REBROADCAST / American Diagnosis / Law & Order

Hi everyone, I'm Dr. Celine Gounder. I'm the host of The Epidemic Podcast. Thanks for listening to the show. We're on break this month, but we'll be back with new episodes after Labor Day. In the meantime, we're replaying some episodes of our sister podcast, American Diagnosis. Formerly known as In Sickness and in Health. The killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd set off the latest calls for police reform this summer. But back in 2015, it was the killing of Freddie Gray in police custody that triggered protests and even riots in Baltimore. In this episode, we took a deep dive into what the Baltimore Police Department was doing and how their zero tolerance approach to law enforcement was doing more harm than good. Thanks for listening. Here's the show.

After a peaceful start, violence broke out near the end of the Freddie Gray demonstration.

Windows were smashed.

—vehicles in some downtown buildings.

Welcome back to In Sickness and in Health, a podcast about health and social justice. I'm Dr. Celine Gounder. This season, we're looking at gun violence in America. And reports say that 12 people were arrested.

This was supposed to be a peaceful rally. The protesters wanted to know what was going on with the investigation into the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray.

But as the rally ended and people started marching toward Camden Yards, it turned very ugly. What do we want? Justice!

There were thousands of protesters Law enforcement is responsible for reducing crime and curbing gun violence. But it can also play a role in instigating them.

At first, they sat down in the streets and blocked—

What you're hearing is footage from demonstrations and riots following the death of Freddie Gray at the hands of Baltimore police in 2015.

All night, all day, we gonna fight for Freddie Gray! Police at times seemed frustrated, unable to get the demonstrators to move.

On April 12, 2015, Baltimore Police Department officers arrested Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old man, for possessing what the police alleged was an illegal knife. While being transported in a police vehicle, Gray sustained injuries to his neck and spine. He later fell into a coma and died on April 19, 2015, just a week after his arrest. Eyewitness accounts suggested the officers involved used unnecessary force against Gray during the arrest, a claim those officers have denied. The medical examiner's office ruled Gray's death a homicide and not an accident because the officers failed to follow safety procedures and provide medical attention to someone who clearly needed it. Baltimore City State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby filed charges against 6 police officers involved in the arrest, Mosby said that Gray suffered a critical neck injury as a result of being handcuffed, shackled by his feet, and unrestrained inside the Baltimore PD wagon, and that officers had failed to establish probable cause for Mr. Gray's arrest, as no crime had been committed because Gray was carrying a pocketknife of legal size and not the switchblade police claimed he possessed at the time of his arrest. Freddie Gray's death became a symbol of the black community's distrust of police, and it sparked daily protests in Baltimore. But what started off as peaceful demonstrations quickly turned into violent riots. In today's episode, we'll discuss the role law enforcement can play in instigating violence. We'll look at the problematic and sometimes illegal behavior of some Baltimore police officers. And we'll also look at the Baltimore PD's culture and why superiors might have turned a blind eye. In the aftermath of Freddie Gray's death in 2015, the city of Baltimore was in an unwanted spotlight. The Black Lives Matter movement had coalesced a few years earlier, and a nationwide debate on excessive police force was underway. But by the time the eyes of the nation turned to Baltimore, local residents had already been wrestling with the problem of violence, local crime, and the police response for years.

In the early part of the 2000s, Baltimore was trying the zero tolerance strategies of New York City.

This is Justin Fenton, a crime reporter with the Baltimore Sun. He's writing a book titled We Own This City about the problems he's uncovered in the Baltimore Police Department.

Our mayor at the time, Martin O'Malley, he looked to the success that New York City was having and getting sort of trumpeted across the country for reducing their crime rate Back then, this zero tolerance model was being praised all across the country as an effective way of reducing crime.

But in Baltimore, this strategy wasn't really working. Crime rates, especially homicide rates, remained stubbornly unchanged. Here's Daniel Webster, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where he directs the Center for Gun Policy and Research. Daniel's been studying gun violence in Baltimore for years.

In, um, 2007, we had a new police commissioner named Fred Biefeld.

The commissioner wanted to move away from zero tolerance and focus instead on the small group of repeat offenders that were driving most of the violent crime. It's an approach we've talked about in prior episodes.

One of his clear strategies for how he was going to help Baltimore lower its rates of gun violence is to focus more of his resources on gun offending and illegal gun possession.

And part of this strategy was to form, quote, violent crime impact section units, specialized squads of detectives that focused on hotspots, those areas in the city where shootings commonly occurred. One of those specialized units was called the Gun Trace Task Force.

