After months of urban rioting and complaints in Baltimore, the U.S. Justice Department commissioned a report into police practices there.
The results show a tyrannical local government, drunk on power and gorged on money, openly defying constitutional limits regarding searches and seizures.
The report found that in Baltimore, police routinely stop people on the street without reasonable suspicion.
Of the more than 300,000 pedestrian stops that occurred over a 5 1/2-year span, only 3.7 percent led to an arrest or citation — and many of those were later dropped.
One middle-aged African-American man was stopped 30 times and never charged.
After one adolescent filed a complaint alleging that a cop pulled down his pants on the street, he told investigators, the same cop later “pushed the teenager against a wall, pulled down his pants and grabbed his genitals.”
One woman was stripped naked on the street while police probed her “anal cavity.” She was not charged.
