The result has been crime. Murders in Baltimore have topped 300 for 10 straight years. The number of assaults, armed robberies, and burglaries in Baltimore per capita leads the nation.
Baltimore’s response to the surge in crime has been primarily to ratchet up its law enforcement efforts and lock up offenders. African-American communities are targeted for arrests as part of the drive to “protect” the community. Consequently, African-Americans in Baltimore are first in the nation by one measure. Baltimore ranks number one for locking up the largest percentage of its residents. Nearly all those faces behind the bars at 401 East Eager Street are black.
Leonard Hamm was the police commissioner from 2004 to 2008 under Martin O’Malley, who served with a “zero tolerance” mantra. O’Malley was true to his word. Under him, cops were super aggressive in black neighborhoods. A grand jury concluded that too many arrests were being made in black neighborhoods without merit, and the city settled a lawsuit from residents who said they were wrongly arrested for minor offenses.
O’Malley picked Hamm to run the department during his second and last term as mayor. O’Malley went on to become Maryland’s governor and to run for the Democratic nomination for president in 2016. Hamm joined the department in 1974 when the city’s black police officers were not allowed to ride in police cars. Smart and creative, Hamm rose through the ranks under the tutelage of Eddie Woods, Baltimore’s third black police commissioner. As a major, Hamm was the first black officer to head the department’s prestigious Central District, the hub of the city’s entertainment, financial, and political districts downtown.
Hamm’s and my career paths overlapped, but we’d never met. I was group supervisor of the team that consisted of about 15 people, including ATF agents, some Baltimore city detectives, a few Baltimore Housing Police officers, and Housing and Urban Development officials who managed the city’s federally funded housing. Our job was to go after higher-level drug dealers who were funneling cocaine and guns into Baltimore. Back then, Baltimore was like the Wild West. I had never been assigned to a city where you could work drug and gun cases literally 24 hours a day. We were everywhere. One minute my team was searching apartments, houses, and cars, and crashing through doors, and another minute we could be doing undercover drug buys. You could be in New Jersey arresting a drug dealer one day and in Virginia the next, tracking down guns flowing into Baltimore. We arrested hundreds of people. I loved my team—in particular, two Baltimore housing cops who were hell on wheels on the street, but who I trained to develop complex investigations.
A special bond was formed between us that still exists. I hesitate to mention their names because of their current work, but one is still on the force in Baltimore. The other is a cop in Las Vegas. They told me about Hamm and suggested I meet him.
“He is a stand-up guy who speaks his mind,” one told me. “So, you need to be ready for some blunt conversation.”
“Trust me,” the other one said, “when he speaks, he doesn’t stutter. What he says is what he means.”
Hamm is now head of the police department at Coppin State University, a historically black university in Baltimore, founded in 1900, at what was then called Colored High School. Before leaving and coming back to the Baltimore Police Department, Hamm headed the police department at Morgan State University, another historically black university, and the department for the Baltimore city schools. Ironically, Hamm’s son, Akil Hamm, whom the father hired when he held the job of chief of the Baltimore city’s public schools’ police department, has risen through the ranks to become chief of the department now. After briefly stumbling around Coppin State’s campus, I finally found the right building and took an elevator to an expansive second floor. I made two rights and turned right into a suite of offices and rooms that house the university’s police department.
At 68, Hamm is still an impressive presence. He strode into the meeting room immaculate, draped in a tailored three-piece suit sans jacket, reflective of his reputation as a smart dresser before and during his tenure as commissioner. On the day we met, somebody had been murdered in Baltimore. I don’t know who was killed, but someone is murdered in Baltimore on average every day, and almost all of them are black. Murders in Chicago, the nation’s third-largest city, have grabbed all the headlines based on their sheer numbers, over 900 a year recently—again, nearly all of them black. Baltimore, however, accompanied by St. Louis in the Midwest, consistently leads the nation’s big cities in murders per capita. Many of those murders are still being driven by street-level drug trafficking.
I didn’t know until we met that Hamm had experienced a personal drug tragedy. His stepdaughter became strung out on heroin in the 1990s and ended up stealing and selling sex to pay for food and drugs. She was found murdered at age 39 in a Baltimore alley in 2008. It didn’t take much for me to see how deeply Hamm carries the pain of that loss. “She wasn’t my stepchild,” he explained adamantly. “I raised her from nothing. I walked her to her first day of kindergarten. I was the only father she knew. I just wasn’t her biological father.” Even as Baltimore’s top cop, with all the officers and resources at his command, he had been helpless to prevent her death.
Our conversation quickly turned to what had brought me to him in the first place—how public policy and law enforcement seem to take divergent tracks depending on who are the victims and who is committing the crime. Hamm started right in.
“If more white people were being shot down in Baltimore and Chicago, everybody’s response would be different. But these are black people, and they don’t really matter. Right now, heroin is a big problem in Maryland, and they want to put more money into prevention. We’ve had a heroin problem in Baltimore forever and ever. When it was black people, the answer was ‘Lock them up.’ It was never a prevention and treatment problem before, because the right people weren’t users.”
