When the Baltimore Police Locked Down Several Blocks of a Black Neighborhood
On Nov. 15, Detective David Bomenka of the Baltimore Police Department reported that his partner, Detective Sean Suiter, had been shot by an unknown assailant whom Suiter had stopped in a vacant lot in the city鈥檚 Harlem Park neighborhood. In response, the department did something that had never been done before and is constitutionally suspect: it completely shut down several blocks in the community, which is virtually all Black, with a police cordon.
For six days, police restricted all vehicles and pedestrians from entering, barred all non-residents, and forced residents to and get permission at the cordon to enter or leave. Press reports also indicate that some residents were told that they could not leave their homes, and were , at the cordon. The department鈥檚 sole stated rationale for this extreme action was the need to preserve a crime scene.
It鈥檚 true, of course, that police have a legitimate interest in securing crime scenes to preserve evidence and ensure that it can be properly introduced at trial. But it鈥檚 hard to understand how that rationale justifies the wide area and long duration of the cordon in Harlem Park, which extended well beyond the vacant lot where the shooting was reported to have occured, much less the other police actions, such as searches, interrogations, demands for ID, virtual 鈥渉ouse arrest鈥� of residents, and the barring of non-residents. The lives of the neighborhood鈥檚 residents were turned upside down for days on end with questionable justification that made less and less sense as time wore on.
There鈥檚 good reason to think the Baltimore Police Department鈥檚 extraordinary lock-down in Harlem Park violated residents鈥� constitutional rights. A federal appeals court to a similar, less intrusive police cordon in Washington, D.C., deeming it unconstitutional. In 2008, the Metropolitan Police Department there created a 鈥渘eighborhood safety zone鈥� program in response to violence in Washington鈥檚 Trinidad neighborhood. Under the program, 11 vehicle checkpoints were erected over the course of five days at locations around the zone鈥檚 perimeter. Officers demanded identification and denied entry to any drivers not found to have 鈥渓egitimate鈥� reasons for wanting to enter. However, pedestrians were allowed to pass at will.
In addition to the legal questions, and the striking disconnect between the police actions and the explanation given, the lockdown in Harlem Park raises more fundamental questions about the nature of policing in Baltimore. Many people noted that there was no similar response from the police in the hundreds of other killings in Baltimore this year. More fundamentally, the treatment of every resident in Harlem Park as a suspect, without any plausible explanation, would simply not have happened in a neighborhood that was more affluent or not predominately Black. This is just one more powerful example of the way in which policing in Baltimore, and in America, is not conducted in a way that treats all people as having equal dignity and worth.
After against the lockdown, the 老澳门开奖结果 of Maryland in mid-December seeking all body camera footage involving officers鈥� interactions with civilians while working the perimeter of the cordon. This is our first request for a potentially large amount of body camera footage since Baltimore began deploying the cameras to the police force in 2016. We don鈥檛 know whether the officers were recording during all of their interactions with people at the cordon, but they should have under .
This is precisely why there was such a significant demand for body cameras for police in the first place. They provide accountability and transparency in contested police actions as well as an independent record of what occurred so that the public is not forced to simply rely on the word of the police. We have also asked for footage of police escorting residents to or from the cordon, police directing residents to remain in their houses, and the first five minutes of any police searches of occupied dwellings within the cordon.
We hope that the footage, with identities redacted to preserve residents鈥� privacy and anonymity, will allow the entire Baltimore community to have a more informed basis on which to judge the police department鈥檚 actions.