As the name implies, Gun Trace Task Force means you're tracing where those guns are coming from.

Seems pretty straightforward, right? But the task turned out to be much easier in name than in the doing.

What this unit found 10 years ago was that the gun laws, even in Maryland, were not particularly strong and made it very difficult to hold people accountable for trafficking guns. And they sort of reconstituted their mission to go after illegal gun possession.

Commissioner Bielefeld's successor, Anthony Batts, refocused the Gun Trace Task Force.

In a consultant's report for our next commissioner, They said this is sort of an underutilized asset, that we needed to get them more involved in crime suppression activities.

This unit was meant to be a federal-style task force that would do in-depth investigations to trace guns to their source. They were supposed to go after gun traffickers and straw purchasers, who were making guns available to those barred from buying them legally. But over time, it seems that all of this became less and less of a priority. They now spent more time on the streets looking for illegal guns. They were a plainclothes unit, which means the officers didn't wear police uniforms. They wore civilian clothes to blend in. They drove unmarked vehicles. They weren't tied to a specific post and didn't have to respond to 911 calls. According to Justin, officers in plainclothes units often operate with a great deal of latitude. For example, they can let suspects go and cultivate them as informants, potentially leading them to bigger fish. Inside the Baltimore PD, the Gun Trace Task Force was known for its success in capturing suspected drug dealers and confiscating their drugs and illegal guns. One officer in particular was seen as a rising star.

Wayne Jenkins was very good at getting guns.

Wayne Jenkins had a reputation within the department as a cop whose aggressive style brought results, and he was celebrated, even promoted for it. He received a Bronze Star for his part in the 2009 recovery of $1 million worth of cocaine from a man's truck. It was one of Wayne Jenkins' many large-scale seizures, but it was billed at the time as the largest cocaine seizure in the department's history. In 2010, when the Baltimore PD created a special squad to go after elusive suspects, Wayne Jenkins was picked for the group. Later that year, his team raided a car wash, recovering more than a kilogram of drugs and $4,000, and the mayor held a news conference about it. Then, in November 2012, Wayne Jenkins was promoted to the rank of sergeant, a frontline supervisor, giving him new authority and new freedom as the eyes and ears of the command. But while Wayne Jenkins was very good at getting guns off the streets, Justin's reporting revealed that many of his tactics were questionable.

Jenkins and his crew would do something that they called door pops, where they would drive at a group of, of young men fast and then slam on the brakes and pop their doors. And whoever ran was thought to be, you know, they must have something illegal. So they were sort of trying to instigate people to run and sort of reveal themselves. They described this numbers game where they'd stop as many cars as they could. They drove at groups of people just trying to increase their chances of finding something illegal.

Wayne Jenkins and his team would check arrest records from prior shifts and go back to the same hotspots. Looking for any excuse to stop and search people, hoping to find a gun on them or drugs, often without any probable cause. But Wayne Jenkins didn't just straddle the line. He and other officers often flat-out crossed it.

In 2010, they see what they think is a drug transaction. They drive in very quickly, they swoop in to try to, you know, startle or stop the people that they observed, and those guys take off. They end up going through a stop sign, hit another car, an 87-year-old man is killed. Jenkins admitted years later that the heroin that they said they found in the car after the crash had been planted to justify the fact that they had chased him in the first place. This essentially gave the man who was driving, it painted him at the time in the media, in the courts, as a drug dealer who fled and killed somebody. You know, they weren't his drugs though. Um, but the, the planting worked.

They planted evidence to protect themselves from disciplinary action. Supervisors might have thought they'd infringed on people's rights. It was common practice for these officers, and they had each other's backs.

Then another time, Jenkins again says that he sees a guy, uh, with a gun. He runs him down with his vehicle. The guy gets out of his own vehicle and is running on foot, and Jenkins drives up onto a front yard and runs the guy down. It later emerges years later that he had called a mentor of his and said, "I just did something bad. I just ran over a guy and I don't know what to do. He doesn't have anything on him." So that sergeant has now admitted in federal court and is awaiting sentencing that he went to the scene with a BB gun and sort of tossed it under a nearby vehicle. And again, this sort of painted this guy as a gun-toting criminal who he had no choice but to run down, but it wasn't true.

Justin says there were red flags that his supervisors and others should have seen.

Our analysis of his cases from 2012 to 2016 showed that about 40% of his cases were being dropped in court, just, just dropped.

That's a lot higher than the 25% drop rate for the rest of the department.

The person gets arrested, they may or may not be held without bail, and then by the time there needs to be a disposition, the prosecutors are not pursuing that case anymore.

