in Sheikh Jarrah; and by the mobs of rioters destroying Palestinian property and threatening Palestinian lives. We are enraged, we are grieving, and we will not sit idly by,” a statement from Hinenu said. “We call on the Baltimore Jewish community to hold the Israeli government accountable, to speak out against these unforgivable atrocities committed in our name. We mourn the Palestinian and Israeli lives that have been lost to this senseless violence. There cannot be peace without justice; we pray and act for both.”

Keith Davis Jr. Likely To Go To Trial for the Fifth Time

On Thursday, May 14, Keith Davis Jr., a man shot by police in 2015 and later charged with the murder of a Baltimore man named Kevin Jones, had his conviction overturned. Now Davis will likely get a new trial or possibly have the charges dropped. For those who have not been following this complicated story, this would be Davis Jr.’s fifth murder trial for the same alleged crime, if Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby decides to prosecute again.

During Davis’ last trial (the fourth one), he was found guilty and sentenced to 50 years. The previous new trials were granted because of hung juries and an appeal based on the prosecution not disclosing important information about one of its witnesses. This fifth trial would be because of a ruling last year by the Maryland Court of Appeals (Kazadi v. State of MD) which said that a judge must ask potential jurors voir dire questions, at a lawyer’s request, about issues of impartiality (in short, questions that would help ensure a juror’s ability to follow instructions). Those questions were not asked before Davis’ last trial.

“Ultimately, Keith was granted a new trial based upon Kazadi v. State, 223 A.3d 554 (Md. 2020), where the Court of Appeals of Maryland held that, ‘on request, during voir dire, a trial court must ask whether any prospective jurors are unwilling or unable to comply with the jury instructions on the long-standing fundamental principles of the presumption of innocence, the State’s burden of proof, and the defendant’s right not to testify,’” wrote lawyer Colin Miller, who helped draft the motion for the new trial for Davis last year. “Because the trial judge refused to do this at Keith’s trial, he’s entitled to a new trial.”

It should be noted that this motion related to Kazadi by Davis’ lawyers was filed more than a year ago, when courts were closed due to COVID-19. Davis’ lawyers also argued that he was especially susceptible to COVID-19 because of breathing issues (which he has as a result of being shot by police) and should be let out on home monitoring for the duration of the pandemic. That was not granted to Davis and, as Battleground Baltimore covered in the past, Davis contracted COVID-19 in jail earlier this year.

Davis’ case has become a major issue for local activists, organized by his wife Kelly. They have alleged police misconduct and even evidence planting (accusations given credibility following the 2017 indictment of drug-dealing, evidence-planting Baltimore cops). And there is the reality that it would be hard for anyone in a case that has gone through this many reversals to feel confident that another guilty or not guilty verdict is final or “just.”

Mosby, inexplicably, responded yesterday to local organizer Bilphena Yahwon via Twitter when Yahwon demanded the charges be dropped: “And what about a kevin Jones and his family? #Crickets,” Mosby tweeted. That tweet has since been deleted.

Davis’ wife Kelly released a statement in which she praised the decision to overturn her husband’s conviction, and also demanded Mosby drop the charges and not take Davis to trial for the fifth time.

“I am so relieved and grateful that the courts have done the right thing in granting Keith a new trial. My husband is and always has been INNOCENT,” Kelly said. “I am now praying that Marilyn Mosby takes this opportunity to show the world the true change agent she has been hailed to be, take the lead of the court, and drop all charges against Keith. Trying one man five times without a clear and clear conviction, a case with some of the most questionable of evidence and occurrences is beyond the pale of what’s fair and just.”

Fight Against Hedge Fund-Backed Renter’s Bill Continues

About 80 people showed up in the Baltimore neighborhood of Waverly on May 12 to show their opposition to a so-called “security insurance” bill which was approved by Baltimore City Council last month. The bill, which Battleground Baltimore has covered (and Rachel Cohen of The Intercept covered last week) was pitched as a way to assist city renters who cannot pay their full security deposit. In reality, one aspect of the bill, we wrote last month, “codifies the option to purchase ‘rental security insurance’—which most housing advocates in Baltimore have a big problem with … because ‘rental security insurance’ is really a surety bond which can easily trap tenants in fees they can never escape.” A growing coalition of renters’ rights folks have organized against the bill and have received some help from councilpersons Zeke Cohen and Ryan Dorsey, the only council members who voted against the bill.

At the Wednesday event, many, including Cohen (who had been arrested earlier that day in D.C. protesting with CASA) and Dorsey, spoke out against the bill. The evening’s MC, a key organizer against this bill, Caitlin Goldblatt, focused on the involvement of Rhino, a hedge fund that has successfully lobbied for this bill in a number of cities. 

“There are so many fights that we are all a part of—that we’re being pulled away from—to fight this particular fight,” Goldblatt lamented during the event.

During the event, video of a Rhino-hosted information session which was recorded and leaked was screened. it shows Rhino head of sales Eric Krauss addressing the “security insurance” strictly in terms of how it would benefit landlords.

WYPR’s Sarah Y. Kim also covered Wednesday’s event, and in her reporting highlighted some of the contradictions in Rhino’s claims. For example, Rhino CEO Paraag Sarva told Kim that it is “policy” for Rhino not to “actually impact negatively any renter’s credit ever.”

“But the contract that tenants sign with Rhino suggests otherwise,” Kim reported. “The contract states that a tenant who fails to pay Rhino for a claim may face long term consequences, including ‘adversely impacted’ credit, difficulty renting other properties, and higher premiums when trying to get insurance.”

Organizers are encouraging Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott to veto the bill. He has until May 17 to do so. Organizers are also encouraging councilmembers who voted for the bill to not override Scott’s veto if it happens. Battleground Baltimore has learned that a few councilmembers are seriously considering not overriding Scott’s veto, though none have publicly stated this.

Elsewhere

Baltimore City Comptroller Bill Henry explains his issues with the city budget process, Twitter.

Employee in Marilyn Mosby’s office is under investigation, Baltimore Brew

Tenant Advocates Rally Against Surety Bonds Bill, WYPR

The battle to keep Black, brown, and other marginalized people safe from police violence is like a fire that has burned for as long as this country has existed. Hot spots flare up when this country’s hatred for Black and Brown people becomes more apparent, making the heat more intense and the pain more unbearable. It feels like we are in one of those moments where the fire is burning especially strong right now. 

This week, a jury found former officer Derek Chauvin guilty of the murder of George Floyd. In May of last year, Chauvin was caught on tape kneeling on Floyd’s neck as Floyd begged for his life. We reached out to State Sen. Jill Carter and Del. Gabriel Acevero, two Maryland lawmakers who were instrumental in getting comprehensive policing legislation passed here in Maryland just a few weeks ago. Carter has a decades-long history of fighting for police accountability. Acevero has pushed for police accountability legislation named after Anton Black, a 19-year-old who died in police custody on Maryland’s Eastern Shore in 2018.

“It was the right thing. The guilty verdict should not be a shock. There was irrefutable video evidence corroborated by a myriad of credible witnesses. The prosecution did its job and Chauvin will be held accountable as he should be,” Carter said. “Knowing 98.3% of excessive force cases do not result in conviction, I’m hopeful this conviction represents the new normal for officer accountability. In Maryland, we have just passed the strongest use of force law in the country. I expect through this, and other reform measures, we will finally begin to see a change in state-sanctioned police violence against Black people.”

“The verdict in the Derek Chauvin trial wasn’t justice, but it was accountability; which is all we can expect from a system not designed to recognize the inherent humanity of Black people,” Acevero said. “The U.S. criminal legal system declines to prosecute 97% of policing killings, only 1% result in a conviction. The verdict was bittersweet news. I believe it should’ve been life without parole.”

Acevero added that “this verdict is not a  substitute for the policy changes that impacted communities have been demanding for decades. Black people’s love language is policy, what we don’t need is pandering and performative wokeness.”

Battleground Baltimore also reached out to Harriet Smith, the director of education for the Baltimore Harm Reduction Coalition to rebuke the inaccurate, insensitive, and downright racist portrayal of George Floyd by Chauvin’s defense. Floyd was portrayed as someone who was possibly overdosing when he was attacked by police—something with absolutely no merit—and, more broadly, had his drug use mentioned in an attempt to dehumanize him and justify what we can all now, legally, call a murder.

“The criminal legal system—as a collection of individuals, policies, and informal practices—is an enthusiastic advocate for the racist war on drugs. Part of this criminalization machine relies on demonizing Black victims when the perpetrator is non-Black,” Smith said. “Fentanyl and methamphentimes and heroin and cannabis and you name it did not create the racist police— drugs did not cause Derek Chauvin to murder George Floyd nor did they cause other officers at the scene to hold back the bystanders. Officer Chauvin made that decision and the system that gave him the uninterrupted power to take the lives of Black people is the problem—drug use is the racist smoke screen.”

This week in Baltimore also marked the six-year anniversary of Freddie Gray’s death. In 2019, Battleground Baltimore’s Brandon Soderberg wrote an op-ed for The Real News detailing how little had been addressed since this city rose up and nearly enacted a revolution. Much of what he wrote remains true two years later:

“[The] Baltimore Uprising…was a youth-led movement organized by those most vulnerable and most affected—even four years later, is still hard for people in power to grasp,” Soderberg wrote. “Issues such as the city’s poverty, segregation, profoundly underfunded school system, inadequate public transportation (including the end of the Red Line, killed by Governor Larry Hogan), the lead paint crisis, and police corruption remain.”

One constant in Baltimore when it comes to exposing police corruption and protesting against police violence is the work of Tawanda Jones and the West Coalition, a group of friends and family who have been calling attention to the police killing of Jones’ brother Tyrone West, since 2013. In many ways, Jones’ dedicated work created the activist infrastructure that enabled the Baltimore Uprising. And in less than two hours of the guilty verdict being announced in the George Floyd case, Jones was at the front of a car caravan and march, calling attention to the George Floyds of Baltimore. She reminded those who joined her that the fight cannot be over because of one conviction.

“I’m not going to start singing Kumbaya or none of that. Like literally, I’m happy but at the end of the day there is no justice, it’s just us trying to hold the cops accountable. To me, it’s almost like you live in a rat house and you catch one rat on the trap and you’re not singing Kumbaya [because] that house is infected,” Jones said. “It’s a big system that is infected with corruption.”

