Freddie Gray’s death in custody: Baltimore protests intensify against US police over black man’s fatal injuries
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- The Reverend Westley West leads a march for Freddie Gray to the Baltimore Police Department’s Western District police station. Gray died from spinal injuries about a week after he was arrested and transported in a police van. Photo: APBaltimore: Protests over the arrest and death of Baltimore resident Freddie Gray continued for a sixth day on Thursday, with about 200 people circling the grassy plaza in front of a cordoned-off City Hall and then marching in the streets at the evening rush hour.”Shame on Baltimore police,” said the Reverend Jamal Bryant, pastor of Empowerment Temple and organiser of several demonstrations so far.With Gray’s father and one of his sisters standing in front of the crowd, Bryant asked residents to hold up their hands “and show the family that we will not sit quietly until justice is done.”
Two marchers are detained by Baltimore police after they climbed over the barricades guarding the department’s Western District police station during a march for Freddie Gray. Photo: APGray was arrested April 12 after a foot chase; police say he was carrying a knife. Video recorded by a civilian bystander shows officers dragging him into a police van. He died a week later.
AdvertisementSix police officers have been suspended while authorities investigate. The Justice Department announced on Tuesday that it would open an investigation to see if civil rights violations had been committed.
Gray’s death and the emotional protests that followed have thrust the city into the vortex of a national debate over police conduct in minority neighborhoods, spurred by the police-involved deaths in the past year of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Eric Garner on Staten Island and Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina.
‘No justice, no peace!’ …Marchers chant near the Baltimore police department’s Western District police station during a march for Freddie Gray. Photo: APAlso on Thursday in the US, the family of Michael Brown filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against the white police officer who killed him, arguing that Brown had his hands up when the fatal shots were fired.
The civil suit filed in state court on Thursday asserts that the white officer, Darren Wilson, unconstitutionally stopped Brown and then provoked him before ultimately taking his life in a hail of bullets. The suit seeks at least $US75,000 ($96,400) in damages.
The lawsuit also names Thomas Jackson, the former Ferguson police chief, and the city as defendants, arguing that the city fostered a culture of racial bias and mistreatment of African-Americans, which resulted in the stop where Wilson killed Brown, 18, in the middle of a residential street.
A protestor supporting Freddie Gray chants during a march to the Baltimore Police Department’s Western District police station, Wednesday, April 22. Photo: APThe lawsuit comes about nine months after Brown’s killing and about five months after Wilson resigned from the Ferguson force. Wilson, who said he was acting in self-defence after Brown punched him and later charged at him, was cleared of any criminal wrongdoing by a state grand jury and a federal Department of Justice investigation.
That Justice Department report found conflicting witness accounts of Brown’s final moments. Forensic evidence and some witnesses’ accounts were consistent with Wilson’s assertion that he shot Brown because the teenager was charging forward in a threatening way, and that Brown’s hands were not raised to the sky. But some witnesses said Brown seemed to be trying to give up and was stumbling toward Wilson before the fatal shots were fired.
On Thursday, Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, a Republican, said State Police will help city authorities deal with Gray-related demonstrations, at the request of Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, a Democrat.
Marchers raise their fists in front of Baltimore police guarding the department’s Western District police station during a march for Freddie Gray in Baltimore. Photo: APMr Hogan said Ms Rawlings-Blake reached out Wednesday to ask for backup assistance. “The front line,” he said, “will be the Baltimore City police.”
Ms Rawlings-Blake complained this week about perceived delays with the review, which she blamed in part on Maryland’s Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights. Mr Hogan said the bill of rights, which affords police specific protections, is only one factor that he would like to see examined.
“There’s a lot of issues going on here that have to be addressed,” he said. “We’re going to take a look at working with the local governments to figure out the best solution, because this is obviously a major issue.”
At the same time, Mr Hogan said he would not launch a state investigation into Gray’s death at this point, noting that both federal and city authorities are reviewing the case.
“We don’t want to interfere with an ongoing investigation,” Mr Hogan said. “I have complete confidence that they’re going to conduct their investigation in a complete and fair way, and it’s going to be transparent.”
Captain Eric Kowalczyk, a Baltimore police spokesman, said members of Gray’s family met Thursday with Police Commissioner Anthony Batts. The family had previously declined offers to meet with Mr Batts and Ms Rawlings-Blake.
In the afternoon, in front of City Hall, Bryant led a moment of silence for Baltimore homicide victims, the overwhelming majority of whom were black men.
He urged protesters to “not disrespect the memory of Freddie Gray by destroying our own community. Do not do what others think we are going to do!”
As the rush hour began, protesters marched several kilometres through downtown toward West Baltimore, where Gray was arrested. Police blocked some streets, snarling traffic.
Two people were arrested after a scuffle broke out about 6.16 pm, police said. There were conflicting accounts of whether the argument began as a confrontation with police or a dispute between protesters.
Washington Post, Reuters
Freddie Gray in Baltimore: Another City, Another Death in the Public Eye
BALTIMORE — In life, friends say, Freddie Gray was an easygoing, slender young man who liked girls and partying here in Sandtown, a section of west Baltimore pocked by boarded-up rowhouses and known to the police for drug dealing and crime.
In death, Mr. Gray, 25, has become the latest symbol in the running national debate over police treatment of black men — all the more searing, people here say, in a city where the mayor and police commissioner are black.
Questions are swirling around just what happened to Mr. Gray, who died here Sunday — a week after he was chased and restrained by police officers, and suffered a spine injury, which later killed him, in their custody. The police say they have no evidence that their officers used force. A lawyer for Mr. Gray’s family accuses the department of a cover-up, and on Tuesday the Justice Department opened a civil rights inquiry into his death.
But as protests continued Tuesday night — with hundreds of angry residents, led by a prominent pastor and Mr. Gray’s grieving family, chanting and marching in the streets — the death has also fueled debate on whether African-American leadership here can better handle accusations of police brutality than cities like Ferguson, Mo., and North Charleston, S.C., with their white-dominated governments
“Unlike other places where incidents like this have happened, they understand what it means to be black in America,” said City Councilman Brandon Scott, an ally of Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and a frequent critic of Police Commissioner Anthony Batts.
“They understand how something like this can get out of hand very quickly,” Mr. Scott said. “They understand the community’s frustration more than anyone else. But at the same time they also understand the opposite — they understand the need to have law enforcement in neighborhoods. So it puts them in a bind.”
This week the mayor and police commissioner have appeared repeatedly in public promising a full and transparent review of Mr. Gray’s death. On Tuesday, the police released the names of six officers who had been suspended with pay, including a lieutenant, a woman and three officers in their 20s who joined the force less than three years ago. Officers canvassed west Baltimore, looking for witnesses.
Mr. Batts turned up in Mr. Gray’s neighborhood, chatting with residents and shaking hands. And Ms. Rawlings-Blake said in an interview that she had asked Gov. Larry Hogan for help in getting an autopsy on Mr. Gray performed by the state medical examiner made public, even piecemeal, as quickly as possible. The mayor said she supported the Justice Department inquiry.
Chanting “Black Lives Matter” and “Justice for Freddie,” protesters marched Tuesday evening on the block where Mr. Gray was arrested. The Rev. Jamal Bryant asked for a moment of silence. Mr. Gray’s relatives — including his mother, her head shrouded in the hood of a sweatshirt — paused quietly.
Mr. Gray’s arrest, which was captured on a cellphone video that shows him being dragged, seemingly limp, into a police van, has revived a debate in this city over police practices.
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“We have a very challenging history in Baltimore,” Ms. Rawlings-Blake said, adding that she had worked hard “to repair a broken relationship” between black residents and the police. She called Mr. Gray’s death “a very sad and frustrating setback.”
Ms. Rawlings-Blake and Mr. Batts had been talking about the problem long before the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in August spawned national protests and the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter. But the officials’ actions are doing little to assuage angry residents here. Rosa Mobley says she witnessed Mr. Gray’s arrest from her bedroom window, and heard him screaming as the police dragged him into a transport van. “We got this so-called black mayor, but she don’t care nothing about us,” Ms. Mobley said as Mr. Batts pulled up in the neighborhood in a black SUV just before noon on Tuesday. “They don’t come around here. Just because we’re poor, we don’t need to be treated like this.”
Because there are no national statistics on police-involved killings, it is impossible to say whether their numbers are increasing. But the growing prevalence of cellphone and police video, coupled with heightened scrutiny by the news media and the public after Ferguson, has focused intense attention on such cases, especially when officers are white and victims are black.
