...and aren't actually a subject most voters responding to his campaign are interested in.
jamilah ?@JamilahLemieux (for EBONY Magazine)
I spoke with @MartinOMalley on his criminal justice reform plan and addressing racism and engaging activists: http://ebony.com/news-views/omalley-debuts-criminal-justice-reform-plan-interview-503#.Vbtw_0uEz1o …
The former mayor of Baltimore and governor of Maryland spoke exclusively to EBONY about why he’s ready to challenge structural racism and how his record of service makes him more qualified than both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders to change the culture of American law enforcement...
EBONY: Do you think that the nation is ready for this type of criminal justice reform plan?
MO: I absolutely do and one of the very important things that we can establish right off the bat is to require data to be recorded that measures police-involved shootings, custodial death excessive use of force… we should require every department to monitor as courtesy excessive force complaints because the things that get measured are the things that get management attention and in the past we haven’t had that standard recording in our country. And I think we especially need it now, so that all of us as citizens will know whether our departments are doing any better this week, or this year, or this month than we were before in terms of reducing excessive force, reducing discourtesy complaints and police involved shootings.
EBONY: Are you ready to tell the entire country—not just the National Urban League or the NAACP—that you are ready to make addressing racism an important part of your campaign for presidency and, if elected, your presidency?
MO: Yes, I am and it’s been an important part of my entire calling to public service throughout my life. I think Dr. King summed it up when he said that one day, this generation of Americans will be called not only for the evil acts of bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good. I think it’s irresponsible for us as citizens not to find ways to talk about this and I think that’s especially important in the public forum of selecting the next president of the United States. And that’s something that, as the mayor of Baltimore elected when our city had become the most violent in America that I’ve had a lot of experience with. And as governor, we reduced our incarceration rate. It was at a 20 year low and we did it by reducing recidivism by 15%. We restored voting rights to 52,000 people, we eliminated the death penalty and we decriminalized possession of small amounts of marijuana. So I’ve had a long trajectory over 15 years in a very diverse space of talking about . And I tend to talk about them in the course of this campaign because this is part of the work we need to do to address what all of us share which is a pretty brutal racial legacy of injustice in our country that’s not limited to crime and punishment. It’s everything in America whether its’ education or housing or other things and I don’t know that we can address it together unless we do find ways to talk about it with one another.
EBONY: In terms of your law enforcement policy as mayor of Baltimore, is there anything you would do differently?
MO: I wish that we had been leaders in the newer technology, both in our state and as mayor, the body cameras and the cameras police cruisers. We were early implementers of putting up public safety cameras to keep public spaces safe. I wish we had been just as early and proactive in the body cameras and cameras in cruisers...I also wish that I had done a better job of institutionalizing some of the practices in terms of policing the police that were implemented during my time, that I wasn’t able to institutionalize to carry on after my time as much as I would have liked…we promised three things: to improve policing, including how we police the police, and we also promised to greatly increase drug treatment funding, which we also did and to greatly improve our interventions in the lives of our most vulnerable young people…I committed to doing 100 reverse integrity screens a year, I committed to increasing the internal affairs division, I committed to a tracking and monitoring with an early warning system that is courtesy and brutality complaints. And I assigned independent detectives for the first time to a civilian review board so they’d had the power to investigate any case independently with the police department’s internal affairs division. And under the pressure of budgets not all of those things continued at the level that they had during our time…we reduced police involved shootings to their lowest levels in modern history. The three years where the lowest level of police involved shootings were during my time as mayor.
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To make clear, O'Malley's term as mayor saw a sharp decline in the numbers of police shootings. Yes, he had an issue with arrests for petty crimes, but there's no evidence that was accompanied by an increase in police brutality, for instance. In fact, his police dept. changed the way incidents of police misconduct was reported and handled by establishing an active review board and a hotline for reporting police abuse or misconduct. Under his term there were over 100 'reverse integrity' stings of police conducted a year. They fully staffed the civilian review board including detectives on the board to investigate claims against police. They used technology to flag abusive officers who racked up complaints.
Also the numbers of arrests is skewed because it reflects repeat offenders, not new cases. What was happening during his term was an effort to clear the open-air drug markets which had been plaguing black majority neighborhoods.
As O'Malley said in a response today, if those had been white-majority communities, there would be no question of the swift and thorough response to drug-related crime and violence which threatened and cost black lives, many young black lives.
I think he's correct in estimating that at least 1000 black lives were actually saved by his police dept.'s focus on responding to and acting on the drug activity which was running rampant in Baltimore when he took office. The city had record deaths and record violent crime when he took office which saw a sharp reduction during his terms as mayor. During his time as governor, recidivism was cut significantly, and incarceration rates were actually REDUCED in his terms to 20 year lows; and voting rights were restored to 52,000 individuals with felonies.
That was a direct result of not only the heightened attention by the police to that drug activity, but also a result of a community policing effort, policing the police with increased accountability for police abuses, and a massive drug-treatment program which recovered many black lives in those communities.
He also closed the most violent prison in the city, ended the death penalty, signed decriminalization of small amounts of pot into law, and actually brought incarceration rates down during his stay in office. That says 'black lives matter,' at least to those black lives which were granted safe streets, prevention of violent crimes and killings and other opportunities to improve on their way of life.
I've lived in Maryland for 45 years. These issues aren't just an abstraction to me, and neither are they to other members of the black community who are affected by these issues.
Those communities, not coincidentally voted repeatedly for Martin O'Malley in overwhelming numbers throughout his several, successive roles serving in public service in Maryland. That's as much of an endorsement of his efforts as anything anyone wants to portray in terms of black support.
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rofl: : 
