Feds Taking Over Policing in Baltimore?

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Feds Taking Over Policing in Baltimore?

Police call in the federal government to help prevent the city from turning into a war zone.

While the media’s attention on Baltimore slowly tapered down after Freddie Gray’s death in April, violence in the city hasn’t. Baltimore is now a war zone, and city and law enforcement officials are begging the federal government to step in and help.

That’s exactly how the Trumpet said events would play out!

The Baltimore Sun published an article on August 2 titled “Federal Agents to Embed With Baltimore Homicide Cops to Quell Unprecedented Violence.” It wrote, “Ten federal agents will join the Baltimore police homicide unit, commanders announced Sunday, after the city followed its deadliest month in decades with a night in which 10 people were shot—seven of them in one incident.”

That one incident was evidently a case of inter-gang violence.

Interim Police Commissioner Kevin Davis mentioned the different federal agencies that will join his police unit: the Federal Bureau of Investigation; the Drug Enforcement Agency; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; the United States Marshals Service; and the U.S. Secret Service. Davis said that the addition of these special agents represents a “flipping of the script of sorts.”

The script indeed has been flipped. Historically, it was the local law enforcement officials who would embed into the feds to provide assistance at the local level. Now, it has reversed.

This is exactly the way the federal government wants it!

My father explained this in his August Trumpet article “Police Under Attack”:

America’s law enforcement is under attack. On one side people in communities are developing a mistrustful, hostile, antagonistic attitude, yelling at police, assaulting and even killing officers in some cases. Police are pulling back from doing their jobs for fear of attack, or losing their jobs or going to prison for doing anything that could be perceived as racist. On the other, the federal government is undermining local law enforcement and stripping it of power in an effort to centralize policing power on the federal level.

He then went on to exhort readers to recognize just how dangerous these trends really are.

The homicide clearance rate for Baltimore’s police department is 36 percent. That’s why Commissioner Davis said “the agents will use federal resources to help homicide detectives solve killings,” as the Baltimore Sun reported.

A total of 191 people have been killed in Baltimore in 2015. Forty-five people were killed in July alone, matching the all-time monthly high from 1972, when the city had 275,000 more residents. Forty-two people were killed in May, the month after the death of Freddie Gray in police custody sparked riots.The violence this year is in some ways unprecedented: No previous year has had two months with more than 40 killings, and the 116 killed from May to July is a three-month high in data kept since 1970.

This is what happens when the police feel handcuffed. One Baltimore police officer who spoke to cnn said one reason for the spike in violence is that the police force is no longer proactive but reactive.

In his July Trumpet article “Your Cities Are Burned With Fire,” my father warned that “[t]he effect of responding to lawlessness by handcuffing law enforcement is very dangerous. It is certain to add fuel to the fire that is burning cities like Baltimore.”

This clip, produced by cnn, reveals one of Baltimore’s “darkest days.”

Now, Baltimore is so bad that local law enforcement is begging the federal government to come in and solve the problem—a problem the federal government is partly to blame for causing!

A spokesman for Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake commented on the move to bring in federal agents saying that it’s “exactly the kind of all-hands-on-deck approach that the mayor has been calling for.”

You may recall that this is the same mayor who essentially handcuffed the police from the beginning of the Baltimore crisis. She called on police to stand down during the riots in April. “[W]hile we tried to make sure that [police officers] were protected from the cars and the other things that were going on, we also gave those who wished to destroy space to do that,” she said.

Baltimore’s city and law enforcement officials gave these criminals way too much space to destroy the city. It’s so bad now that they are calling in the feds! But this will only make matters worse. Read Gerald Flurry’s article “Police Under Attack” for more on this critical subject.