Minneapolis has

its own 'Freddie Gray'

reckoning

What is it that police officers

fail to understand?

I call it my First Law of Journalism: Cops Lie. It was something I learned in the early days of my 40-year career as a reporter and editor at The Baltimore Sun, first witnessed during three days spent with a police squad in tactical drug enforcement half a century ago. 

That cops make false arrests, write misleading reports, plant evidence and even steal from people they arrest has long been known -- particularly by people of color in urban America. In Baltimore, that misbehavior became public in recent years through criminal acts by the city police department's now-infamous Gun Trace Task Force. To date, a dozen cops have been convicted.

Before that, five years ago, there was Freddie Gray. He was arrested as a drug suspect in West Baltimore's long-troubled Sandtown neighborhood. The only video of the arrest shows the young black man in handcuffs and leg shackles on the ground, and then being carried and pushed into the back of a prisoner van. Somewhere before the van arrived at the area police station, Gray suffered a broken neck. He died in a hospital a week later.

The anger in Baltimore built up during that week, and exploded after Gray's funeral into days of arson, looting and property destruction. The city's top prosecutor, State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby, brought criminal charges against six police officers involved in the arrest -- including the driver of the van on the odd count of "depraved-heart murder," in a presumption that Gray, left unrestrained by safety belts in the back of the van, was given a "rough ride."

But there was no definitive evidence, no video of him being injured. And none of the cops was convicted.

In Minneapolis, "Freddie Gray" was a burly black man named George Floyd, 46, who worked as a security guard at a bar -- and there were witnesses as three officers knelt atop his body as he lay face-down and handcuffed in the street next to a parked car. One officer kept a knee pressed on Floyd's neck as he repeatedly cried out, "I can't breathe," and even called out for his mother. A fourth officer stood watching, seeming to do nothing to intervene. Floyd was unconscious when paramedics arrived, and pronounced dead at a hospital.

At least two bystanders had cellphones and recorded video that bore witness through social media to all of Minneapolis and the world of the brutality that marked Floyd's last minutes of life.

And within a day, the rage that had simmered through years of police brutality, malfeasance, insensitivity and even racism across America exploded in Minneapolis. Last night, and into the wee hours today, the local police station -- evacuated and left unprotected -- was burning, while a block-long stretch of looted stores across the street was engulfed in flames.

 A crowd appearing upwards of a thousand strong celebrated in the street, cheering as some people set off fireworks and others hurled wooden boards and flammable debris to fuel the fire rising at the station's lobby entrance.

Fires were also set elsewhere in the city and neighboring St. Paul, and amid that chaos another demonstration some 700 miles away brought a cordon of police officers to protect buildings in the center of Louisville, Ky. Seven people were reported wounded by gunfire during the protest there related to the killing of a black woman, Breonna Taylor, by white police officers in her home two months ago. Television coverage showed a bonfire being stoked in the middle of a street near what appeared to be the courthouse.

Other demonstrations broke out in New York City, Phoenix, Denver, Memphis, and Columbus, Ohio.

Which brings us back to my First Law of Journalism. What, I wondered, would the police have reported about George Floyd's death had there been no video bearing witness. 

According to a New York Times article, the initial statement by the Minneapolis police -- issued before the videos surfaced -- "was short and sanitized. An allegation of forgery. A suspect who 'appeared to be under the influence,' who 'physically resisted officers' and who appeared to be 'suffering medical distress.'"

It took a week for Freddie Gray to die and several subsequent days of the so-called "Baltimore uprising" before prosecutor Mosby announced criminal charges against the six police officers, in what was clearly an effort to calm the city's chaos.

In Minneapolis, the timeline of events is much more compressed -- and perhaps it was surprising that authorities did not quickly lodge an assault charge that would bring at least one of the officers into custody -- the one who had his knee on Floyd's neck -- pending likely indictment by a grand jury. The city did, however, announce the firing of all four of the officers involved in the nightmarish arrest.

But early this afternoon, authorities in Minneapolis announced that the kneeling officer, Derek Chauvin, was now under arrest -- charged with third-degree murder and manslaughter. "This case has moved with extraordinary speed," said Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman. "This is by far the fastest we've ever charged a police officer."

There's really nothing new here. We have seen the chaos before, as in the Los Angeles rioting triggered by the recorded police beating of Rodney King more than a generation ago. 

There are multiple factors underlying these incidents, including an erosion of decency in some police officers as they develop a lack of respect and empathy for people as they deal daily with difficult, often tense, encounters. And in response, particularly in minority communities, there is an ever-growing mistrust of law enforcement and the criminal justice system.

In black urban America, they've talked for years about police misconduct.

What some police officers fail to understand now is that technology putting video capability in the hands of nearly every person on the street is showing evidence time after time for that mistrust.

Police could see this coming, having for years tried to prevent people from recording their activities in public view. Courts have ruled consistently that people have the right to record police activity in public, so long as they are not interfering.

And there's another matter some police officers forget -- who they work for.

Baltimore's Riot of 2015

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.