Meanwhile, Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby has lately been more intensely in the spotlight. Mosby’s name will forever be linked with Gray’s not only for the stirring speech she gave on the steps of the War Memorial Building on May 1 announcing that she was bringing charges against the officers, but also for issuing the commands to crack down on crime in Gilmor Homes, the community where Gray was when police first pursued him. As we wrote last week, Mosby recently announced the results of a year-long experiment where low-level crimes like some forms of drug possession, sex work, and tresspassing were no longer prosecuted. It is policy that ideally, in the long run, will reduce the number of interactions between police and citizens, but in the short term has confused councilmembers and even made some of those who support these policies skeptical due to a lack of clarity surrounding the policy.

Still, Mosby’s announcement is part of a growing acknowledgement that reducing police power is the only way to make serious change. At this year’s Board of Estimates Taxpayers’ Night, held on Apr. 21, citizens organized to make a very public rebuke of Mayor Brandon Scott’s proposal to add $28 million to the Baltimore Police Department’s already robust budget of more than $550 million, showing that they want even more change. 

Comptroller Bill Henry noted that the city council would be able to review the budget in far greater detail than the Board of Estimates, and urged the mayor and city council president to take steps to make it easier for the public to weigh in on the budget process. 

“As the preliminary budget stands right now, I do have serious concerns with our priorities and the direction our city is headed,” Henry said. But, he said, the budget that Scott submitted was simply more of the same. 

“Plainly put, Baltimore needs a budget that gives less money to the police department and invests more money into our own people and their communities,” Henry said. “We need to find a way to invest in people’s lives. To make it so that they don’t have to commit crimes in order to survive. Better policing is only one part of public safety. Addressing poverty and other root causes of crime are a substantially larger part and our budget should reflect such thinking.”  

What Henry said was reflected in what nearly 100 residents declared during the event. Thanks to a serious organizing effort by the Baltimore group Organizing Black, Baltimoreans across the entire city came prepared to tell the mayor, “Defund the police.”

In 2020, Baltimore City Council removed $22 million from the police department budget—a response to the then-nascent “defund the police” movement. Part of that modest budget cut was the result of Organizing Black, as well. They organized around the city and even closed a street in front of City Hall and painted “Defund the Police” in the street. A year later, the support for “defund” has clearly expanded and it would be hard for anyone in Baltimore to dismiss the movement as “niche” or only an activist concern when residents from some of the city’s most divested neighborhoods and most invested neighborhoods all challenged the police budget.

Some of the Taxpayers’ Night attendees pointed to the ineffectiveness of police. One woman said she had been sexually assaulted several times and each time, when she tried to get help she got none. Another person testifying said that they noted that the kids they work with become “tense and distant” when police are around. “They are suddenly in survival mode,” they said. Others pointed to the moral imperative of taking money away from an organization that harms the community when so many other resources in the city are underfunded, or not funded at all.

 “I want to see a moral budget,” one person said. 

Reopening in a Pandemic: Make It Make Sense

Gov. Larry Hogan roiled people who still have common sense Thursday when he said that Maryland residents should go out in a still raging pandemic and enjoy Easter weekend. 

“It’s great for people all over Maryland to drive to Salisbury to get vaccinated,” he said at a press conference held yesterday. “We want to encourage far more people to do that. Like, this is Easter weekend; it’s a big weekend for Ocean City. I think if you haven’t gotten a vaccine. You want one, I would say, get in your car tomorrow, drive to the beach, stop in Salisbury, get everybody vaccinated, and then go to Ocean City and get some Thrasher’s French fries, stay for the weekend and go to Easter brunch on Sunday morning.” 

Hogan’s assertion is both untrue and unsafe: with both the Pfizer and Moderna versions of the vaccine, recipients must get two doses of the vaccine and then wait two weeks to be considered fully vaccinated. With the Johnson and Johnson vaccine, recipients are considered vaccinated two weeks after a single dose. If someone was to go to Ocean City after getting a dose, they would still be at high risk of contracting and spreading the virus. 

In a press statement, the Lower Shore Progressive Caucus, which represents the lower Eastern Shore of Maryland, condemned Hogan’s statements. 

“With Covid Cases once again over 6% and rising across the Lower Eastern Shore and so many of our residents waiting to receive their shots, many of which are frontline workers, over 60 years old, or have pre-existing conditions, the Governor’s comments are nothing short of irresponsible and dangerous,” they said.

Hogan’s statements were bad, but we can’t blame what appears to be increasing capriciousness around COVID-19 only on Republicans, because Democrats have also been dropping the ball lately.

Mayor Brandon Scott held a press conference Thursday with Baltimore City Health Commissioner Dr. Letitia Dzirasa. At the conference, Dzirasa announced that Baltimore is averaging about 29 COVID-19 cases per 100,000 residents. That, she said, is a higher rate than both the state of Maryland and the US as a whole. Dzirasa said that the city is in the midst of a “new surge,” with the average new case count up 143% from four weeks ago and an average positivity count up 106% from four weeks ago. Despite these scary statistics, neither spoke about any further shutdown of city public life. For reference, the last time restaurant dining was shut down, the city was averaging 37 new cases per 100,000 people. This number is slightly higher than the average right now. However, city officials have not been super clear about how they make their decision. A rep for Scott told us “the Mayor will continue to assess the data with the health commissioner and our hospital partners on a regular basis.” At press time, they had not responded to further questions about the way this data is assessed.

It seems that instead of shutting down or being more clear, officials are shifting the burden of responsibility to the public.

Scott, who recently further loosened restrictions on activities like indoor and outdoor dining in the city, added that Baltimore citizens should take the virus seriously, noting that new variants were more harmful to younger adults. 

“There is no longer an excuse for ignorance,” Dzirasa said. She added that every time someone makes a bad decision “you are potentially pushing us one step back.”

However, Americans have been getting mixed messages about this pandemic from the very start. Then-President Donald Trump purposely obscured and downplayed any messaging that could have helped prevent the spread of the potentially deadly disease. But even now, with Trump out of office, scientists and doctors are still learning about it. Yesterday, for example, the CDC backtracked from statements by Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky, suggesting that people vaccinated against the coronavirus can never become infected or transmit the virus to others. 

The good news is that people are slowly but surely being vaccinated. Marylanders 16 and older can now register for vaccine appointments and more residents are getting their shots. Still, we need a cultural shift if we want to make it safely through this crisis, and that shift needs to be led by the people we pay to run our institutions. 

The Baltimore Teachers Union has used #makeitmakesense as their hashtag and rallying cry to push for safer measures as Baltimore City Schools reopen, but it really applies to everyone, as public officials on both sides of the aisle push forward despite the deadly threat COVID-19 still poses to all of us.

Update from Mayor Scott’s office providing further details about how reopenings and closings are determined: The Mayor and Health Commissioner never focus solely on one number, but rather overall trends and patterns on positivity rates, deaths, and hospitalizations. Baltimore City has consistently made decisions at its own pace, as was appropriate according to the data and public health experts. The Mayor will continue to rely on the science and public health experts to lead Baltimore through the ongoing pandemic.

Police Reform In Annapolis: Make That Make Sense, Too  

You would be forgiven for not understanding what is happening in Annapolis to what seemed like, until recently, a sweeping police reform bill.

Over the past week, House speaker Adrienne Jones’ Police Reform and Accountability Act of 2021 (HB 670) has been debated and picked apart and delayed and stalled and criticized—mostly in bad faith—to such a degree that it is only because of the dogged reporting (and tweeting) of Maryland Matters reporter Hannah Gaskill that even we have any sense of what’s going on. As it was introduced, the Police Reform and Accountability Act of 2021 was to repeal the Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights, allow the Baltimore Police Department to become a city agency (it is currently a state agency and has been since the Civil War), reduce the use of “no knock” warrants, and more. 

So what is going on? The Police Reform and Accountability Act of 2021 has been subject to hours of debate in which Maryland Republicans worried about such things as police leaving the force if the reforms are too strong, and pushed back against a provision that would require mental health screenings for cops.

Late Thursday night, the Police Reform and Accountability Act of 2021 passed out of the chamber, although it has in some ways become a different bill. State Sen. Jill Carter, who has been advocating for changes to policing for nearly two decades, characterized the back-and-forth with the bill as the result of there being “two universes” in Annapolis: “The universe that I’m in? People cannot understand a separate set of rules and procedures for this one group of people that has never been held accountable.”

Will Paraphernalia Decriminalization Be Watered Down Next?

Pardon us, Battleground Baltimore readers, we’re feeling especially cynical this week. Both the Maryland House of Delegates and Maryland Senate passed bills that would decriminalize drug paraphernalia. The result would be that police would have one less reason to arrest some of the state’s most vulnerable people—people who use drugs. In Maryland, harm reduction workers have been arrested for possessing needles and people who use drugs are regularly harassed and not infrequently arrested for having paraphernalia such as needles. The Baltimore Harm Reduction Coalition described a recent arrest that puts someone who is part of a syringe service program (SSP) and someone they were trying to help, at risk.

“Just last Thursday, March 25, a participant of an authorized syringe service program in Baltimore City was arrested and jailed for attempting to bring items considered paraphernalia to a loved one in another county who needed these life-saving supplies,” BHRC writes. “This SSP participant was, and continues to be, punished for trying to help someone achieve greater safety and serve public health goals. Regardless of whether or not the charges are dropped, this person has had their life turned upside down, spent multiple days risking exposure to COVID and not been able to attend to their loved ones.” 

But there are amendments to the bill. Namely, the Senate Bill passed with amendments that would still let police arrest people who have paraphernalia if the police decide the paraphernalia was used for “delivery, distribution, or sale.”

“We need to decriminalize possession of paraphernalia under any circumstance right now. If distribution, delivery, and sales of paraphernalia are not protected, our state’s public health is under threat,” BHRC writes. “If the Senate Judicial Proceedings (JPR) Committee does not agree to the House version, members of JPR and the House Judiciary Committee will need to decide on a version of the bill in conference committee. This would further delay the process and clog the urgent agenda of these busy committees.”

