Martin O'Malley's term as mayor saw a sharp decline in the numbers of police shootings...yes, he had an issue with arrests for petty crimes, but there's no evidence that was accompanied by an increase in police brutality. In fact, his police dept. changed the way incidents of police misconduct was reported and handled by establishing an active review board and a hotline for reporting police abuse or misconduct.
Under his term there were over 100 'reverse integrity' stings of police conducted a year. They fully staffed the civilian review board including detectives on the board to investigate claims against police. They used technology to flag abusive officers who racked up complaints.
Also the numbers of arrests is skewed because it reflects repeat offenders, not new cases. What was happening during his term was an effort to clear the open-air drug markets which had been plaguing black majority neighborhoods.
As O'Malley said in a response today, if those had been white-majority communities, there would be no question of the swift and thorough response to drug-related crime and violence which threatened and cost black lives, many young black lives.
I think he's correct in estimating that at least 1000 black lives were actually saved by his police dept.'s focus on responding to and acting on the drug activity which was running rampant in Baltimore when he took office. The city had record deaths and record violent crime when he took office which saw a sharp reduction during his terms as mayor. During his time as governor, recidivism was cut significantly, and incarceration rates were actually REDUCED in his terms to 20 year lows; and voting rights were restored to 52,000 individuals with felonies.
That was a direct result of not only the heightened attention by the police to that drug activity, but also a result of a community policing effort, policing the police with increased accountability for police abuses, and a massive drug-treatment program which recovered many black lives in those communities.
He also closed the most violent prison in the city, ended the death penalty, signed decriminalization of small amounts of pot into law, and actually brought incarceration rates down during his stay in office. That says 'black lives matter,' at least to those black lives which were granted safe streets, prevention of violent crimes and killings and other opportunities to improve on their way of life. I've lived in Maryland for 45 years. These issues aren't just an abstraction to me, and neither are they to other members of the black community who are affected by these issues.
Those communities, not coincidentally voted repeatedly for Martin O'Malley in overwhelming numbers throughout his several, successive roles serving in public service in Maryland. That's as much of an endorsement of his efforts as anything anyone wants to portray in terms of black support.
from Nick Kelly at Medium:
The Bum Rap Against Martin O’Malley
If you’re reading this, you’ve probably heard criticism of Martin O’Malley’s use of zero-tolerance policing and it’s alleged impact on crime and unrest in Baltimore. I’ll get right to the point. Don’t believe the criticism.
First, because all the criticism I’ve seen (and believe me, I’ve seen a lot) is based upon serious factual distortions and/or unproven theories. Critics contend that mass arrests during his term as Mayor were prime movers of tense and sometimes violent nights more than twelve years after they peaked.
That may sound theoretically plausible if you imagine that he ordered mass incarcerations and/or had unusually large numbers of Baltimore citizens arrested. That’s why you are so disturbed when his critics tell you (falsely) that Martin O’Malley had over 100,000 people arrested out of a total 600,000 population! They sometimes further say he put 1 in 6 citizens in jail! But neither of these claims is true.
I will explain why shortly. But before I take you into why those harmful claims disintegrate under close inspection, here’s the second reason I’m advising you to doubt Martin’s critics. Quite simply, it’s because they so often point to a darkly pessimistic work of fiction. While it’s obviously true that Baltimore still has it’s share of serious problems, it’s not the bleak and ruined city portrayed in “The Wire”. In that grim drama every person is ultimately compromised or corrupt. The people of Baltimore are not just like the characters in “The Wire” or the villains in “Gotham”. Nor is the fictional “Tommy Carcetti” just like the real Martin O’Malley.
Third, and most significantly, I’m advising you to disbelieve those critics because the people of Baltimore re-elected Martin O’Malley by a landslide in 2003. They not only re-elected him, they did so with what has to be a record 173,030 votes. He won 88% of the vote and every district in the city.
Why is that vote total a big deal? Because it was an enormous vote of approval of his policies after he had increased the arrest rate to its peak. By comparison, once Martin O’Malley was elected Governor of Maryland, his successor as Mayor, Sheila Dixon, won the race for Mayor of Baltimore with only 36,726 votes. Then, in 2011, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake won with only 40,125 votes (see pg. 12). The differences between the number of votes he received and the numbers of votes they received is truly stunning, especially when you consider that none of those elections happened in Presidential election years. The point is that the overwhelming majority of the people of Baltimore apparently loved what Martin O’Malley did with policing in his first term as Mayor!
How can that be true, some of you may wonder, when you may be thinking (incorrectly) that Baltimore police had put 1 in 6 citizens in jail? Well, first of all, you may not be aware that arrest numbers include multiple arrests of repeat offenders. In other words, the annual number of arrests is always greater than the number of people arrested. The number of people arrested during one of those years is more like 10,000 than 100,000. And they were usually pretty much the same 10,000, arrested and questioned multiple times.
Second, you may not realize that many of those arrested don’t spend even one day or night in jail. Many are just questioned and released. Finally, and this is really important, I’m fairly confident that you are not aware that there were 89,000 arrests in 1998 in Baltimore the year before Martin O’Malley became Mayor. Eighty-nine thousand arrests were made in Baltimore the year before Martin O’Malley became mayor. Let that sink in for a minute...
Now, back to those 89,000 arrests in 1998. Did you remember that number? Have you guessed why it’s important to understanding the truth of what Martin O’Malley did? I bet many of you have.
In the four years following his inauguration as mayor, Martin O’Malley did drive that 89,000 inherited arrest number up to 115,000. That’s a 29% increase, or about a 7% increase per year. (Not exactly a drastic shift, eh?) In the following four years, he dropped it back down to 93,000. So, based on those numbers, it’s hard to see how Martin O’Malley’s so-called “zero-tolerance policing” was all that draconian compared to the policing already in effect in Baltimore.
But still, don’t all those arrest numbers qualify as “mass incarceration”? Nope. As I explained before, those are arrest figures, not numbers of people locked up for days at a time in jail or prison. And this next point may be a shocker to those of you who have believed his critics. Martin O’Malley actually reduced the incarceration rate! And he also reduced homicides, major crimes, and police-involved shootings!
read more: https://medium.com/@Nick_Kelly/the-bum-rap-against-martin-o-malley-9155359f00ee#.r5wre1ecx
Watch Martin O’Malley Shade David Simon’s Great Work of Fiction
= new reply since forum marked as read
