Witnesses began delivering testimony this week in what is the start of a months-long set of trials of six Baltimore officers for the death of Freddie Gray, who incurred fatal injuries while in police custody in April.
The trials are being watched as a rare opportunity for accountability in police brutality, disproportionately against unarmed African Americans.
But in Baltimore, the racial dynamics are not as stark as in some other prominent cases of death at police hands. On the jury, eight out of 12 members are black, and more than half of those who made up the pool reported that they or immediate members of their family have been victims or suspects in crimes. The city’s leadership – including the mayor, the president of the city council, the chief prosecutor, and, at the time of Gray’s death, the police commissioner – are black. And three of the officers charged in Gray’s death, including the defendant now on trial, William Porter, are black.
Porter, the first defendant, is a 26-year-old African American man who grew up, like Freddie Gray, in West Baltimore. But in the fifth grade, his mother moved the family across town, where he did well and eventually started college. According to the Washington Post, he left due to debt and graduated from the police academy in 2013.
The job eventually brought him back to West Baltimore, where he encountered Freddie Gray on the morning of 12 April. During an incident involving Porter and five other officers, Gray suffered a severed spinal cord after being dragged on the ground and transported in the back of a police van in restraints without a seatbelt.
Police in the Western District were for many symbolized by the rough-and-ready head-busting cops always ready to clear corners on the television show The Wire, Ellis Carver and Thomas “Herc” Hauk. Years of zero tolerance in the neighborhood, most of which was designated a “high crime area”, ensured that officers weren’t popular in the neighborhood, where residents – and not just young ones – felt they were treated unfairly, harassed, and left unprotected from criminals.
“I live right there,” a middle aged woman named Reesa Burton said on 25 April, barely a block from the Western District police station where Porter was based. “If I call the police, it’s half an hour coming. It’s terrible.”
“They’ll arrest you for anything,” her sister Margaret added.
“They’re terrible,” Reesa said.
But defense lawyers in Porter’s trial are depicting Porter as a good cop in an incredibly difficult environment, where the rules are learned from other officers on the streets and not in the academy or from a rulebook. Porter never fired his gun during his three years in office and his worst offense involved leaving his post to assist another officer “because that’s the kind of cop he was”, said Gary Proctor, one of Porter’s attorneys.
“I can imagine for Porter it’s difficult,” said Leon Taylor, an African American who served as a Baltimore City police officer for over a decade. “It’s more difficult when you feel that you’re part of the community and the community is willing to negate all of the positive things that you’ve done and all the greater things you could have accomplished because of this incident.”
Taylor, who said he is “from the hood”, also served as a peacekeeper in Sarajevo before joining the police force. He elaborated on the difficulty of navigating different communities. “I myself have locked up relatives, so it’s just something that happens. I’ve met relatives for the first time answering a call,” he said. “Police are part of the community and the situation with Porter. Porter is part of the community, he came from the community, he had relatives there.”
Porter’s dilemma
Even though Porter is black, he is also blue and that may test his loyalties in different ways. In his new book, The Beast Side: Living and Dying While Black in America, East Baltimore author D Watkins recounts a conversation about an acquaintance who had become a cop: “He ain’t black no more, he’s white! Better yet, he’s blue, he’s with the biggest gang in the city.”
The prosecution has asked that Porter be tried first so that he may be used as a material witness in the other cases, especially those against Caesar Goodson, who is facing the most serious charges, including second-degree murder, and is the only officer not to give a statement to the police and Alicia White, who allegedly spoke to the back of Gray’s head and found him unresponsive and is, like Porter, being charged with involuntary manslaughter, second degree assault and reckless endangerment. Like Porter, both White and Goodson are black.
Lt Kenneth Butler, the president of Vanguard Justice Society, an organization for Black police officers, acknowledged the difficult position Porter finds himself in, but said it’s not all that unusual outside of the “magnitude of the incident”.
“I think Porter is in a very unfortunate situation,” he said. “I guess maybe he is a material witness. I don’t know how it is going to go. But trying to police in Baltimore being an African American police officer, it may be difficult. But I think it’s difficult around the nation just to be a police now, no matter what color you are.”
That difficulty has, in some cases, helped to strengthen the bond between officers, which can extend into the courtroom.
“There’s a very strong police culture that values and enforces a code of silence,” said Doug Colbert, a professor of law at the University of Maryland.
The case of former Baltimore police officer Joe Crystal shows how deeply entrenched that culture is. Crystal, who is white, testified against fellow officers for beating a suspect and eventually had to quit the department after intense harassment which included threats, a rat beneath his windshield wipers and ultimately physical danger when his colleagues failed to respond when he called for backup. Even after all of that, Crystal has said that the night before he testified was one of the most difficult in his life.
So far, even though they are being tried separately, the group, called “the Baltimore six” by the police union, which is contributing to their individual defenses, has maintained a unified front.
But that may all change as a result of the trial.
“If he’s convicted then his lawyer is under an ethical duty to present Porter with other alternatives to being sentenced for the crime or crimes for which he was convicted,” Colbert said. “That’s where he’ll be faced with being offered a negotiation that would likely require his testimony against other officers in exchange for leniency in his ultimate sentence.”
Peter Moskos, a former member of the Baltimore police department who is now an author and professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, acknowledged that there is a blue wall but said it only goes so far.
“The general rule of thumb is: No, cops will not go out of their way to say bad things about another cop certainly,” he said. “But cops also aren’t willing to go to jail for the misdeeds of another cop. ‘Why am I going to risk my pension and my job for your fuck up’ is the general attitude … To some extent, when the shit hits the fan, all bets are off. You do have to cover your ass first.”
“It seems like they’ve adopted a divide and conquer strategy to get the desired outcome of the case,” Taylor said of the prosecution, but noted that ultimately it depends on the outcome.
Moskos was a bit more fatalistic.
“I mean the problem is, even in the best case scenario for cops, they’re still fucked because Freddie Gray went into the van alive and came out dead,” he said. “That can’t happen.”
- This article was amended on 5 December 2015. An earlier version said Peter Moskos was a retired member of the Baltimore police department. He is a former member.
Comments (…)
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion