You Can't Please Anybody

The school shooting in Florida this past week - on February 14, 89 years to the day after the St. Valentine's Day Massacre in Chicago, which only goes to show you how mass shootings in this country are nothing new - have politicians demanding that something be done about gun control.  Martin O'Malley has been demanding that something be done for years.

I'm not going to comment on the Parkland shootings per se because I can't say any more about school shootings that I haven't already said.  But I would like to look at O'Malley's position on guns, if only to remind voters that we could have had a President who would have addressed the issues.  O'Malley promoted in the 2016 presidential campaign a plan to expand safeguards to all gun purchases, require a background check for every individual gun purchase, require fingerprint-based licenses for transfers and purchases, and mandate safety training and waiting periods for gun purchases. He also advocated an assault weapons ban (which he pushed through as governor of Maryland), a program for the government to work with gun manufacturers to stop the illegal trafficking of firearms, and stronger incentives for law enforcement to  uphold such measures.

It's this stand on firearms that has made O'Malley Public Enemy Number One with the National Rifle Association.

You'd think O'Malley would get plaudits for his gun policy from his fellow Democrats.  Well, he probably would - if he could only get past questions about his public-safety record as mayor of Baltimore. 

Jayne Miller of Baltimore TV station WBAL-TV has reported that two members the Baltimore Police Department's  Gun Trace Task Force, who were supposed to get illegal guns off the street, would steal money and drugs from drug dealers targeted by the force.   They were convicted on charges of racketeering and robbery.  Although this corruption has been going on since O'Malley left the mayor's office in Baltimore to become governor of Maryland in 2007, and although the Baltimore police were already one of the most corrupt police departments in urban America before O'Malley became mayor in 1999, this story simply gives O'Malley's critics more opportunities to go after his criminal-justice record - and how his failure to reform the Baltimore Police Department has led to the lawlessness in the city that disproportionally affects people of color.  

In other words, the NRA hates him, but the people whom O'Malley should have as allies don't think too much of him either.

Again, Martin O'Malley has devoted his life of public service to making his city and his state as safe and as free of violence as possible, but he was only able to do so much as mayor of Baltimore and than as governor of Maryland.  He pursued his policies in the interest of the greater good, but some problems, especially in urban America, can't be solved in a single year or even in a single tenure of office.  And while he did what he thought was right when it came to public safety, knowing that his policies weren't going to be popular with everyone, he was somehow unable to satisfy anyone. 

Martin O'Malley knows what to do about gun violence, but if he were President today, he couldn't do it alone . . . which is pretty much what he is now.  So why do I continue to support him for President in 2020 when not too many people seem to be interested in the idea?  I think of O'Malley as someone who's ahead of his time, and I'm hoping that by the 2020 presidential campaign, his time will catch up with him.   

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.