David Simon: O’Malley ‘Destroyed’ Policing

[Vattel]

10. You are making progress: "That's not to excuse the abuses of civil liberties."

But the cat is out of the bag, and to say that "the dangerousness on the street compelled the policy" is completely false:

So Martin O’Malley proclaims a Baltimore Miracle and moves to Annapolis. And tellingly, when his successor as mayor allows a new police commissioner to finally de-emphasize street sweeps and mass arrests and instead focus on gun crime, that’s when the murder rate really dives. That’s when violence really goes down.

You also make a lot of other false claims about Simon's views, but I will settle for quoting the article you reference:

“We still have men who are suffering from it today,” said Marvin “Doc” Cheathem, a past president of the Baltimore branch of the NAACP, which won a court settlement stemming from the city’s policing policies. “The guy is good at talking, but a lot of us know the real story of the harm he brought to our city.”

. . .

A. Dwight Pettit, a Baltimore lawyer whose clients have won numerous settlements from police brutality complaints, said O’Malley’s “approach to policing when he was mayor was disregard for the Constitution.”

“His philosophy was, ‘Put them in jail and figure it out later,’ and that will solve the crime problem,” he said. “It created a confrontational mentality with the police.”

. . .

In 2005, with O’Malley in office, Cheathem recalled the local NAACP branch being “inundated with calls from African Americans and Hispanic men saying they were being arrested and no charges were being filed.”

A contingent of activists “met with the mayor and shared our anger — that these guys weren’t being charged but were coming out with arrest records,” Cheathem recalled. “We requested that this process be stopped, and he was not receptive to it at all. We left with the idea that we had no recourse but to sue.”

The NAACP joined in a lawsuit filed by the ACLU that was based on the arrest of a 19-year-old man with no prior criminal record who spent hours in jail for dropping a candy wrapper on the street while sitting on the steps of his aunt’s house. The suit named O’Malley and other Baltimore officials, including the police commissioner, and alleged that the Baltimore police had improperly arrested thousands of people “without probable cause and in violation of the U.S. Constitution.”

The complaint was settled four years later, with Baltimore agreeing to pay an $870,000 settlement. By then, O’Malley was governor.