2016 Baltimore Police Beating of 56-Year-Old Settled for $45,000

This week, Baltimore City’s Board of Estimates awarded a $45,000 settlement to 56-year-old Theresa Rouse, who confronted police officers back in 2016 after they detained her 13-year-old grandson for allegedly smoking cannabis. Rouse approached the police, and Officer Chris Florio ordered her to “get back” and to put out her cigarette. Rouse instead flicked the cigarette at Florio, who threw Rouse to the ground, put his knee on her back, and put her in handcuffs. The incident was recorded with a cell phone by an onlooker. Next, Rouse was carried by her hands and legs and eventually put on the curb when officers could not get her in the police car. She was charged with, among other things, second-degree assault and possession of a dangerous weapon (the dangerous weapon? Her cigarette).

Baltimore Brew’s “A flicked cigarette and a knee to the neck” covers the incident and settlement in depth and also notes that “the BOE was told that Officer Florio was cleared by BPD’s Internal Affairs Division of any mishandling of the Rouse arrest. Neither he nor other police at the scene—identified in court records as Officers Anthony Ward, John Romeo, John Rosenblatt and Sergeants Michael Brinn and Billy Shiflett—faced disciplinary action.”

Earlier this year, ACLU MD released “Chasing Justice,” a report which revealed the Baltimore Police officers with the most allegations against them. 

ELSEWHERE

“Harm Reduction During the Pandemic,” WYPR’S On The Record

“The story of a Baltimore assistant state’s attorney who says she was hung out to dry,” Baltimore Brew

“Worker-Owned Businesses Are Having a Moment,” Bloomberg Businessweek

“2021 Baker Artist Awardees Announced,” BmoreArt.

Mayor Scott’s State of the City Address

On Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott’s 100th day in office, he delivered his first State of the City address, laying out his administration’s success, the ongoing challenges, and most importantly, he introduced a number of progressive policies that include a guaranteed income pilot program, suspending drug screenings for most prospective city employees, making sure no one loses their home to a tax sale, and much more.

An independent review (released earlier this month) of a guaranteed income pilot program in Stockton, California, found that 125 recipients who received $500 a month for 24 months experienced improved employment prospects and better mental health.

“Politics should be about working together in good faith to solve our city’s problems. This means making real investments in creating jobs, safeguarding our neighborhoods, supporting local businesses, and fostering communities where all families can thrive,” Scott said.

He also acknowledged Baltimore’s recent history of corruption, which includes two previous mayors—Sheila Dixon and Catherine Pugh—being federally charged for corruption.

“Establishing trust is key. This is especially true when trust has been broken over and over again. Given the public skepticism and disappointment towards City Hall, it was critical that I work to regain your faith and prove that local government can operate in your best interests,” Scott said. “In order to restore your faith in city government, we need to deliver effective, reliable, and equitable services to our residents.”

Also this week, Scott released his Public Safety Plan. Scott’s plan deviates from decades of past public safety plans, which focused almost entirely on the Baltimore Police Department, and instead looks more broadly at public safety through “equity, healing, and trauma-informed practices.” The full text of the plan can be read here and residents can offer comment. Local activist Melissa Schober has already responded to the plan in a Medium post in which she takes a skeptical look at some of what is suggested and notes when it overlaps with policies the city has attempted over the past decade or so. 

Students, Councilmembers Join Calls to End Digital Redlining

Student activists and local council members joined growing calls for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to tackle the issue of inequities related to high-speed internet access. Access to high-speed internet has become increasingly critical during the pandemic, highlighting the disparate rates of access existing in many low-income communities and communities of color. 

On March 15, about 100 elected officials and grassroots groups around the country signed a letter demanding FCC Acting Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel launch a commission focused on “Digital Redlining” and that she reinstate net neutrality protections stripped away under the Trump administration. 

“Large internet services providers have profited handsomely during the pandemic,” lawmakers and activists write in the letter. The group singled out internet service provider Comcast, which delayed a plan to charge users for exceeding their bandwidth limits after it faced public outrage. 

“This type of fee is akin to a regressive tax that impacts poor communities and cities like Baltimore—primarily communities of color the most. We believe that Internet Services Providers should be barred from imposing predatory data caps,” they write.

The letter connects the digital divide (a term used to communicate the way low-income communities and communities of color are able to access high-speed internet at far lower rates than wealthier, whiter communities) to decades of racist public policies that have created enormous disparities in terms of wealth, public health, and more.

“The term ‘redlining’ comes from a well-known discriminatory housing practice from the early 20th Century. The impact of the practice still looms large in cities like Baltimore,” said Councilperson Ryan Dorsey in a press release. “When we talk about digital redlining, we’re talking about corporate policy that places profit motive over the public good.”

Baltimore has the third worst connectivity rate among major cities: 40 percent of residents, including 200,000 households with school-aged children, lack access to high-speed internet or a computer, both of which are necessary to access remote learning, a May 2020 Abell Foundation report found.

“With the pandemic it’s been very clear the internet is a public utility, but it is treated like a luxury separated by race and class,” student organizer Kimberly Vasquez said during a press conference local activists held with other signatories of the letter.

When the pandemic hit last year and her fellow students could not access remote learning, Vasquez, a leader with the student group Students Organizing a Multicultural Open Society (SOMOS), mobilized public support to secure $3 million in city funds to buy hotspots and laptops to help students access online learning from home. 

“I’m proud to stand with my colleagues in Baltimore City and across the nation in calls for an FCC investigation into price gouging, and the creation of a Commission on Digital Redlining,” Councilmember Kris Burnett said. “ISPs must be held accountable for their decision to leave communities behind at a time where they need to be connected the most.”  

“When it comes to internet access during the pandemic, majority Black, Brown and Indigenous neighborhoods across the country have been left off the map. Students have struggled to learn.  Seniors have been unable to make their telemedicine visits. The status quo is unacceptable. We need the FCC to step in and support our communities,” Councilmember Zeke Cohen said.

In Congress, new “squad” member and former Bronx High School teacher Congressman Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) introduced legislation to make broadband access equitable: “I’m proud to introduce the Broadband Justice Act to bring the internet into our public utilities framework and guarantee access to broadband for all,” he tweeted. 

A Giant Inflatable Joint in Annapolis

Over the past few years, Maryland has fallen woefully behind on cannabis reform, many activists say. In 2014, Maryland decriminalized cannabis and, at the end of 2017, the medicinal cannabis program went into effect, but the state has lagged on additional reforms such as increasing the decriminalized amount (it remains at 10 grams, whereas most states have it set at one ounce) and legalization, which has been a source of controversy and, some say, cowardice on the part of legislators. Now, in the current legislative session, time is running out to approve legalization—there is both a House bill and a Senate bill proposing legalization. This prompted advocates to show up in Annapolis on Thursday accompanied by a 51-foot inflatable joint, featuring the slogan “Maryland Pass The Joint!,” to try and get something done soon.

“Some legislators won’t like seeing the big fifty one-foot joint, I guess because they like to pretend that people don’t actually use marijuana,” Luke Jones of Maryland NORML (National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws) said in a press release. “We’re saying—we are past that point now. Cannabis consumers are obviously here, and are obviously going to fuel the tax revenue legislators are so excited about, so we might as well call it what it is. It’s a joint—legalize it for goodness’ sake already!” 

Unions, Community Groups Demand Federal Relief Funds For Essential Workers

Essential workers and their allies are calling on the Maryland General Assembly to pass stronger workplace protections for frontline workers using a portion of the $3.9 billion the state is receiving from President Joe Biden’s first stimulus bill, signed into law on March 11.  

“Our frontline and essential workers have had to go to work every day this past year, and this has increased their risk of contracting the virus and even death. We have seen this virus take essential workers from us, and we will gather to bear witness to their deaths,” said Ricarra Jones, political director of 1199SEIU healthcare workers union, a leader in the  Protect Maryland Workers Coalition.

On March 18, the over 8,000 Marylanders who have died from COVID-19 were remembered during a Zoom call with frontline workers who lost co-workers and loved ones during the pandemic. Frontline workers shared stories of being forced to work in unsafe conditions and not being provided PPE or COVID-19 testing. The attendees called for the passage of the Essential Workers’ Protection Act, which would require employers to provide safe working conditions, PPE, free COVID-19 testing, hazard pay, and other protections during the duration of the pandemic.

“We will also urge our state leaders to pass the Essential Workers’ Protection Act so essential workers stay safe and ensure they have the pay and benefits they deserve,” Jones said.

A letter from the coalition—comprised of unions, community groups, and clergy—to local elected officials in support of the bill said, “despite receiving more than $1.9 billion in loan relief and funding during the pandemic, many Maryland employers have refused to provide adequate protective equipment and hazard pay for their employees.” 

The $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan (ARP), which Congress passed without the support of a single Republican Senator, is wildly popular, will reduce child poverty by half, and put money in the pockets of millions of Americans. But many say Democrats on both the state and Federal level can do more to support frontline workers, who suffered in the highest rates during the COVID-19 pandemic, and are disproportionately Black and people of color. Some of the nation’s worst outbreaks came in nursing homes, with deadly impacts on both residents and staff, who are disproportionately people of color.

With additional federal relief currently at an impasse as long as Republicans can filibuster most legislation, advocates say state authorities must act to provide adequate aid for frontline workers.

Speaking at the vigil, Jake Burdett, a local Amazon warehouse worker and activist, said, “Even with PPE, workers are contracting COVID on a weekly basis,” as bosses impose unreasonable productivity goals. 

On Saturday, The Real News will be reporting on a rally being held at the Amazon warehouse at BWI to demand the company halt its anti-union campaign as the mostly Black workers in Bessemer, Alabama vote on whether to join a union. 

Freddie Redd (1928-2021)

On March 17, pianist Freddie Redd died at the age of 92. Perhaps best known for his score to The Connection, a play and later a film about jazz players and the limbo of waiting for the arrival of a heroin dealer, Redd also appears in the movie, setting off a career that continued delivering up until his death. Just last month, Reminiscing and Baltimore Jazz Loft, both featuring Redd, were released. Both were recorded back in 2013 at Baltimore venue An Die Musik, just two years after Redd moved to Baltimore.

“Playing with Freddie gave me the same feeling as listening to his music,” saxophonist Brad Linde told jazz critic Nate Chinen. “It was joyful, toe-tapping, and supremely lyrical. His melodies (composed or improvised) were thoughtful, his harmonies wholly original and inevitable, and his touch was crisp and clear.”

Elsewhere

“Federal grand jury investigating Baltimore officials Nick, Marilyn Mosby; churches, campaign staff subpoenaed.” The Baltimore Sun.

“Marilyn Mosby refuses to say if campaign funds were used to send threatening letter to former prosecutor,” Baltimore Brew.