The police here did not release the racial breakdown of the six suspended officers. Now the Justice Department will look into whether they violated Mr. Gray’s civil rights. Such inquiries are not unusual; in Ferguson, the department did not find Mr. Brown’s rights were violated. However, a second broader Justice Department review of the Ferguson Police Department resulted in a scathing report detailing abusive and discriminatory practices by the city’s law enforcement system.
In Baltimore, police-community tensions date at least to 2005, when the Police Department, following a practice known as “zero-tolerance policing” made more than 100,000 arrests in a heavily African-American city of then roughly 640,000 people.
In 2006, the N.A.A.C.P. and the American Civil Liberties Union sued the city, alleging a broad pattern of abuse in which people were routinely arrested without probable cause. The city settled in 2010 for $870,000, agreed to retrain officers and publicly rejected “zero-tolerance policing.” Ms. Rawlings-Blake became mayor that year.
In 2012 she brought in Mr. Batts, who had run the police department in Oakland, Calif. In 2013, he proposed that police officers wear body cameras to capture encounters like the one that injured Mr. Gray; plans are now in the works for a pilot project.
Ms. Rawlings-Blake has also eliminated a police unit that had a reputation for treating suspects harshly. Last year, she and Mr. Batts asked the Justice Department to investigate after The Baltimore Sun reported that taxpayers had paid nearly $6 million since 2011 in judgments or settlements in 102 lawsuits alleging police misconduct. That investigation is ongoing
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William Murphy Jr., the lawyer for the Gray family, said Tuesday in an interview that “the commissioner’s heart is in the right place,” and that the mayor — whose father, Pete Rawlings, was a civil rights advocate and powerful Maryland politician — “understands police brutality and the extent to which it has a cancerous effect on our society.”
But Mr. Murphy said they had inherited “a dysfunctional department” whose officers “had no probable cause” to arrest Mr. Gray, who was stopped early on the morning of April 12 after a police lieutenant made eye contact with him and he ran away. That lieutenant was one of the six officers who were suspended.
“He was running while black,” Mr. Murphy said of Mr. Gray, “and that’s not a crime.”
At a news conference Monday, Deputy Police Commissioner Jerry Rodriguez said Mr. Gray “gave up without the use of force.” Mr. Gray, who was apparently asthmatic, then asked for his inhaler, but he did not have one; he was conscious and speaking when he was loaded into the van to be taken to the police station, Mr. Rodriguez said.
In interviews on Tuesday, witnesses gave various accounts. Michelle Gross, who took cellphone video of the arrest, said she saw two officers standing over Mr. Gray as people said: “He’s just lying there? Why don’t you call an ambulance? Why don’t you get him some help?”
Another witness, Kiona Mack, who said she took the cellphone video that showed Mr. Gray being dragged into the van, said she saw officers “sitting on his back, and having his leg twisted.”
Members of Mr. Gray’s family have said he suffered three fractured vertebrae in his neck and that his larynx was crushed, according to The Baltimore Sun; Mr. Murphy, the lawyer, said Mr. Gray’s spinal cord was 80 percent severed. Those details have not been confirmed by doctors or authorities, but experts on spinal cord injury said even less obvious neck trauma could be life-threatening.
“It doesn’t necessarily take huge force to fracture or dislocate a vertebra, and have a traumatic compression of the spinal cord,” said Ben A. Barres, professor of neurobiology at the Stanford School of Medicine. “It gets worse very rapidly if it’s not treated.” And, he said, “moving the person, like lifting him into a van, or even the ride in the van, could make the injury much worse.”
The police have said they will complete their inquiry by May 1 and turn it over to the state’s attorney in Baltimore — Maryland’s name for local prosecutors — who will determine whether to bring criminal charges. Ms. Rawlings-Blake has said she will also convene an independent commission.
In Mr. Gray’s neighborhood, which is adjacent to a public housing development called the Gilmor Homes, people remembered him Tuesday as a likable young man who sometimes got into trouble with the law — Maryland court records show he had at least two arrests for drug-related charges since December.
Mr. Gray had a twin sister, and a brother who died, friends say, and he also suffered lead poisoning as a child. They are furious about his death, and particularly about police conduct.
“He wasn’t out causing any trouble,” said Roosevelt McNeil, 26, who had known Mr. Gray since Mr. Gray was a child. “He had some arrests, but he wasn’t a big drug dealer or something like that. He was a great guy over all — he didn’t deserve to be handled like that. Why won’t the cops say how they ended up going after him, from that to him having his neck broken?”