Eastern District Sergeant Cites Low Arrest Statistics
WBAL-TV News
BALTIMORE -- Another police memorandum appears to push Baltimore City police officers to make more arrests.
Last Friday, WBAL-TV 11 News reported about an internal police memo interpreted by some as setting arrest quotas.
On Monday, the WBAL-TV 11 News I-Team obtained another memo from a police sergeant in the department’s eastern district.
Every two weeks, officials from the city’s police districts defend statistics to top police brass that perhaps explains the sergeant’s frustration over performance of an entire shift, WBAL-TV 11 News I-Team reporter Deborah Weiner reported.
In the area east of Johns Hopkins Hospital, known to police as the eastern district’s “Sector Three,” the sergeant’s memo calls arrests statistics for the midnight shift ‘severely lacking.’
The memo states that there were no criminal citations made for a whole week last month, and two patrol cars had logged just one arrest for the entire week.
The memo urged the statistics to improve considerably and remain at a high level. Department officials, meanwhile, support the memo’s message.
“We expect a lot out of them and I think a memo like this is perfectly reasonable,” the department’s communications director, Matt Jablow, said. “We do not have quotas. We hold our officers to high standards, and we hold them to high standards with statistics.”
But police officer representatives said they’re not always equipped to properly meet the challenge.
“They try to do a Herculean job out there with little to no equipment or lacking in equipment, mainly vehicles, and a shortage of manpower,” Dan Fickus, a spokesman for the department’s police union, said.
A Baltimore police officer who was shot in the hip this year on the very shift in question, however, wonders how much more he and his colleagues can do. He asked to remain unidentified.
“That could’ve been any one of us. If we weren’t doing anything, we wouldn’t have been out trying to get these guns and whatnot,” the officer said.
The eastern district memo comes just days after a memo from the southwestern district was interpreted by some as a call for arrest quotas.
Police officials said it has been a difficult summer with an increase in shootings and homicides.
“We’ve had too much crime on the midnight to 8 a.m. shift and it’s been articulated to every member of this department, down the chain, that this needs to stop,” Jablow said.
The sergeant said officer discretion is used too often as an excuse not to make arrests or issue citations, Weiner reported. Officers have this week to improve before officials take further action.