“Majority of Maryland Republicans Support Cannabis Legalization, Goucher Poll Finds,” The Outlaw Report.

“Living With Art: Erin Fostel and Ryan Dorsey”, BmoreArt.

“Maryland Governor Expands Vaccine Eligibility; All Adults Eligible By April 27,” WYPR.

“Baltimore’s Violence Prevention Plan,” by Melissa Schober on Medium.

One reason why The Real News Network calls Baltimore home is because we know that the struggles the people in this majority-minority city face (unequitable access to resources like education, clean air, and transportation, for example) are the struggles people face all over the globe. This is the latest installment of our weekly news roundup from the Baltimore trenches, which we hope will help keep our friends and neighbors abreast of what’s going on in our city, but also resonate with people united in the struggle everywhere.

Maryland’s House of Delegates Pass Police Reform and Accountability Act

Maryland’s House of Delegates passed a package of policing accountability and reform legislation on Thursday night that is by far the most substantive police oversight legislation the state has ever seen. 

The Police Reform and Accountability Act of 2021 (HB 670), sponsored by House Speaker Adrienne Jones, repeals the Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights, allows the Baltimore Police Department to become a city agency (it is currently a state agency and has been since the Civil War), reduces the use of “no knock” warrants, and more. 

House Republicans attempted to seriously amend the bill—all 17 of their proposed amendments failed—and also gathered in Annapolis along with police from across the state to criticize the bill, which they described as “far left.” Many elements of The Police Reform and Accountability Act of 2021 are similar to a number of recently passed state Senate bills. Now, the House and Senate begin negotiations about the bills’ specifics.

An update on vaccine distribution and reopening plans

If Larry Hogan was not white and a man, his response to COVID-19 would be given the all-hands-on-deck journalism coverage it required. It would resemble the coverage of Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh’s scandal surrounding the sale of her “Healthy Holly” books. Multiple reporters would cover evolving stories of heartbreak as families struggled to survive despite a long-broken unemployment benefits system. Reporters would wait outside the door to the governor’s mansion, peppering Hogan with questions about the very apparent racial inequality in Maryland’s vaccine distribution. Instead, Hogan’s bungling of the vaccine—and a dose of Hogan-style anti-Blackness—has been framed as simply a difference of opinion. 

The problem with vaccine distribution is so bad that the Baltimore City and Prince George’s County delegations (Baltimore City’s population and Prince George’s County’s population are each a little over 60% Black) held a joint hearing on it last week.

“If vaccine distribution were equitable, we would expect to see comparable rates of vaccination across racial groups and jurisdictions, but vaccination rates are not tracking with the size or racial demographic of county populations,” Scott said. 

Scott also challenged Hogan’s unsubstantiated claims that Black Baltimoreans are especially suspicious of the vaccine and said Baltimore City residents want to be vaccinated against COVID-19, it’s simply not available to them. Both Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott and Prince George’s County Executive Angel Alsobrooks spoke about the fact that their residents would definitely get the vaccine, if they could.

Alsobrooks noted that at the time of the hearing, only 10% of vaccinations administered at the Six Flags vaccination site in Bowie, Maryland, had gone to Prince George’s County residents. That’s despite the fact that Prince George’s County has the highest number of positive COVID-19 cases in the state and the second-highest number of deaths from COVID-19. 

“So we haven’t shown up today to beg anybody for anything, we’re asking for what we have already paid for. And so when we talk about whatever allotment we need, we don’t want anybody to siphon that out to us, we want to be given only what we deserve,” Alsobrooks said. “Our residents deserve these vaccines, every person, whether they are reluctant, afraid or not.” 

Instead of slowing down to allow more Marylanders to be vaccinated, Hogan, following the lead of other Republican governors, instead announced this week that he would be further loosening restrictions on public interactions in Maryland. Starting today, March 12, at 5 p.m., capacity limits on indoor and outdoor dining, retail businesses, fitness centers, and religious establishments will be no more. 

Scott and Alsobrooks quickly announced that they would be keeping the restrictions in their districts in place. Representatives for Del. Stephanie Smith, who co-chaired last week’s hearing with Del. Erek Barron, said lawmakers are still working to resolve the equity problem in a real way. Smith represents Baltimore and Barron represents Prince George’s County.

“The Baltimore City and Prince George’s County delegations have been working with their jurisdiction’s health leadership and the House Committee on Health and Government Oversight to identify ways to strengthen the Governor’s recently announced communications strategy for vaccine equity. Communication is important but addressing vaccine equity requires more than a marketing campaign,” Smith said via a statement released by her office.

Mosby introduces fund to honor Dante Barksdale

This week, City Council President Nick Mosby announced legislation that would create the Dante Barksdale Career Technology Apprenticeship Fund. Barksdale, a violence interrupter, was murdered in January. The legislation would create a non-lapsing trust to pay for Baltimore students to learn skills that would help them find work after graduation. The money would come from city contractors and go into a lockbox until voters could consider a charter amendment that would put the fund into action. 

Mosby said the inspiration for the bill came from a text exchange he had with Barksdale before his death, in which Barksdale encouraged Mosby to find more ways to get young people in the city employed.

“We constantly talk about the importance of local hiring, we talk about imagining a council that puts itself in the position to do more, particularly as it relates to our young folks,” Mosby said at this week’s city council meeting.

“We understand how much Dante meant to the city that he loved and dedicated his life to improve,” Barksdale’s mother said in a statement. “This Career Technology Apprenticeship Fund will cement his legacy for years to come.”

Fourteen-year-old charged as adult 

The shooting death of 15-year-old Jaileel Jones is a tragedy. Also heartbreaking is the fate of the 14-year-old who police have accused of the crime, saying it stemmed from an argument between the two boys. 

The teen was charged as an adult with first degree murder and gun violations. 

City Councilmember Zeke Cohen, who has been leading the city’s efforts to roll out Trauma Informed Care legislation, told us that he believes that children should not be charged as adults. He said that he has had conversations with his liaison to the State’s Attorney, but this would require a legislative fix at the state level.

“What we have done has not worked for either victims or perpetrators of violent crime. Our children’s fundamental needs are not being met. The juvenile justice system is supposed to rehabilitate young people, hold them accountable and address untreated trauma. Instead we pay other parts of the state to warehouse children, putting them in horrific conditions, exacerbating their trauma and almost completely ensuring that when they get out, they will reoffend.”

The teenager, who we are not identifying by their name because they are a minor (despite what the state says), has been named publicly by other Baltimore news outlets. It’s an unfortunate decision given the fact that the child accused of this crime has not yet been found guilty, and his charges could be later changed so that he is later charged as a juvenile. 

Three Years Of Opposing Johns Hopkins University Private Police

It was three years ago, in March 2018, that students and Baltimore residents first began organizing against Johns Hopkins University’s private police bill. Back then, Battleground Baltimore’s Brandon Soderberg covered an early protest for The Real News, “What a Private Police Force Would Mean For Johns Hopkins University and Baltimore.” Students quickly mobilized to oppose the bill that would allow Hopkins to have a private police force, developing a petition and slowly building a coalition of groups opposing Hopkins’ plans.

“We developed the petition from a zero concessions stance—We want no private police categorically,” student and organizer Mira Wattal said back then. “An increase of police does not increase safety.”

“We’d already be a crime-free city if that were the case,” another student, organizer Evan Drukker-Schardl, added.

Since then, the fight to oppose an armed private police force on Hopkins’ campuses escalated significantly, with more and more groups organizing together, and, in 2019, holding a nearly month-long sit-in and occupation of a university building which led to police raid on the building and a number of arrests. In the aftermath of the police killing of George Floyd, Hopkins said it would be putting the idea on pause, but many Baltimoreans do not expect the university to concede. During this legislative session, Sen. Jill Carter introduced a bill that would prevent the establishment of police forces for private universities but it only finally received a hearing today, Mar. 12. Battleground Baltimore caught up with The Coalition Against Policing By Hopkins last week to discuss where they currently stand and how they’re continuing to organize against private police.

What groups make up The Coalition Against Policing By Hopkins?

CAPH is composed of longstanding community leaders and other groups, including: BRACE (Baltimore Redevelopment Action Coalition for Empowerment), West Wednesday, Tubman House, Baltimore Bloc, Baltimore Jail Support, Garland Sit-in and Occupation, Teachers and Researchers United (TRU), Party for Socialism and Liberation – Baltimore, Baltimore Libertarian Socialist Caucus – DSA, Baltimore DSA, YDSA at Johns Hopkins, Refuel Our Future, Real Food Hopkins, Unidos DMV, and Rise Bmore.

Why were lawmakers saying first saying that the bill wouldn’t be heard?

According to Sen. McCray’s correspondence with constituents, he claims that because it is not a city delegation bill he cannot choose to hold a hearing. He claims it is because he “value[s] democracy.” He further said that “If there is a bill that a senator would like brought up for discussion, that respective senator has the ability to bring up that bill for discussion during the regularly scheduled delegation meetings held on Friday.” We asked Sen. Carter’s office, who confirmed that she had previously requested that SB276 be given a hearing, so we don’t know what his claim means.

I’m very interested in the organizing that happened around boosting public support for this bill. I think we are learning more and more how important organizing is to meet the very real needs of suffering Marylanders. Can you talk a bit about how it came together?

We realized that there were only a few bills left that the city delegation could reasonably consider and that SB276 had its JPR hearing over a month ago. We knew that time was likely running out, and that if SB276 were on this hearing list we would have heard about it. 

Knowing this, we had a discussion about how to put serious pressure on the city delegation and, in particular, Sen. McCray, who chairs the delegation. We had already been organizing both online and in communities around Hopkins for several months to build support for SB276 and communicate how private police would affect us—making banners, putting up flyers, and using social media, in addition to having private discussion with legislators. With limited time and no central place to hold an in-person demonstration (and general hesitation to host an in-person demo, for obvious reasons), we put together an easy-to-use media toolkit that we sent directly to coalition members and other supportive people/groups, and asked that they participate in a social media blitz to amplify the calls we have been making so that support for the bill would be more noticeable and concerted. Many people also sent emails and made phone calls to Sen. McCray and their respective senators, further amplifying the message.

Elsewhere

Sweeping Police Reform Bill Passed By House of Delegates, Maryland Matters.

Dorsey Proposes Relief Fund For Baltimore City Artists, WYPR.