As a black police commissioner, Hamm said he suggested all of this to O’Malley, but the mayor refused to act on Hamm’s suggestions. Officers were there to lock up people, not to solve problems. O’Malley said, “I want my police to be warriors, not social workers.”
“That’s what he said,” Hamm recalled. “So, that’s what we did.”
He paused for a moment. A sense of frustration settled across his face. It looked familiar to me. We talked some more, before I climbed back into my car for the three-hour drive home. As I made my way north up Interstate-95, I thought about deadly police interactions with African-Americans and the difference in the two drug crises—one perceived as black and the other as white. Whether unconsciously or intentionally, American society is suffused with a racial bias that must be eradicated. When it comes to ailments and needs in the black community, the response is punitive and lacking. The incidents we routinely encounter, which would be unacceptable in the white community, are shunted aside, ignored, or explained away, as if we were throwaway people, as if our lives didn’t matter. Our lower life expectancy, higher infant mortality, higher rate of chronic diseases, lower income levels, and higher unemployment rates are all interrelated. These same dire statistics have been the underlying cause of black riots since the 1960s. Police are merely the flashpoint, the most immediate intersection between abrasive and discriminatory policies and the black public.
I thought about my fellow officers who are upset or feel betrayed about a movement that is directed at fighting against police. But my brothers in blue are wrong. The suspect has once again been misidentified. These protestors are not saying white lives don’t matter or that police lives don’t matter. Everything in America—from educational institutions to social networks, television, news, films, financial markets—says white lives do matter. Instead, the message is a demand and a plea for society to embrace African-Americans’ humanity. Black lives matter—too.
Kathleen O’Toole
First Female Chief of Police, Seattle Police Department; First Female Commissioner, Boston Police Department
I think my childhood is what shaped
my career. I was the eldest child in my family. I had a younger brother and my sister was the youngest. My dad was a schoolteacher. He was a wonderful human being, but he used to work three jobs to make ends meet. My mother was a seriously abusive alcoholic. I loved my mother dearly. She didn’t want to be what she was. Her dad was an abusive alcoholic. She had a horrible illness. So, I had to assume the role of mom when I was just a little kid. I don’t remember ever being a kid, really. I can remember being about 5 years old and taking my brother, who was 2, and walking down to the corner store. We had to cross really busy streets to get what my mother needed at the store. Because I had to assume a lot of responsibility at an early age, I feel comfortable being in charge, and I feel a sense of responsibility. When people talk about all the negative effects of growing up in a dysfunctional family, I laugh and say, “I don’t know. I don’t have many friends who grew up in a functional family.” I never complain about it, because, but for that experience, I might not be where I am today.
When I was in high school, [being a police officer] wasn’t even an option available to me. Women could only work in the Boston Police Department as either a matron or a secretary, not a cop. I was a junior at Boston College in 1974 when the Boston Police Department hired the very first female patrol officers. In 1979, I was in my second year of law school, going to school at night, when I was offered a job with the Boston police. I never aspired to be a cop, but it was a cool opportunity to see the law from a different perspective. I thought I’d stick with the job a year or two, but soon realized it wasn’t just a job: It’s a vocation, a calling. It’s really about helping people.
In the academy, I was given all kinds of statutes, so I could arrest people, and physical training, and then I went into the field and was shocked. What do you mean I have to help people resolve their marital issues? But that’s most of what we do. We deal with people’s problems and try to solve them. I’ve loved every minute of it, even on the most difficult days. I’ve had the opportunity and the privilege to save some lives and deliver babies. My husband (a retired police officer) likes to remind me that he delivered seven and I only delivered two.
I think it’s unfortunate that those [television] shows [and movies] depict policing the way they do. It’s all about shootouts and car chases, but, in reality, that’s just such a small percentage of what we do. Ordinary day-to-day police work is very satisfying, but it isn’t that exciting or that dramatic. We respond to calls 24/7 from people with a wide variety of needs. Over a year and a half in Seattle, we answered 1.5 million calls for service. Force was only used in 0.3 percent of those instances. So, it’s a fraction of 1 percent of the times that we use force. The same holds true for most police departments. That’s why I always refer to our organizations as “police services” rather than “police forces,” because police force implies that we do that a lot, and that’s not accurate.
Unfortunately, as cops, we are at the tail end of failed systems. When our institutions fail to provide people with the things they need to survive—skills, jobs, resources—they become police problems. So, if a community’s education system isn’t good, the people are living in poverty, or not getting the mental health services they need, we are probably going to end up in an encounter with you.
Our biggest challenges are at the intersection of public services, health services, and public safety. We have people on our streets who are addicted, who are homeless, who are in mental health crisis. We did nearly 10,000 mental health interventions in the Seattle Police Department in one year. Consequently, we must now do an enormous amount of training of our officers in mental health crisis intervention.
