In the matter of Freddie Gray
the 'routine' has vastly changed
During a 40-year career in the news business, I came up with
my "two first laws of journalism":
No. 1 is "Cops Lie."
No. 2 is "Cops can't spell."
I mean no disrespect for officers of the law. I like most
cops I've met. But I deemed it important for folks in the news business to
understand that cops are very much like other folks you meet -- they do not
always tell the truth or get things right.
Face it -- everybody lies. Maybe not all the time, but
sometimes. And who hasn't made a spelling error? The point is to understand
that information you are being given may not be accurate or true. Journalists
have an obligation to check facts and get other points of view. Truth can be
elusive, perhaps not even possible to ascertain.
I learned about cops lying -- or perhaps not telling all the
truth -- as a young police reporter at The Baltimore Sun nearly half a century
ago. A tactical squad sergeant invited me to go along on drug investigations
and raids with his team of about half a dozen men. But I had to make a deal
with the devil. I might witness some activities that I had to agree not to
report in my story.
The first such incident came as the cops were trying to
locate a drug dealer, and leaned on his mentally slow brother-in-law for
information, stopping by the man's tiny street-level apartment in pre-urban
renewal South Baltimore. They told the man he faced arrest for drug possession
and, to his denials, got him to agree to a search of his dwelling. As they
rummaged around, one of the officers planted a packet of powder under a lamp,
then "found" the supposed drugs. The guy was scared. And then, to
avoid arrest, he told the team where to find his brother-in-law's drug stash
nearby.
That was a little deception, a warrantless search -- a
shakedown, really -- at the expense of a
simple-minded citizen of Baltimore to get what they wanted. And it was part of
the investigative process that I was bound by our agreement not to report.
Which brings us to Pennsylvania Avenue, in 1969 an epicenter
of illegal drug activity -- and this week, an epicenter of the protests over
the strange death in police custody of Freddie Gray.
It was another investigation here by the squad, this time
with a search warrant for a building that had a padlocked front door. Two men sitting on folding chairs on the sidewalk in front of that building were detained,
while the squad broke open the padlock and began combing through a 3-foot-deep
heap of trash piled inside. They found, at the bottom of a trash can under the
pile of debris, a plastic bag containing filled drug capsules.
Neither of the suspects resided in the building, and neither
had a key to the padlock. Neither was holding drugs. They had been sitting in
chairs on a public sidewalk. And they were charged with possession with intent
to distribute narcotics.
In the official report on their arrest on drug charges, the
cops wrote that the men were "on the premises."
As distasteful I deemed their deception in the case of the
feeble-minded brother-in-law, which I was unable to recount in my story, I
realized in the Pennsylvania Avenue arrests that the cops were lying in their
official report -- and this time, I was free to write the circumstances of the
search and arrests, and quote from the official report by the police that the
suspects had been "on the premises."
They were not in jail very long. Defense lawyers noted my
first-hand account as proof that the men had been outside the premises -- not
on the premises.
I asked the sergeant about that, and whether the men his
team had arrested were in fact guilty. "They were dealing drugs,
Dave," was the sergeant's reply. "Maybe not there, but they were drug
dealers."
"On the premises" was an example of using vague
language to avoid the truth. It was so routine that the cops hardly saw it as
lying.
Which brings us, 46 years later, to the death of 25-year-old
Freddie Gray, whose arrest on April 12 was partially recorded on video -- just the
last seconds, in which he was shown face-down on a sidewalk, a cop on either
side of him, and then, seeming unable to walk, dragged to the back of a
prisoner transport van. He was shouting in apparent pain.
Police reported that Gray had been "arrested without
incident."
It is a phrase so routine, perhaps the officers themselves
could not see it as untrue. From their point of view, Gray's arrest was
routine. He had made eye contact with them, then ran, and he was chased,
caught, handcuffed and loaded into the van. That's what they do.
But it was hardly routine for Freddie Gray, whose short life
was marred by childhood exposure to lead dust in his mother's cheap rental home
and later a long rap sheet of drug arrests.
Sometime between eye contact and Gray becoming unresponsive
and not breathing, his spinal cord had been snapped. He died a week later.
The death became Baltimore's Missouri Moment -- its turn in
the global spotlight, with angry demonstrations following deaths at the hands
of police in Ferguson, Mo., New York
City and other communities. Charm City, one of the local and usually ludicrous
nicknames, is under a State of Emergency and occupied by National Guard
soldiers after the demonstrations grew into a riot of looting, burning and
violence.
Later this week, police promise a fuller report on Gray's
arrest and death as the department turns over the investigation to the
Baltimore state's attorney's office -- the prosecutorial arm of the criminal
justice system. Meanwhile, six police officers involved with the arrest and
transport of Freddie Gray remain suspended with pay.
And key questions from a period of some 30 minutes remain
unanswered -- starting with what was the "probable cause" for Freddie
Gray's arrest. The joke, of course, is that he was simply "running while
black." And how could his spinal cord have snapped? Before that
bystander's video began, did an officer have a knee resting on Gray's neck? Left
unattended and without a safety restraint in the caged confines of the
transport van, was he given a "rough ride" to the police station?
Nothing here is simple, other than the public response to
deaths at the hands of or in custody of police in a nation that has changed,
remarkably, since the 1960s.
What once was routine is anything but.
Posts