Danielle Evans’ The Office of Historical Corrections Gives Readers More Questions to Sit With, BmoreArt.

One reason why The Real News Network calls Baltimore home is because we know that the struggles the people in this majority-minority city face (unequitable access to resources like education, clean air, and transportation, for example) are the struggles people face all over the globe. This is the latest installment of our weekly news roundup from the Baltimore trenches, which we hope will help keep our friends and neighbors abreast of what’s going on in our city, but we also hope these stories will resonate with people united in the struggle everywhere.

Amazon Workers’ Union Drive In Bessemer, Alabama Resonates in Maryland

On Sunday, Feb. 20, outside of the Sparrows Point Amazon facility in Baltimore County, several dozen people braved freezing temperatures to hold a car caravan and demonstration in solidarity with unionizing Amazon workers in Bessemer, Alabama.

The historic union drive of mostly Black Amazon workers in Alabama is making waves across the country, including in Baltimore, where dozens rallied in solidarity last weekend. The highest-profile organizing drive in the South in recent memory has gained steam amid a COVID-19 pandemic that has boosted Amazon’s profits and market share, along with the wealth of its founder Jeff Bezos (who has gained at least $90 billion and is reportedly seeking to buy the Washington Football Team). Hundreds of workers across the country have contracted COVID-19, and many have been fired forspeaking out about unsafe working conditions. 

5,800 workers at an Amazon facility in Bessemer, Alabama, are voting on whether to join the  Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSW), and face what they say is an anti-union campaign and blatant intimidation by management, which is trying to thwart unionization efforts by tracking employees, hiring anti-union firms, and using a host of other anti-union tactics. The group More Perfect Union has documented the various techniques Amazon has engaged in, including even changing traffic light patterns to disrupt union activity.This week, it was reported that Amazon has offered to pay $1,000-$2,000 to workers if they quit before March 16, 13 days before voting ends on March 29.

The demonstration in Baltimore County was one of dozens of actions that took place across the country to demand Amazon respect the right of its workers to organize and improve safety conditions, organizers said.

One Amazon worker in attendance, who did not want to be named for fear of retaliation, said she faced many of the same workplace hardships reported by workers in Bessemer, such as “managers being disrespectful, and pretty extreme punishment” for not maximising productivity.

“They’re constantly telling us to work faster and faster. I know that the Bessemer workers had been dealing with that, plus obviously the heat and unsafe conditions, unsanitary conditions, during COVID, a global pandemic. And they decided that they were going to organize a union and have a voice on the job. So we’re out here to say we’re in solidarity with them,” she said.

In attendance were members of several local progressive organizations like Progressive Maryland, Amazonians United Baltimore, and activists like labor historian Bill Barry. 

“This is really a pandemic-provoked campaign, because the company had such a little concern for their safety and their welfare and their lives, as well as pay and benefits,” Barry said.

Many noted the parallels between how Amazon’s non-union steel manufacturing jobs have replaced manufacturing jobs in cities like Baltimore and Bessemer, which was also once a major steel center and home to tens of thousands of unionized manufacturing jobs that provided strong health benefits and retirement plans. 

The location where the Amazon warehouse now sits in Sparrows Point was once the site of a steel plant that was one of the largest unionized facilities in the world, Barry explained. 

“[The factory] had 31,000 people at their peak, and a strong union place from 1941 on, until it closed in 2012,” he said. “The union benefits used to be spread to everybody, when unions were 37% of the workforce. Now that non-union, no-benefit standard is spread to everybody.”

Bills to repeal the Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill Of Rights “gutted”

Maryland’s legislative session began last month with the announcement of a flurry of potentially powerful police reform bills, many of which have been hard fought for years but seemed to be having their moment of consensus following the police killing of George Floyd. But now, a month later, the sweeping reforms these bills offered seem less promising. In particular, the bills to repeal the Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill Of Rights (LEOBR) have, according to its Senate sponsor Sen. Jill Carter, been “gutted” by a number of proposed amendments (those amendments are broken down here by Maryland Matters).

For those who don’t know, Maryland’s LEOBR provides unprecedented protections for police officers in the state, shielding them from accountability (this primer from Maryland Matters explains LEOBR quite well; Maryland Matters’ Hannah Gaskill by the way, has been doing an excellent job covering police reform in Annapolis).

Most notably, there are approved amendments which would prevent jurisdictions from establishing civilian review boards, including one that would allow police officers to expunge complaints against them if they were not sustained or declared unfounded and are three or more years old. Battleground Baltimore has discovered that in Baltimore City, for example, complaints against officers are rarely sustained (in 2015, 17% were sustained; in 2016, 12%; in 2017, 21%; in 2018, 23%; and in 2019, 27%). 

The way police and a civilian review board look at the same allegations against the same officers is often radically different. Battleground Baltimore’s Brandon Soderberg reported in The Appeal last month that one Baltimore Police officer, Edward Creed, had a planted evidence allegation declared unfounded, while a civilian review board recommended termination based on video of that incident. Creed, who is still with the force, is a powerful example. But he is not an outlier, as ACLU Maryland’s recent report on misconduct “Chasing Justice” revealed. Misconduct allegations which Soderberg obtained also show that many officers who received allegations in 2016 were receiving allegations for the same kind of misconduct in 2019. Thanks to the amendments, that would mean an officer could have his unfounded 2016 allegations expunged, removing the possibility of discovering a pattern of misconduct over just a few years. 

The repeal of the LEOBR bill has, thanks to these amendments, done the opposite. Carter said as much this week.

“It is absolutely appaling that we’ve now allowed, in a bill that is labelled ‘The Repeal of the Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill Of Rights,’ we’ve now restored all of the things that are unnecessary in the bill which completely guts the concept of Repeal of the Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill Of Rights,” Carter told the state Senate. “This was all about saying we are no longer going to tell the people of Maryland that this one group of people that has the ability to, in a fleeting moment, to kill you … we have now said that you can’t have any say if your jurisdiction wants you to over that disciplinary process.” 

A look at the state Senate votes shows that Sens. Carter, Shelly Hettleman, Barbara Lee, and Charles Sydnor were the Democrats who most frequently opposed these amendments.

Vaccine Inequity Continues Even If Governor Hogan Doesn’t Think So

This week, Maryland opened up a new mass COVID-19 vaccination site at M&T Bank Stadium, where the Baltimore Ravens play, and began offering up to 250 vaccinations a day. Along with this encouraging news: more insults about the city from Maryland’s Republican Gov. Larry Hogan. The number of vaccinations will increase steadily, with claims by the state that it will be up to 500 daily this weekend, could be up to 2,000 next week, and, eventually, 10,000 each day—something Hogan called “tremendously exciting.” As Battleground Baltimore has noted over the past couple of weeks, many across the state have criticized Hogan’s vaccination plan, especially the fraught rollout and inequitable distribution of vaccines (white Marylanders have been receiving vaccinations at four times the rate of Black Marylanders). There was even a popular Facebook group called Maryland Vaccine Hunters whose creation and popularity speaks to the lack of quality information about vaccinations coming from the state government.

Additionally, Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott attempted to ask Johnson & Johnson, who were developing its vaccine in Baltimore City and expect it to be approved any day now, for direct access to the vaccines, because Baltimore was being underserved. In response to that, Hogan mocked Scott’s request by saying, “nice try,” and suggested Scott was trying to “jump the line.” On Thursday, after Hogan toured the M&T Bank Stadium vaccination site, he again dismissed Baltimore’s concern about vaccination equity, saying the city has received “far more [doses] than they are really entitled to.” Baltimore City is a little over 60% Black. Additionally, access to the vaccine is open to everyone, not only city residents, and data shows that more than two-thirds of the vaccinations given out in the city went to non-residents.

In response to Hogan’s comments, Baltimore City Comptroller Bill Henry tweeted, “There are a lot of ways I could break down how this response is factually incorrect, but my ears are still ringing from this dog whistle.” 

Maryland Delegate Marlon Amprey tweeted, “Hogan should have just came and tossed a couple vials of the vaccine to a crowd like Trump tossed paper towels in Puerto Rico. Because, this is the same level of disrespect. I don’t think Hogan understands equity or math bc 70% of the vax received went to non-city residents!!!”

More From Marilyn Mosby

Black Baltimoreans are dealing with several crises at once: COVID-19, an airborne virus that disproportionately kills Black people; a shortage of potentially life-saving doses of the COVID-19 vaccine; record levels of joblessness (plus a broken unemployment benefit system); and the unraveling of legislation that could weaken the LEOBR.

Despite this, Kobi Little (president of Baltimore’s NAACP), former Mayor Bernard “Jack” Young, attorney J. Wyndal Gordon, and a few other folks made their way to Baltimore’s City Hall this week to defend State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby from what they said were racist attacks on her by the Inspector General for Baltimore City Isabel Cumming.

As we wrote in last week’s Battleground Baltimore last week, the controversy began when the Baltimore Brew reported that Mosby spent over 100 days traveling back in 2018 and 2019. Mosby asked the Baltimore Office of the Inspector General to look into the matter, and the Inspector General released a report highlighting some of the potential irregularities in Mosby’s actions. 

Cumming has said that the whole issue could be resolved without penalty by Mosby filling out a few amendment forms. However, Mosby says the report is an attack on her as a Black woman. 

To be sure, Marilyn Mosby faces misogynoir—targeted hatred because she is both Black and a woman. However, it’s distressing that so many influential Black leaders in the city are using their energies to protest such a minor incident, especially given how many of Baltimore’s poor Black citizens do not have her money or access to power.

Cummings, by the way, told The Real News that she has not received any other allegations of racial bias from other city employees or subjects of OIG investigations.

Around the same time of this week’s rally, Mosby’s campaign sent out an email written by her husband seeking to raise money for her re-election campaign. The subject line read “vindicated.” 

“Her name is consistently being drug [sic] through the sand with misrepresentative headlines and attacks,” Nick wrote about his wife in the email. 

Nick Mosby, City Council President and wife of Marilyn Mosby  shared this email through his political campaign’s account.

It was both an example of the unique power the State’s Attorney has as a city official who is also married to another high-ranking city official, and yet another reason why Mosby must walk a tight ethical line. 

It’s unclear whether the email means that Nick Mosby, in his capacity as City Council president, is saying that the OIG’s office is in need of further oversight. The Real News also reached out to his office to find out whether the city council president had to follow certain rules in order for his wife’s campaign to be able to send out the email. So far, neither the mayor or the city council president has responded to The Real News’ questions.

On Friday morning, Cumming would neither confirm nor deny whether her department was looking into the email. Neither Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott nor Nick Mosby responded to requests for comment from both The Real News and The Baltimore Sun. 

Dorsey and FOP

City Councilperson Ryan Dorsey was called a “nigger lover,” among other things, after he criticized the Baltimore branch of the Fraternal Order of Police over the weekend. 

On Saturday, Dorsey tweeted “Last week, @BobbyCherryJr asked me to meet with him and his racist brotherhood’s psychotic president. This week, they lobbied to gut @jillpcarter’s LEOBR repeal, SB627. I haven’t the least interest in suffering these people. I’m totally fine having nothing to do with them.” 

Battleground Baltimore has noted that Baltimore Police sergeant Bobby Cherry has in the past, endorsed police officers running over protesters and mocked a shooting that occurred at radical bookstore, Red Emma’s. This 2015 Baltimore City Paper article details that Cherry offered himself up as a “character witness” for an officer charged with police brutality and characterized the department to a whistleblowing cop as “blood in, blood out.”

In response, the Baltimore Fraternal Order of Police President Mike Mancuso issued a press release calling for Dorsey’s censure, and calling his tweet “disgusting and mindless.”

Baltimore Sun columnist Dan Rodricks wrote about Dorsey and the FOP in a piece titled “A Baltimore councilman at war with city cops.” In it, he calls Dorsey’s language “shocking.” Rodricks doesn’t devote any of the column to the violence police have enacted on Baltimore’s Black citizens—both physically (A Department of Justice report, released in 2016, outlines many of those injustices and notes pattern of discrimination in the department), but also legislatively by resisting accountability bills in Annapolis.

Dorsey took to Twitter the day after the piece was published to share some of the email he received from a former Baltimore police officer and other FOP sympathizers who had read Rodricks’ column. That is when he was called a “nigger lover,” among other things.

The Real News reached out to The Baltimore Sun to ask about whether they planned to address the way Rodricks’ column seemed to incense hatred against a city official. We also asked about whether, given Baltimore’s majority-Black population and the Sun’s own efforts to improve reporting on Black issues in their own newsroom (they recently assembled a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Team), they planned to address the issue further. They did not respond.

In an interview on WYPR on Thursday, Council President Nick Mosby seemed to agree with Rodricks, telling journalist Tom Hall that “there is a certain level of decorum that elected officials have to carry.”

From the pages of The Sun to City Hall, many of Baltimore’s most powerful still seem wedded to the idea that respectability saves Black lives. 

Elsewhere

The Pandemics of Racism and COVID-19 are a Deadly Mix, The Real News

Bill Henry hires a Dixon insider to assist in his reform efforts, Baltimore Brew

We Keep Us Safe call for donations, Twitter.

@scanthepolice’s tweets related to Thursday’s night fatal police shooting, Twitter.

In a virus-ravaged city, nearly 400 million vaccine doses are being made — and shipped elsewhere, The Washington Post

Burnett seeks regulation of facial recognition technology in Baltimore, WYPR

Viewpoint: Healthy city, healthy bid — How Baltimore should host the World Cup, Baltimore Business Journal.

One reason why The Real News Network calls Baltimore home is because we know that the struggles the people in this majority-minority city face (unequitable access to resources like education, clean air, and transportation, for example) are the struggles people face all over the globe. This is the latest installment of our weekly news roundup from the Baltimore trenches, which we hope will help keep our friends and neighbors abreast of what’s going on in our city, but we also hope these stories will resonate with people united in the struggle everywhere.

Baltimore Still Battling For COVID-19 Vaccine

Last week, Maryland’s Republican Gov. Larry Hogan was confronted by many across the state—including Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott—about the COVID-19 vaccine not being delivered in an organized, timely, and perhaps most importantly, equitable way. Hogan pushed back against the criticism, as he often did, with a mix of dismissiveness and condescension (“Nice try,” he told Scott, who asked Johnson & Johnson directly for the vaccine). This week, it was revealed that the Baltimore City Health Department will get 2,000 doses over the next four weeks while Baltimore County, whose population is only slightly larger (about 830,000 in the county to the city’s 610,000) will get 4,900 doses. And Anne Arundel County, whose population is about 580,000, is getting 3,400 doses of the vaccine each week. Additionally, Montgomery County (population of about 1 million) is receiving 4,500 doses and Prince George’s County (population of about 909,000) is receiving 4,200 doses. For many, the disparities reflect Hogan’s focus on counties over cities and catering to white populations over Black populations (Prince George’s County and Baltimore City have the largest Black population in the state).

On Monday, Feb. 16, during a weekly health department meeting, Maryland senators challenged the low percentages of Marylanders vaccinated, as WYPR reported. On Thursday, Feb. 18, a snow storm in Baltimore temporarily disrupted testing in the city.

Amid these vaccination concerns, however, Scott announced on Wednesday, Feb. 17, that Baltimore City would reduce the limits on how and when businesses can operate during the pandemic. On Feb. 22, Scott said, bars will no longer have to maintain a one-hour time limit for customers, and the 10-person limit for indoor gathering and 25-person limit for outdoor gatherings has been lifted. His reasoning, Scott explained, is the city’s positivity rate is 50% lower than it was last month.

Zeke Cohen talks Healing City Baltimore 

It’s been a busy few weeks for Baltimore City Councilperson Zeke Cohen as he continues to guide efforts to put his Healing City legislation (approved in 2019 by then-Mayor Jack Young) into action. 

“A big part of what we hope to do with the Healing City Act is not just get government trained in trauma-informed care, but to really reimagine and rethink how we deliver health care within our communities,” Cohen told Battleground Baltimore last week. “To knock down some of the barriers around stigma with mental health, or the ways in which the healthcare system is extremely exclusive.”

The second Healing City youth summit was held earlier this month with a flurry of virtual events, including a youth day, panels, and a community day. It concluded with a ceremony held outside the beauty salon where Baltimore mother Destiny Harrison was murdered in front of her daughter in December of 2019. Local barbers and beauticians created a scholarship fund for beauticians coming out of Mergenthaler Vocational-Technical High School. They set out to raise about $5,000 but ended up raising over $71,000. Three young people were awarded the scholarship. 

“One of the things that I didn’t even know is that in order to become a cosmetologist or a beautician, you have to go through a bunch of certification, and you have to buy your own kit. And that can actually be prohibitive for some of our young people,” Cohen said. “Because that’s one of the things that we know about Destiny, is that not only was she, at age 21, a successful entrepreneur who launched her own beauty salon, but she also mentored other young women coming up. And so we wanted to honor her by providing not just financial support, but also a whole network of beauticians who are already doing the work.”

On Monday, Feb. 176, 28 members of Baltimore’s first ever Trauma-Informed Task Force were sworn in by Mayor Brandon Scott. Scott, City Council President Nick Mosby, and members of the Baltimore City Council have also received trauma-informed training. Speaking to The Real News Network, Cohen said that he knew the program had to be specific to this city for it to stick.

“If it feels generic, it will fall flat, and no one will care. And so the way it was designed has community voice all throughout it. The way it’s implemented has community voice throughout it. And it’s really a reflection of not just the trauma that we experience in Baltimore, but also what is our greatest asset, which is our people,” he said. 

The training is lead by the Baltimore City Health Department, in partnership with Youth Healing Alliance, Holistic Life Foundation, OSI, Akoben, and other community-based organizations.

Cohen said he hopes to go city agency by city agency, getting all employees sworn in. He knows that with the pandemic and the devastation that has accompanied it, the city needs trauma-informed care more than ever. 

“So the level of trauma is exponentially worse than it was. And I would also just say that I think all of us right now are in need of healing, myself included,” he said.

Cohen also said that it’s important for all leaders to rethink and reimagine the ways that they can make Baltimore a better place.

“I think it’s incumbent on legislators, elected officials, people in positions of power and authority, to do the work to try to understand not just what instinctively feels like it’s going to keep people safe, often people meaning middle class people, but to really try to understand where the root of violence or crime comes from,” he said. “I think, if we’re going to take on a challenge as big as trauma, then it’s going to require people from all different walks of life to be part of the solution, everyone from a returning citizen, to a student, to a pediatrician, to a teacher, to a parent, everybody needs to be at the table.”

Mayor Scott’s Transition Report

Earlier this month, Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott released his administration’s transition report. The 85-page document is the result of various teams compiled by the mayor looking to address important issues such as public health and safety, arts and culture, the environment, housing and development, and more. Last month, Battleground Baltimore’s Lisa Snowden McCray profiled Scott in a piece which asked the question, “How will [Scott] get a city in the midst of crisis to run at a basic level of competency while also meeting a rising, progressive call for bolder action from dedicated activists?” 

The transition teams provide a glimpse of how Scott will run the city competently—and, citizens hope, corruption-free—while acknowledging progressive voices. The teams put grassroots leaders and established voices in the city in the same room, ostensibly with the same degree of power, to work out a number of issues. The report, which can be read here, is an accessible and easy to read document complete with bullet-point recommendations.

“The inclusivity, thoroughness, and thoughtfulness of the committees’ work are a testament to Mayor Scott’s ability to inspire residents all over the city to work together to create a better Baltimore,” the transition steering committee said. “The themes that emerged from the committees’ reports echo Mayor Scott’s values and priorities, including building a better Baltimore for residents in every zip code; investing in historically underserved and under-resourced neighborhoods impacted by systemic racism; and making city government work for everyone, with transparency and accountability. We are optimistic about the future of our great city under Mayor Scott’s leadership, and we stand ready to help however we can.”

Additionally, Scott’s team released a 100 days tracker, which will allow Baltimoreans to see where the administration is during its first 100 days. The 100 Days of Action Tracker uses the transition report’s recommendations. Today (Friday, Feb. 18) is day 74 for Scott. The tracker declares, “there are 58 actions planned in total. 11 are complete, and 23 are in progress.”

Mosby Woes

An announcement from Acting Baltimore City Solicitor Jim Shea brought some semblance of closure Thursday after Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby spent the week fending off increasing allegations of impropriety surrounding travel, gifts, and campaign donations.

The whole thing was the result of dogged reporting from The Baltimore Brew, which uncovered the fact that Mosby had traveled 144 work days in 2018-2019, among other things.