We need to harness our resources and work with other disciplines, other government agencies, nonprofits, and the private sector to augment our resources. That’s how we can solve some of these problems so it’s not a revolving door, so the police are not going to the same call day after day, responding to the same people who are not getting the services they need to resolve their issues. We go on lots of calls of people with serious mental health issues, dealing with domestic violence situations, alcohol and drug issues. We can’t solve their problems, but we can steer them in the direction of services.
For example, we have too many black children who are not getting the education they deserve, who are not getting the services they need. We need to rally and figure out a way to wrap our arms around these kids, to help them succeed. There is a disproportionate number of young black children who face huge challenges and we as a nation need to do something about that. We had a program, called Summer of Opportunity, in Seattle. We didn’t just give kids a job, we worked with John Hancock and other private-sector companies to get the kids mentors, extra tutoring, and educational support. We taught them how to come in and interview for jobs. We gave them jobs every summer. It was the police department. It was the private sector. It was prevention and intervention. This is the work that people don’t think of as police work. It is.
Just before I left the Boston Police Department [2006], we had lost a lot of officers. We didn’t even have enough police to answer all the 911 calls. I knew it was going to be a long hot summer because I had seen an uptick in gang activity. So, in March or April, I instructed our gang unit to work together with all our partners—in education and social services—and compile a list of the 1,000 kids who are most likely to pull a trigger or get shot this summer.
All of us—social services, the police, the schools—are all dealing with the same families, the same kids, all the time. In over 800 cases we were able to get into the homes before the school year was over to ask families what they needed. “Hey, we know your kid could have some issues this summer. Does he need a job? Can we get him some tutoring? What about your younger kids? Can we get them into summer camp? Do you have enough food in your refrigerator?” The police department put it all together, but it was kind of a multidisciplinary operation.
We need to prepare our officers to deal with the more complicated issues that they are inevitably going to face. We’re trying to give the cops the tools, the skills that they need to do their job and at the same time use the least force necessary in doing so. I used to go to the range once a year to train at a target and occasionally, we got [cardiac pulmonary resuscitation training]. That was the extent of in-service training. Now in the Seattle Police Department, we are doing five times the training we used to do. We’re focusing on things like de-escalation in use-of-force situations, mental health crisis intervention, and bias-free policing.
We wield so much power in policing. We can deprive people of their liberty. We can take lives, we can send people to prison. We have to be so careful not to wield that power inappropriately or unfairly.
Policing is a messy business, and policing will always be a messy business because we are dealing with complicated issues. We will have tragedies and when we do, we need to stand up and tell the truth. We need to be transparent. We need to apologize when necessary. We need to hold our officers accountable. We need to have systems in place to address these complicated issues and these developments because we’re cops, we’re human beings. With training, I’m convinced we can do a lot better, but there will always be something. We can do 1,000 things right, but there will be that one cop who does something wrong.
4.
THE SYSTEM
It was 2004, and my family and I were in the midst of another of our cross-country excursions as I moved from one ATF assignment to another. I think this was our third trek across the United States. We had left Washington, D.C. just three years earlier on our way to Seattle, where I worked as the number two person in charge of the region. Now, we were headed back to D.C., where I would be chief of staff to an ATF assistant director, the person in charge of all field operations for the nation. It was a great opportunity. I was excited.
We loved Seattle, but I think my wife was ready for a more stable life and a more consistent working environment for me. In Seattle, I was constantly on the road. My secon
d day on the job, I flew to Alaska, to oversee the arrest of about 30 people for drugs, guns, and gang activity as part of a joint operation. I think the next week I was in Idaho. Seattle was like that. It is geographically the Bureau’s second-largest division behind Denver. It includes Washington state, Oregon, Idaho, Alaska, Hawaii, and Guam.
Consequently, there was never a “routine” day. Our mission ran the gamut from incidents on Native American reservations to organized crime and street gangs in Seattle and Portland, from bombings to white supremacist groups and antigovernment militias in rural Oregon and Washington state to gun trafficking in Guam and Hawaii. The scariest guys we had to deal with were the white supremacists and the antigovernment militiamen. They were as bad as the thugs in Boston, career criminals who had pages and pages of felony convictions for armored-car robberies, arms dealing, and violent assaults as soldiers in organized crime. In one incident in Boston, one of my informants was murdered, burned, and his mouth was stuffed with a roll of dimes to indicate that he was a snitch. Members of white militias and white supremacist organizations were always openly armed with rifles, and had ammunition bandoliers strapped across the waist and chest of each one. Both groups would kill you just for looking at them the wrong way.
With my schedule, most of the rearing of our two young children, unfortunately, fell on my wife. So, now it was on to a new adventure. As we bumped along the road, the children, ages 7 and 5, played and argued. Scattered toys, books, and clothes turned the back seat into a miniature Romper Room. One thing I tried to do with all the moves from division to division was to make the trip a learning experience, which is why we drove instead of flying. We went through Yellowstone National Park, visited the Silverwood Amusement Park in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, drove through the Rocky Mountains, the Grand Tetons, and a few other natural wonders. It can be a tedious and boring drive. The trip consisted mostly of me driving while everyone else slept. Still, we got in some pretty good stops and saw a lot of the nation along the way.
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