So Wayne Jenkins may have been good at catching guns and making arrests, but his cases were often not strong enough to hold up in court. The people he was arresting may not have been criminals. But according to Justin, because of the way the department tracked its cases, it was easy to overlook or ignore this.

And it continues to this day. Nobody sort of steps back and tracks that or analyzes that by officer, by unit to say, wait a minute, we might have a problem here. This officer isn't showing up for court. He consistently has Fourth Amendment issues. There's consistently, you know, questions about the way he puts together his evidence. They didn't track it like that and still don't.

So it's not just that a few bad apples flew under the radar. The problem's much bigger.

The problem is policing in this country in many urban areas has not been conducted in a way that has been the most constitutional.

Cassandra Crifasi is an assistant professor at the Center for Gun Policy and Research at Johns Hopkins. She works with Daniel Webster, who you heard from earlier this episode.

For a very long time in policing, not specific to Baltimore, but very broadly, promotion and advancement through the ranks was often focused on numbers. How many, how many arrests, how many guns, you know, how many, how many, rather than what was the outcome.

It would be like hospitals measuring their success based on how many surgeries they did, ignoring whether the patients whether they needed surgery in the first place, and whether they survived surgery after. Cassandra says that instead of focusing on the quantity of their cases, police departments across the U.S. should focus on their quality. How strong is the evidence? Do we have reasonable suspicion? Is there racial profiling going on? Cassandra is working with the Baltimore PD to address this.

So we've begun tracking the disposition of these cases so we can tell when an officer makes an arrest, whether charges are dismissed and for what reason, whether they sort of pled guilty, or whether the jury found them guilty or not. And so we're tracking these with the purpose of creating a monitoring system. You know, the Gun Trace Task Force issues in the police department, I feel very strongly, were a result of somewhat a lack of accountability and a lack of oversight. And also just folks not thinking about the normal distribution of data, right? Like you're going to have some folks that maybe don't bring in very many guns, a lot of folks that bring in some, and then a few that bring in a lot. But the Gun Trace Task Force was, like, way over on the extreme outlier. And paying attention to the numbers and thinking, OK, either these people are really, really, really good, or maybe something inappropriate is going on.

Wayne Jenkins and others could get away with civil rights violations and other misconduct because there was no real oversight. Or data-driven accountability. The numbers they were tracking didn't really mean anything, except perhaps to signal their numbers game was a fraud. Cassandra points out the stakes go beyond the need to discipline individual police officers to keep them in line. It's about keeping everyone focused on the bigger picture.

It's not just about being punitive, but it's really focusing on quality, because when you're arresting the right people that are responsible for violence, was sort of the first step in repairing some of the police-community relationship problems that have plagued Baltimore and other urban areas.

The consequences of having no oversight or accountability in a police department is that people stop trusting the police. Police-community relations crumble, and this in turn leads to more violence. Andrew Papachristos, a professor of sociology at Northwestern University, explains why.

What we see among people who tend to offend, especially people who tend to use guns illegally, is that they have less faith in sort of the systems of law, right? Especially policing.

According to Andrew, this lack of faith leads to a kind of legal cynicism, where people don't believe police can solve the problems that are of concern to them. They stop believing that police can be effective or that they're going to be fair. So instead of turning to the police, people take matters into their own hands, do their own problem-solving if they want justice or protection. This vigilantism leads to retaliation and more violence. To make matters worse, in addition to instigating violence, legal cynicism makes it much harder for police to do their jobs effectively. Andrew conducted a study in Missouri to understand if and how people changed their behavior after highly publicized acts of police violence, acts like the death of Freddie Gray while in Baltimore police custody.

What we looked at was basically one of the simplest ways that citizens engage police, which is calling 911. It is in fact indispensable to how police do their jobs, and it is the way that the average citizen actually engages the police, by calling 911 and saying, I just saw something happen, or someone broke into my house, or my car was stolen.

Andrew's team looked at the case of a man named Frank Jude Jr., who was brutally beaten by police in Milwaukee in 2004.

What we found was that residents, especially residents in Black neighborhoods, stopped calling the police and stopped calling the police not just for sort of low-level stuff like, say, property crimes, but actually for things like robberies and shootings. Which suggests they were so sort of becoming distrustful of the police that they would refrain from calling even though it's sort of in the neighborhood's benefit to engage the police around these things from this sort of traditional perspective.

Legal cynicism means residents in a neighborhood see no reason to work with the police. Without neighborhood cooperation, crime goes unsolved, criminals operate with impunity, And the belief that police aren't there to serve is reinforced. The tactics Wayne Jenkins and the Gun Trace Task Force engaged in were hurting the community. But in the eyes of the department, Wayne Jenkins still got the goods, so his behavior was tolerated.