Mosby asked the Baltimore City Inspector General to look into the allegations, and they complied, releasing a report that pointed out a few ethical irregularities, including Mosby’s failure to get the approval of the Board of Estimates before some of those trips. 

“There is nothing in the City Charter or the City Code that would require BOE approval of non-funded travel by an elected official,” Shea wrote in a memo to City Comptroller Bill Henry. In his own statement, Henry added that the city’s Administrative Manual could use “a complete overhaul.” 

The Brew also discovered that the lawyers that Mosby had hired to defend her during the investigation were paid for using campaign funds, and that a campaign finance report she submitted had incorrect addresses for some donors (Mosby has since amended the report, fixing many of the mistakes).

Through it all, Mosby has taken a Trump-like approach to the allegations, calling the Brew’s reporting erroneous and using a photo of Baltimore Inspector General Isabel Cumming on a work trip as a way of defending her own travel.

Also, as some on Twitter pointed out, the announcements from Shea and Henry, along with a work group being assembled to establish further clarity around elected officials and their travel, extend more grace to Mosby than her office extends to the many Black residents her office prosecutes. 

The account @bmorecourtwatch, which live-tweets Baltimore court cases, has highlighted incidents where young people on pretrial home detention have been punished for violations that were likely misunderstandings of the rules because the court’s orders were not clear—precisely the sort of procedural misunderstandings Mosby claims led to the past week or so of allegations.

“This Is Our Music”: RIP Baltimore Club Vocalist Jimmy Jones

This week, every generation of Baltimore’s club music scene was devastated to learn of the death of innovative vocalist Jimmy Jones. He was 50 years old. Baltimore club, a style of hard and fast dance music created in Baltimore that fuses hip-hop and house with some of the sharp-edged sounds of Black techno has influenced dance culture around the world. But in Baltimore, this music—often praised by national and international music writers as part of the party music vanguard—is cathartic music for the Black working class. 

Jones, who entered that underground scene when he was just a teen, collaborated frequently with producers DJ Booman and KW Griff, shouting and half-rapping catchy hooks, such as “Watch Out For The Big Girl,” a club song that has spread across the country over the past three decades and has even been embraced by popular rapper Lizzo. He was a passionate vocalist, using his Baltimore accent and a touch of a lisp to deliver pop-friendly chants through jagged underground beats while always making sure they represented the city and told Baltimore’s multivariate neighborhoods that they mattered. He could sound like he was singing a nursery rhyme, leading a protest, and talking your ear off at the club all at once. On “Where Y’all At,” Jones chants, child-like, “East side, get me pumped, where y’all at?” over a tangle of a James Brown breakbeat and an “Apache” sample. And then Jones always made sure to name specific streets: “Harford Road, 31st, Tivoly!” That was kind of his thing.

Club music is mostly about songs rather than albums, but two releases featuring Jones are easily accessible on streaming services such as Spotify and provide a sense of his warmth and talent: 2003’s “30 Minute Workout” by the Doo Dew Kidz (Jones’ group with Booman and KW Griff), where Jones talks, yells, shouts, sings, and screams over breakneck speed club beats (a highlight is turning Survivor’s “Eye Of The Tiger” into a get-drunk-and-hook-up song) and 410 Pharoahs’ “410 Funk,” a rap/club hybrid featuring Jones, Booman, and rapper Labtekwon (start with “Real Fresh”)—the rare example of hip-house done right.

Battleground Baltimore’s Brandon Soderberg got to know Jones over the years reporting on club music. Back in 2009, the tail-end of a moment where club music was adopted—and many say co opted—by so-called “hipster” dance labels, Jones expressed frustration that his city’s homegrown house music made for Black Baltimore by Black Baltimore was getting international praise but many of the innovators were not.

“A lot of kids [in Baltimore] are poor,” Jones told Soderberg. “This is our music.”

There is a GoFundMe to help Jones’ family pay for his funeral costs.

Elsewhere

“MD Senators Push For More Equitable COVID-19 Vaccine Distribution,” WYPR

“Baltimore will spend over $5 million to give out free recycling cart,” Baltimore Brew

”Mother as Creator: A Perfect Power at the BMA,” BmoreArt

“Biden’s Health Plan Shifts Even More Public Dollars Into Private Hands,” by Dr. Margaret Flowers for Truth-out

One reason why The Real News Network calls Baltimore home is because we know that the struggles the people in this majority-minority city face (unequitable access to resources like education, clean air, and transportation, for example) are the struggles people face all over the globe. This is the latest installment of our weekly news roundup from the Baltimore trenches, which we hope will help keep our friends and neighbors abreast of what’s going on in our city, but we also hope these stories will resonate with people united in the struggle everywhere.

Baltimore City Schools Delays Expanded Reopening Plan

Baltimore City Schools officials announced that they were delaying a plan to further reopen schools in the midst of the potentially deadly COVID-19 pandemic. Instead of beginning the expanded reopening in mid-February, the plan is now for schools to reopen during the first two weeks of March. 

Nationwide, the COVID-19 virus is still spreading, killing over 450,000 Americans and leaving others with serious long-term health problems. Doctors and scientists are still learning about the disease—the way it is spread and the impact it has on the human body.

Baltimore City Schools CEO Dr. Sonja Santelises has been defending the expanded reopening during the continued pandemic, saying that students are suffering emotionally by not being in school buildings and that their grades are lagging. 

In response to questions about why it was so important for students to even be graded during such a traumatic time in our nation, City Schools said “failures and low GPAs are a warning to us that students are not receiving the content that they need to progress academically … Our grading policy mandates that students have the opportunity to reassess during each grading period to demonstrate what they have learned.”

The Baltimore Teachers Union called the delay a victory for students, parents, educators, and public officials, but said that school officials still have more work to do. They are asking that City Schools staff are fully vaccinated before returning to schools, that ventilation upgrades be completed before returning to school buildings, that minimum public health metrics are met for one week before expanding in-person programming, and that a robust and reliable proactive testing program for staff and students is implemented.  

Robert Stokes, chair of the Baltimore City Council’s Education, Workforce, and Youth committee, held a three-hour long virtual hearing on Feb. 4 where Santelises, parents, teachers, principals, and students all made their cases for and against further reopening schools. 

A few principals spoke about how schools need to be opened because schools provide desperately needed support services to students. The Baltimore Teachers Union has said that while that is a fact, the work of providing these services can and should be distributed throughout other Baltimore institutions.

“We have seen encouraging news over the past days and we are experiencing a downward trend for the first time in a long time, we have the chance to get ahead on the spread of the pandemic,” Baltimore Teachers Union president Diamonté Brown said at the hearing. “And if we prematurely expand in-person programming without the necessary full vaccinations, adequate ventilation, and a proactive testing plan, we, like a lot of cities, will reverse our gains and extend the pandemic’s grip on us.”

Student Marigold Lewy rapped Stokes for not giving students the same amount of time as Santelises, who was able to deliver a 10-minute slide presentation.

“Students were supposed to be a part of this because we are affected most. However, most of the people on here have totally disregarded students and we do not appreciate that as students,” she said. She also asked for more school nurses and a de-emphasis on standardized testing.

Meanwhile, an outbreak at Johns Hopkins University is a good example of what spread could look like in a learning environment.

Thirty undergraduates at Johns Hopkins University tested positive for COVID-19 earlier this week. That is, according to Hopkins, out of 6,000 students. Many of the students are student-athletes and live in the same commons building. Late last year, many students, teachers, and community members were upset when Hopkins—whose name is synonymous with public health and whose Coronavirus Resource Center is often cited by news outlets for COVID-19 data—announced that many of its students would be returning to campus this semester. In response to the positive tests, Hopkins closed the campus down for two days.

City Councilperson Odette Ramos of District 14—where Hopkins’ Homewood campus is located—tweeted, “I have asked for an immediate meeting with JHU to understand what happened and measures JHU is taking to prevent this. Neighbors report parties and gatherings. I knew this would happen and told JHU before they did this that students would not behave. JHU is directly responsible.”

Keith Davis Jr., Hospitalized

Keith Davis Jr., a Baltimore man who was shot by police in 2015 and was subsequently charged with a homicide that he has been tried for four separate times, has been hospitalized. 

Davis, whose case has become an activist cause in Maryland thanks to the efforts of his wife, Kelly Davis, has suffered from health issues since being shot in 2015. Namely, he developed breathing issues as a result of being shot by police in the neck. Last year, Davis’ lawyers argued in court that he should be placed on home detention for the duration of the pandemic because his breathing issues and asthma make him especially susceptible to COVID-19. The Baltimore City State’s Attorney’s office argued against Davis’ release, and even questioned whether or not his health issues were legitimate, as reported by Battleground Baltimore co-writer Brandon Soderberg in The Appeal.

Now, less than a year after those hearings, Davis has been hospitalized. Since Monday, he has gone through three procedures for internal bleeding. At some point, he was even placed on a ventilator, but details about his health have been scant. 

“Last night, Monday, February 1, Keith Davis Jr was rushed to UPMC Western Maryland to locate and stop internal bleeding. Keith was stabilized after his first procedure but had to receive blood transfusions due to the amount of blood loss. This morning Keith is entering his second procedure as doctors attempt again to locate and stop his bleeding,” Davis’ supporters said in a statement released earlier this week.

Davis’ wife struggled to obtain any information about her husband even though she was the one who consented to him going into surgery. 

“When I arrived at the hospital, I was met with brute resistance and hostility. They informed me that despite needing my consent for Keith’s procedures, they could not provide any updates on my husband. I was directed to DOC who then redirected me back to the hospital. I was running in circles all while my husband’s patient rights were being violated,” Kelly Davis said. “As Keith’s wife, I am his next of kin. I am the only one that can make medical decisions for my husband when he is unable to do so for himself.”  

Even after his third procedure, his wife says all that she has been told is that he is “getting better,” but knows little else.

“This has been a horrific experience and I can’t help but wonder how often it occurs. Keith is very sick as we continue to play legal football in both the appellate and circuit courts; Keith’s health following being shot by police declines,” Kelly Davis said. “The prison system can not adequately care for him medically, if they could he would not have spent the last 3 days shackled to a hospital bed on a ventilator. Keith needs to be home to receive the proper care as regardless of anything he has never been sentenced to death.”

