09 May 2015

Baltimore Activists Recount How Police Unions Crushed Accountability Reforms

By Lee Fang

Only weeks before Freddie Gray’s death while in custody of Baltimore police, cops from around the state filled a committee hearing room in Annapolis to aggressively lobby against a wave of reform bills aimed at increasing police accountability in Maryland. The police won: every bill to make it easier to investigate and prosecute police misconduct went down to defeat, leaving the state’s extraordinarily cop-friendly laws in place. (It’s a measure of the egregious circumstances of Gray’s death and the public outcry afterward that six police officers have nevertheless been indicted.)

Civil rights advocates say they were heavily outgunned — metaphorically — by the police.

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