His unit was responsible for taking 100 guns off the street in 2015 and again in 2016. And they were, uh, regarded as, I think one of their former bosses even post-indictment was saying that they were viewed as a tier 1 asset and the only ones producing after Freddie Gray.

And this was important.

I think that we had a tremendous crime spike following the unrest associated with the death of Freddie Gray. Crime, gun violence went up about over 60% that first year, and we're up about 80% over 2014 as we stand here today. I think there was this urgency that, you know, we don't have time to do these investigations. We need results. And I think the department was in this results-oriented mindset where if you get guns, you've accomplished something, go out, get more.

In May of 2015, the month after Freddie Gray's death, there were 43 homicides in Baltimore, making it the deadliest month in 40 years. Thousands of police and Maryland National Guard troops were deployed., and a state of emergency was declared within the city limits. Crime rates remained high, and Baltimore ended the year with 344 homicides, the second highest total except for 1993. And while there was an increase in shootings, there was also a decrease in the number of arrests made after 6 officers were charged in Freddie Gray's death. Hotspots and high-crime neighborhoods that had once been overpoliced now seemed to have no police presence at all. This contributed to the perception that the police wasn't able or willing to stop the violence. The Baltimore Police Department was under tremendous pressure to show it was still in control. Wayne Jenkins, who was as productive as always, consistently bringing in guns and drugs without backing down, may have been both a source of reassurance and inspiration to follow. And so the Baltimore PD doubled down on the very tactics that had alienated the community in the first place the tactics that had led to Freddie Gray's death.

We don't know when this started exactly, but he started stealing money from people at least in 2011, if not earlier, if not much earlier, and was stealing drugs.

Wayne Jenkins wasn't just using excessively aggressive methods and lying about evidence to get guns off the streets. He was a criminal himself. Stealing drugs and money from suspects and others.

He, in sometime around 2012, partnered up with a bail bondsman who was a former drug dealer. Well, I shouldn't say former. He partnered with a bail bondsman from the area where he lived and said, if I start bringing you drugs I take off the street and you sell them, this will be pure profit. And the bail bondsman was caught and confessed and had pictures and videos and all sorts of things to back this stuff up and said that this was like a near-daily thing.

As Justin reported in the Baltimore Sun, Wayne Jenkins had designed the perfect crime. He knew his victims had little to gain by confronting him or denouncing him to the authorities. It would be their word against a respected, celebrated police officer. And even if anyone did believe them, what good would come from admitting that they'd been in possession of even more drugs and cash than what the arresting officer had reported? Before he took a cut.

There's a deep distrust of people who do come forward. You know, officers, even now that I talk to, they say, oh, people make up stuff all the time. They're highly organized. They pay people to make complaints. Their attorneys tell them to make complaints. They're trying to jam us up all the time. And that breeds this atmosphere where it's like nothing is to be trusted.

Justin says that as in many other police departments across the country, inside the Baltimore PD, there was a lot of deference given to plainclothes police.

They work in this gray area. They are allowed to catch and release people. They are allowed to do things that straddle the line, or walk close to the line, I should say. And then when there's claims made that they broke the rules, the courts very much want to give deference to the word of an officer.

The system, Justin says, is designed in a way that it requires anyone alleging police misconduct to thoroughly document their claims. But why would anyone volunteer documentation of illegal transactions like drug sales?

It's seen as a big deal to, you know, discipline an officer or hold an officer accountable for something, and they want to have proof, and it's often not there. So people aren't taken at their word.

Unless, of course, you're the police. Then the system will give you the benefit of the doubt.

The system is built on believing them, and it would sort of collapse upon itself if they said that we don't believe you unless everything can be documented and proven. And so I think that there's an incentive to keep that system going until people are caught, and it's hard to catch them.

Stealing from suspects became the norm for everyone involved.

The officers talked about even the people in the community seeing it as a tax, you know, that it is cost of doing business, that if the officers take your money, especially if they're just skimming some of it, that that's just something that happens. You know, and again, I think that, you know, this reluctance to go through the internal affairs process to of not being believed, not being able to prove these things.

This created a system that allowed officers to get away with not just questionable, but illegal behavior. They were very effective and had a good reputation with whom it mattered: the department and the courts, even when their suspects-turned-victims could see through the hypocrisy. One of the reasons people are hypocritical is because it allows them to wield power quietly This is Ekow Yanka, a professor of law, criminal law, and criminal theory at Cardozo Law School in New York City.