Zy Richardson, spokesperson for the Baltimore State’s Attorney’s Office, said the office had no comment about Davis’ condition or the SAO’s arguments last year that Davis did not have any health issues. Lt. Latoya Gray, media relations coordinator of the Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, also provided no comment on Davis’ health issues: 

“The Department does not comment on inmate medical issues,” Gray said.

Baltimore Ends Contract with Surveillance Plane

This week, Baltimore City’s Board of Estimates unanimously voted to end its contract with the controversial surveillance plane—or “spy plane,” as residents often call it. The plane, which flies above the city during the day recording citizens’ every move in the hopes of capturing shootings and other violent crimes, has been controversial. It flew in secret in 2016 and was brought back in 2020 with promises of being more transparent. 

A number of reports about the plane’s effectiveness in assisting police in investigating crimes have been less than promising. Recently, a much-awaited study from the Rand Corporation showed that the plane developed evidence in 158 of 1,532 crimes. Mayor Brandon Scott has dismissed the plane as a “gimmick,” and at the Board of Estimates meeting, Eric Melancon, the Baltimore Police Department’s chief of staff, said, “there was no statistical difference between those instances where the plane was involved in evidentiary collection versus instances that were not.” 

Additionally, the ACLU of Maryland, who sued over the use of the “spy plane,” have stressed that the lawsuit will continue, and that just because Baltimore City had stopped using the plane, does not mean they should not be held accountable for allowing the plane to fly.

“[Baltimore City] can’t intentionally duck accountability by suddenly bailing on its years-long defense of this technology,” ACLU MD’s David Rocah said.

Mayor Brandon Scott Talks Defunding the Police

Baltimore City Mayor Brandon Scott spoke to National Public Radio about defunding the police, and what followed was a surprisingly sophisticated and nuanced discussion of the slogan, which  has generally been mischaracterized in the mainstream press. Last year, when Scott was the City Council president, Baltimore’s council voted to reduce the police budget by $22.3 million by getting rid of the Baltimore Police Department’s mounted patrol unit and transferring the marine unit to the fire department. These cuts add up to less than 5% of the police’s massive budget, which is nearly $550 million.

“What we are in the process of doing now is putting together how we can actually responsibly over time reimagine the city’s budget to decrease our dependency on policing,” Scott told NPR. “That means putting the responsibility to respond to things on the people that should be responding to them, which costs less. It costs less—just numbers—it costs less for a mental health person to deal with a mental health or substance abuse issue than it does for a police officer. Then that money can be reallocated somewhere else.”

Scott also explained to NPR that the police budget has continued to expand without resulting in tangible, long-term effects on crime.

“I can say quite openly, frankly and bluntly, that, hey, in 1993, when I was nine years old, the city had 350-something murders, and our police department was our largest funded agency. No different than 2020. We have been beating our heads on the wall the same way,” Scott said. “And again, this is coming from someone who supports constitutional-focused policing. But it’s never been about these mass arrests—never. It’s always been about who. The violence is carried out by the same people over and over again. And instead of wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on focusing on everyone that looks like me, we should be intensely focused on those who are committing the violence.”

Elsewhere

“Three Years Later: There’s Something About Mary, the ‘Prostitute’ in the Sean Suiter Case,” by Justine Barron for The Suiter Files.

“Maryland General Assembly Will Consider Multiple Cannabis Bills in 2021,” The Outlaw Report.

“‘All Light Everywhere’ Review: Documentary on Surveillance Society Shows How Cameras Are Killing Us,” Indiewire.

One reason why The Real News Network calls Baltimore home is because we know that the struggles the people in this majority-minority city face (unequitable access to resources like education, clean air, and transportation, for example) are the struggles people face all over the globe. This is the fourth installment of our weekly news roundup from the Baltimore trenches, which we hope will help keep our friends and neighbors abreast of what’s going on in our city, but we also hope these stories will resonate with people united in the struggle everywhere.

Baltimore Police Union Opposes LEOBR Repeal—And One Member Praises Police Driving into Protesters 

Last week, the Baltimore Sun published an op-ed written by members of the Baltimore City Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 3—the Baltimore City police department’s union—defending the Law Enforcement Officer’s Bill of Rights and arguing against its repeal, which is being proposed this legislative session.

“There is simply no evidence that eliminating the LEOBR will improve public safety or increases accountability [sic],” wrote the group’s President Michael Mancuso, Robert Cherry (the previous president and chair of the group’s Legislative Committee and a sergeant with the BPD), and Elliot Cohen, who serves as the group’s state trustee. 

“The repeal of the LEOBR will create uncertainty for officers who have to make split-second decisions,” they also wrote.

LEOBR provides police officers with significant workplace protections, especially as it pertains to discipline and investigations regarding misconduct. This includes requiring investigations into police officers be conducted by other police officers only and providing an officer accused of misconduct five days to locate an attorney before they are interviewed about the incident. 

On Sunday, just days after the op-ed was published, one of its authors, Cherry, took to Twitter to express his “full support” of police officers in Tacoma, Washington, who drove into a crowd during a police protest.  

“Any other cops agree?” he asked in a tweet, “or are you afraid to speak out?!”

The Baltimore Police Department has not responded to repeated requests for comment from The Real News Network about Cherry’s tweet. This is not the first time Cherry has created controversy on Twitter for cruel and controversial remarks. In 2015, after there was a shooting at radical bookstore and activist hub Red Emma’s, Cherry tweeted, “I’m sure it was captured on cell phones by the many patrons there who regularly capture police w/cell footage.” He later deleted the tweet. 

Maryland is one of 16 states which still have the LEOBR in effect. Activists and politicians in Baltimore have long said the law prioritizes police over the community and leaves civilian oversight groups powerless to hold bad officers accountable. Maryland Matters reported that in August of last year, Del. Wanika Fisher (D-Prince George’s Counties) pointed out that only six officers have been charged in police killings since 2005, although the Mapping Police Violence database shows that 138 people were killed by officers from 2013 to 2019.

Earlier this month, we spoke to Maryland Del. Gabriel Acevero, who is sponsoring a bill to repeal LEOBR and another bill which would make it easier for the public to access police misconduct information, which is currently protected by the Maryland Public Information Act.

Acevero called LEOBR, which Maryland signed into law in 1972, “the blueprint for how to protect corrupt and racist cops,” and added, “we also have some of the most restrictive transparency laws that don’t allow for transparency.” 

Acevero explained that changes to these laws “are inextricably intertwined” if the state is to begin to seriously hold police accountable.

“When police are investigating themselves it doesn’t provide confidence and it doesn’t provide transparency,” Acevero said. “We should not be asking perpetrators of police violence to weigh in on what laws would hold them accountable.”

Baltimore City Students are Striking

The fight over whether more Baltimore City students and teachers will be back in classrooms is still going on. Earlier this month, Baltimore City Schools announced that expanded in-person classes would resume, starting in mid-February. Since then, the Baltimore Teachers Union has been adamant that it’s still not safe to resume in-person learning, pointing to concerns about vaccine accessibility (Johns Hopkins officials say it will take about 20 weeks to get all City Schools employees vaccinated), and worries that upgrades to city school buildings won’t be completed in time. This week, a coalition of students announced that since Maryland law prohibits Baltimore teachers from striking, they’d strike themselves. 

High school senior and former student school board commissioner Joshua Lynn announced the strike at Tuesday’s school board meeting. Students K-2 would strike Feb. 16, while students in grades 3-5, as well as grades 9-12, would strike March 1. The move is largely a symbolic one because Baltimore City Schools officials are not forcing students to return to classroom learning. They are only requiring teachers to do so.

Lynn said he’s experienced the old infrastructure in Baltimore City schools firsthand.

“Baltimore City, having some of the oldest buildings in the state, and some of the oldest buildings in the country … that’s a big factor that we have to take into account,” he said. 

Lynn said other young people-driven groups are helping organize the strike, including Good Kids Mad City Bmore and Baltimore Algebra Project. They are also working with the Parent and Community Advisory Board, which has come out against the plan to further reopen schools.

Lynn said he has had a few members of the Baltimore City Council reach out in support of the strike, but has not heard anything from the mayor’s office or the school board.

Also at this week’s school board meeting, Johnette Richardson, a member of the Baltimore City Board of Commissioners had stern words for fellow member Durryle Brooks. Brooks had an op-ed published in the Baltimore Sun last week in which he cited his concerns about the reopening plan. Bringing up the siege on the U.S. Capitol a few weeks ago, Richardson said that she respects freedom of speech, but seemed to condemn Brooks’ decision to write the piece.

“While we respect the varying opinions of each of our commissioners, this particular opinion expressed by Commissioner Brooks is not the reflection of each member of our board,” she said. “We support our CEO and her team in their attempts to provide reasonable options for students and families of Baltimore City.”

Members of the Baltimore City Schools Board of Commissioners are appointed by the mayor. Critics of this model have called for members to be elected instead of appointed, saying that members rarely, if ever, deviate from the wishes of Baltimore City Public Schools. 

Meanwhile, Councilperson Robert Stokes announced that he would be holding a hearing about the plan on Feb. 4 at 5 p.m., and more members of Baltimore City Council have expressed concerns about school reopenings. 

See The Real News Network’s Jaisal Noor’s report on the fight to keep teachers and students safe in both Chicago and Baltimore here.

The Black Butterfly: The Harmful Politics of Race and Space in America

Frequently quoted in The Real News’ reporting, a former professor at Morgan State University, and a current researcher and visiting associate professor with the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute, Lawrence Brown just released his book, “The Black Butterfly: The Harmful Politics of Race and Space in America.” Its title, the press release for the book explains, is “a reference to the fact that Baltimore’s majority-Black population spreads out on both sides of the coveted strip of real estate running down the center of the city like a butterfly’s wings.” It is a counter to the Baltimore parlance which calls the center of the city, powered by white business interests, “The White L.” Brown’s book explores Baltimore’s long history of redlining and segregation and its effects on Baltimore’s myriad problems, connecting what has happened in Baltimore to similar cities such as Cleveland and St. Louis—and then offers up some hope by way of a five-step plan for racial equity.

“Today, many Black neighborhoods at the core of hypersegregated metropolitan areas remain deeply redlined and are confronted with everything from urban apartheid to toxic pollution,” Brown writes in the introduction. “As evidence of America’s antipathy towards Black neighborhoods, both a Democrat and a Republican took turns demonizing and denigrating majority Black jurisdictions in Maryland within a span of several months in 2019.”