Nomination for Hero Badge

 

These seven officers have been charged but not convicted, and anything can happen between arrest and final conviction. However, the charges are in Federal Court, and I’d be willing to bet there isn’t an Assistant United States Attorney (AUSA) with a less than 96% conviction rate, in Baltimore. Seven-Baltimore-police-officers-arrested-racketeering-charges.

Watch the City’s spin doctors at work. Excuse #1, these are 7 “bad apples” and are not representative of the 3000 hard-working men and women of the Baltimore Police Department. 

If you buy this premise, then you are already setting the stage for the next seven, and the next seven and the next seven to take these guys place. That is not to mitigate what these officers did as individuals in any way. The fact is seven officers in a small specialized unit went rogue. They did it because they could. They looked around and saw that management controls that should have been in place, weren’t, or that oversight was lacking because the bosses always seemed to be looking the other way. To buy off on the City’s story is to believe that seven bad cops managed to manipulate various assignments and commands so that each transferred to the same squad. Nope, not buying it.

Since these were City cops filing cases in Federal Court and there was a State Attorney involved also, I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that this was a grant funded unit. That means if you look hard enough, one will find a “Mission Statement” that describes what the group was supposed to be doing. Find it read it and then tell me would any sane manager use that statement as a roadmap to creating a successful operation? It wouldn’t surprise me if that Mission Statement and grant were all the guidance the members of the newly formed unit received.

As a safe first course, this unit became a “numbers squad” How many guns did you seize this month? How many forfeited? What is the value? How many persons arrested for a misdemeanor/felony? How many charged state/federal? The only question left unasked by management, How did you do it? Why? Because management didn’t want to know, they could always fall back on blaming prosecutors, ‘you accepted the cases for prosecution.’

The indictment and arrest of these seven officers is, first and foremost an organizational failure, rather than a failure of individuals. Management controls were inadequate to the task, or the police administration failed to follow their policy and procedures. Individual officers in the unit did not follow policy and procedure because they knew it was not being enforced. Police work is not the same as building widgets. Using production numbers as the sole performance measure will likely result in failure.

Unfortunately, hundreds of cases, which resulted in convictions will now be dismissed because of the actions of the cops who were charged and the police administration who set the stage for it to happen. For that reason, both are co-recipients of this week’s Nomination for Hero Badge.