It allows them to wield power without being held into account by those who are being wronged. Hypocrisy is often a way in which we quietly suffocate the voice of those who we dominate.

And this hypocrisy, in turn, breeds more legal cynicism.

One of the things that happens when you meet somebody who's a hypocrite, who avows one thing but does another, is eventually they just lose credibility with you., right? When they speak, they no longer have any sort of moral authority over you. You start to understand that the way in which they speak is just a way in which they can marshal power over you. And the same thing is true of our laws. When we consistently use our political institutions to pretend and avow one value while serving another, it loses its moral force. It loses the way in which we have any faith that the laws are about anything other than a thin veneer of power.

Wayne Jenkins kept rising through the ranks. In June 2016, he became the leader of the Gun Trace Task Force. Justin found that throughout Wayne Jenkins' career, there had been warning signs, but they were either missed missed or ignored. For example, between 2006 and 2009, Wayne Jenkins was the subject of at least 4 lawsuits alleging beatings or other misconduct. The plaintiffs prevailed in 3 of the 4, either because of a jury verdict or because the city decided to settle the case. But in none of these cases was Wayne Jenkins held to account. He wasn't caught until 2017, almost by accident.

A drug investigation by county authorities is what brought him down.

This is what happened. Baltimore County authorities, working on the opioid problem, wiretapped a group based out of Northeast Baltimore City that was bringing in a lot of the drugs to their jurisdiction. To their surprise, they picked up an officer from the Baltimore Gun Trace Task Force on the wiretap speaking to a member of the group in a very familiar tone. It was the wiretap recordings and the criminal charges that followed that caused officers to flip. And that's what eventually led investigators to Wayne Jenkins.

And it really came together in this roundabout way. And I say that because there's every reason to think that Wayne Jenkins might still be doing what he was doing if things hadn't sort of clicked into place in this sort of coincidental way that they did.

On February 23rd, 2017, a federal grand jury indicted Wayne Jenkins and 6 other officers involved. Wayne Jenkins is now serving a 25-year sentence in a federal prison in South Carolina. The story of Baltimore's Gun Trace Task Force is an extreme example of individual officers abusing their power. And downright engaging in criminal activities for years without being held accountable by their superiors. But while some of their tactics, like stealing drugs from suspects to sell on the black market, were unique to Wayne Jenkins and his crew, when we hear about how they treated the people they were policing, the violence, the abuse, the community mistrust, and the backlash, that story unfortunately is all too familiar. For police departments to be effective in reducing gun violence and other crimes, they must be clear-eyed about their long-term goals and focus on quality over quantity of cases. This means police departments need to forge meaningful partnerships with communities, but the onus is on the police, and especially on its frontline officers, to combat legal cynicism and earn the community's trust.

This is why issues of procedural justice are at the sort of forefront Andrew Papachristos again.

He says that's the million-dollar question: how to combat legal cynicism. There are different models being studied around anti-bias training, citizen oversight, and more democratic neighborhood policing that are getting us closer to the answer.

There's a lot of theory and evidence to suggest that if you change the way police go about their business, how they interact with citizens, the ways they interact with citizens, that you can change people's perceptions. And by the way, that is a slow-changing process. There is nothing that is going to happen that is going to rebuild trust between police and citizens overnight. It is a long, hard process of change. And it is also one that has to be done in a very transparent and honest manner. And transparency is not always the strength of many police departments. So I think the easiest ways to start combating legal cynicism is to really think about ways we can change the dynamic between police and citizens. It's a relationship. It's one that's vital, not just to policing. Police need citizens to engage them, to help, you know, address public safety problems, but also, you know, citizens need police to help make neighborhoods safer places too. I think It is stunning and dangerous how little people realize not just that there's a lack of faith among so many, but why there's a lack of faith among so many. Echo Yanka again: It's not because people don't want to be safe. It's not because people don't want safe neighborhoods.

And frankly, it's not even because African Americans don't want policing.

It's not because Hispanic Americans don't want policing. People want policing.

They just want good policing. And all too often, no one is making them feel that that's what they'll get if they call the cops. Today's episode of In Sickness and in Health was produced by Virginia Laura and me. Our theme music is by Alan Best. Additional music by The Blue Dot Sessions. If you enjoy the show, please tell a friend about it today. And if you haven't already done so, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps more people find out about the show. You can learn more about this podcast and how to engage with us on social media at insicknessandinhealthpodcast.com. That's insicknessandinhealthpodcast.com. I'm Dr. Céline Gounder. This is In Sickness and in Health.