Drastic Measures

The issue of criminal justice remains Martin O'Malley's greatest Achilles heel when the 2020 election cycle begins.  O'Malley has coyly hinted that he will run for President then ("I just might," he's fond of saying), but if he does, his oversight of the Baltimore Police Department as that city's mayor will remain an issue for his foes - and he has many in Maryland - to use as a club on him.  Which is ironic, since that's what Baltimore policemen are accused of doing - using clubs.  Among other things.

O'Malley (above, in 2002, when he was mayor of Baltimore) resorted to zero-tolerance policing when he took over the worst city in America for violent crime and used drastic measures to make the once-prosperous industrial city safer.  His policies, though, encouraged an already existing culture of brutality waged against civilians by the police, and much of his approach was challenged - successfully - by the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.  In January 2017 - ten years after he left office to become governor of Maryland - the U.S. Justice Department, in one of its last actions before Loretta Lynch handed the keys to Jeff Sessions, found numerous violations of the Constitution and of civil rights in investigating the Baltimore Police Department's patterns and practices that many people linked to O'Malley's policies.

The investigation, for the record, primarily looked at the Baltimore police's record in the decade after O'Malley left office, and one of his successors, former mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, admitted that change and reform can be slow.  Cops normally violate constitutional rights in Baltimore despite rigorous training, and they're partial to calling blacks by all sorts of racial epithets, and not just that word.  They get brutal with black suspects, and they get furious at and physically brutal against some black residents for just existing.  This is in a city that is two-thirds black.  Officers don't know how to handle sensitive matters that could and do get violent, and they're under pressure to show results to satisfy the city's Comstat system, a police-data system O'Malley initiated and has lauded,  which uses analytics and numbers to achieve efficient results.  

Anthony Barksdale, a high-ranking black police official in Baltimore who headed a squad focusing on the most violent offenders, insisted that the Justice Department's investigation of some circumstances made race more important than it appeared.  Barksdale noted that the massive arrests, stops and crackdowns in targeted neighborhoods was based on not the racial makeup of these neighborhoods but on the violent crimes in them.  "What the [Justice Department] didn't do is overlay the crime map on those stop maps," he says.

Barksdale said there was also training on constitutional issues and admitted that there were violations based on the failure of commanders to reinforce it, but he was optimistic that continued training can lead to greater reform.

Such nuances don't matter in politics.  O'Malley has shown time after time that he is no bigot, especially in his record as governor of Maryland and his commitment to equality for all.  But his failure to get a handle on the criminal element in the Baltimore police as mayor - as opposed to the criminal element the police are supposed to protect people from - will remain a sore spot for him unless he deals with it.  After all, he has the weight of constitutional violation by his police force around his neck, and if he ran for President again he would have to do more than mend fences with black voters - he'd have to tear down the fence and start over from scratch.  Also, imagine an O'Malley still hobbled by his criminal-justice record going up against Donald Trump - blacks might just want to throw up their hands and stay home, crippling an already disabled Democratic Party.

As I publish this, Trump has pardoned former Maricopa County, Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio for defying a court order against the illegal tactics he used to crack down on undocumented immigrants.  O'Malley has never done anything like that - he's a champion of immigrants' rights, incidentally - but given the Baltimore police's reputation for disregarding the law, a Democratic presidential primary opponent might want to draw a parallel between Baltimore and Maricopa County (which includes Phoenix) and make it look like Arpaio is O'Malley's brother in arms.  

If O'Malley is going to have a chance in 2020, he's going to have to acknowledge the Baltimore Police Department's mistakes - and his own. Like putting too much faith in Comstat.  "Comstat, or 'goal oriented community policing,' has saved thousands of American lives in cities all across our nation," he recently wrote in an online editorial.  "In some places, the improvement in policing continues as more and more lives are saved. New York and Los Angeles in particular have figured out how to improve public safety while, at the same time, improving public trust  -  the basis of all security for any free people."

Alas, OMalley wasn't the mayor of either of those cities.  He was the mayor of Baltimore, and while he may have inherited a city with a police department that makes the Los Angeles Police Department look like the Mayberry sheriff's office (and it was probably just as corrupt when Thomas D'Alesandro III - Nancy Pelosi's older brother - was mayor of Baltimore in the late sixties, during the last major  Baltimore riot before the Freddie Gray scandal), he didn't leave it in any better shape for the three black female mayors who succeeded him. Without intending to, he may have even left it in even worse shape to some extent.  Yes, Baltimore is a tough town to govern and make safe, and yes, all of these problems existed long before O'Malley was on the scene.  But none of Baltimore's other mayors ever ran for President, either.

The Justice Department's report came out long after O'Malley was forced to withdraw as a candidate for President, so this will just be one more weapon his enemies will use against him in 2020 if he choose to run for President then.  The only reason his record as mayor of Baltimore wasn't a big deal in 2016 was because he wasn't a big deal.  I can assure you, though, that had O'Malley emerged as Hillary Clinton's chief Democratic primary opponent, she would have used his criminal-justice record as Baltimore mayor to destroy him. 

O'Malley did what he did as mayor of Baltimore to fight crime because he believed that drastic measures were necessary.  This time he has to take drastic measures to fight to save his own viability as a presidential candidate.  I'm still for the guy, and I still want him to run for President again, but he has to do and say more than he's said or done so far about his criminal-justice policies.  And now.  And fast.

By the way, I'm not calling him Marty anymore.  He loathes the nickname.  Besides, that's what his worst enemies - not all of whom are in Maryland - call him.