The Department of Justice released a startling 163-page report last month that details widespread discrimination and excessive use of force in the Baltimore Police Department. The report concluded “the relationship between the BPD and many of the communities it serves is broken.”
The year-long investigation uncovered shocking statistics about the systemic abuse and racial bias by police in Baltimore, such as:
- 90 percent of excessive force incidents reviewed by the Department of Justice involved force against African Americans;
- 95 percent of individuals stopped at least 10 times by police were African American;
- African Americans are five times more likely to be arrested for drug possession despite comparable rates of drug use across races.
These data points were only uncovered after months of painstaking review of hundreds of thousands of documents by investigators. That’s because, according to the report, BPD “fails to collect and record important data on a broad range of activities and that, when it does collect data, BPD does not use the data to manage and supervise officer activity.”
[For more of this story, written by Eric Liu, go to https://psmag.com/we-need-data...5d61fc93e#.z4l2vyeis]
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