The Drug War Killed Probable Cause In Baltimore
Bill Keller at The Marshall Project interviews David Simon, the creator of Baltimore-based "The Wire." An excerpt:

BK: What do people outside the city need to understand about what's going on there -- the death of Freddie Gray and the response to it?

DS: I guess there's an awful lot to understand and I'm not sure I understand all of it. The part that seems systemic and connected is that the drug war -- which Baltimore waged as aggressively as any American city -- was transforming in terms of police/community relations, in terms of trust, particularly between the black community and the police department. Probable cause was destroyed by the drug war. ...

Probable cause from a Baltimore police officer has always been a tenuous thing. It's a tenuous thing anywhere, but in Baltimore, in these high crime, heavily policed areas, it was even worse. When I came on, there were jokes about, "You know what probable cause is on Edmondson Avenue? You roll by in your radio car and the guy looks at you for two seconds too long." Probable cause was whatever you thought you could safely lie about when you got into district court.

Then at some point when cocaine hit and the city lost control of a lot of corners and the violence was ratcheted up, there was a real panic on the part of the government. And they basically decided that even that loose idea of what the Fourth Amendment was supposed to mean on a street level, even that was too much. Now all bets were off. Now you didn't even need probable cause. The city council actually passed an ordinance that declared a certain amount of real estate to be drug-free zones. They literally declared maybe a quarter to a third of inner city Baltimore off-limits to its residents, and said that if you were loitering in those areas you were subject to arrest and search. Think about that for a moment: It was a permission for the police to become truly random and arbitrary and to clear streets any way they damn well wanted.

On race:

BK: How does race figure into this? It's a city with a black majority and now a black mayor and black police chief, a substantially black police force.

DS: What did Tom Wolfe write about cops? They all become Irish? That's a line in "Bonfire of the Vanities." When Ed and I reported "The Corner," it became clear that the most brutal cops in our sector of the Western District were black. The guys who would really kick your ass without thinking twice were black officers. If I had to guess and put a name on it, I'd say that at some point, the drug war was as much a function of class and social control as it was of racism.

...What the drug war did, though, was make this all a function of social control. This was simply about keeping the poor down, and that war footing has been an excuse for everybody to operate outside the realm of procedure and law. And the city willingly and legally gave itself over to that, beginning with the drug-free zones and with the misuse of what are known on the street in the previous generation as 'humbles.' A humble is a cheap, inconsequential arrest that nonetheless gives the guy a night or two in jail before he sees a court commissioner. You can arrest people on "failure to obey," it's a humble. Loitering is a humble. These things were used by police officers going back to the '60s in Baltimore. It's the ultimate recourse for a cop who doesn't like somebody who's looking at him the wrong way.

His own crew members would get picked up for DWB -- Driving While Black -- while going home from the set:

We'd wrap at like one in the morning, and we'd be in the middle of East Baltimore and they'd start to drive home, they'd get pulled over. My first assistant director -- Anthony Hemingway -- ended up at city jail. No charge. Driving while black, and then trying to explain that he had every right to be where he was, and he ended up on Eager Street [the location of the notorious Baltimore City Detention Center]. Charges were non-existent, or were dismissed en masse. Martin O'Malley's logic was pretty basic: If we clear the streets, they'll stop shooting at each other. We'll lower the murder rate because there will be no one on the corners.

The upshot:

By the standard of that long list, Freddie Gray becomes almost plausible as a victim. He was a street guy. And before he came along, there were actual working people -- citizens, taxpayers -- who were indistinguishable from criminal suspects in the eyes of the police who were beating them down. Again, that's a department that has a diminished capacity to actually respond to crime or investigate crime, or to even distinguish innocence or guilt. And that comes from too many officers who came up in a culture that taught them not the hard job of policing, but simply how to roam the city, jack everyone up, and call for the wagon.

via @WalterOlson @CatoInstitute