The Slatest

In Addition to Ending Their Abuse and Discrimination, Baltimore Cops Also Need to Stop Acting Like Jerks

Harold Perry, 74, and his wife, Jasalle Coates, 62, stand in their garden on April 19 next to the mural of Freddie Gray that was painted on their home.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Rampant and unjustified use of force. Routine disregard for constitutional rights and systematic racial discrimination. A dead, decapitated rat left on the car of a police officer who dared to report a colleague’s misconduct.

With such an extraordinary parade of horribles, it’s hard to decide what qualifies as the most disturbing finding in the Justice Department’s new report on policing in Baltimore. The 163-page document is the result of an intensive yearlong investigation that was triggered by the unrest following the death of Freddie Gray. The investigation, the first step on what will be a long road to reform, involved staffers in the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division poring over years of Baltimore Police Department data, interviewing numerous officers throughout the command structure and speaking with residents of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. The picture conjured by the report is that of a thuggish police force in which it is considered normal to abuse and torment black people.

Against that backdrop of violence, it may seem naïve to focus on the parts of the DOJ report describing how police officers in Baltimore speak to residents in the course of day-to-day interactions. And yet the material still manages to shock:

Many residents throughout the City of Baltimore, and particularly in impoverished, primarily minority, neighborhoods, described being belittled, disbelieved, and disrespected by officers, spurring some groups to submit detailed accounts, documentation, and even formal reports to us about their experiences with the Department…These accounts included reports of verbal abuse during routine interactions and often involved cursing or threats. In one account, during a traffic stop, a resident politely asked an officer why he had been pulled over. The officer simply told him to get out of the car and, when asked again, began cursing at the resident, even threatening to tow his “fucking car.” In another account, a woman asked police officers the reason for conducting a search of her home. She was told to “shut the fuck up bitch and sit the fuck down” because they were “the fucking law.”

You might think that, while it would be better if officers didn’t act so cruelly to the people they’re supposed to be serving, the absence of civility seems like the least of Baltimore’s problems. That isn’t necessarily wrong. But it ignores the profound harm that pervasive hostility and reflexive disrespect do to the relationship between a city’s police force and its citizens. It also underestimates just how far a little civility could go toward improving that relationship.

In its investigation, the DOJ found “numerous instances in which officers spoke in an unnecessarily rude or aggressive manner when interacting with suspects, witnesses, and the general public.” Some of these expressions of aggression “escalated situations and, at times, led to the unnecessary use of force.” In others, they took the form of unabashed racism: The DOJ describes one incident in which a black man, while out walking in April 2015, was accused of looting and called a “low life n****r,” and another, from 2010, in which an officer “admitted that he said ‘you know, you’re acting like a real n****r right now’ during an encounter with a young African-American male he had stopped for ‘loitering.’ ”

These instances of disrespect and racist belligerence aren’t merely the result of police officers having difficult, aggravating jobs: They’re a reflection, as the DOJ put it, of a “prevalent ‘us-versus-them’ mentality” built on officers’ “antagonistic feelings towards community members”:

When asked about community-oriented problem solving… one supervisor responded, “I don’t pander to the public.” Another supervisor conveyed to us that he approaches policing in Baltimore like it is a war zone. A patrol officer, when describing his approach to policing, voiced similar views, commenting, “You’ve got to be the baddest motherfucker out there,” which often requires that one “own the block.”

That state of mind is often reflected in even the smallest interactions between officer and civilian, and it doesn’t take any excess of empathy to understand that when, say, a young black man finds himself on the receiving end of it, the unmistakable message he receives is that the police hate him and are not to be trusted.

Research suggests that simply changing how officers talk to people could make a big difference—that if officers were kinder and more respectful, it could have a powerful effect on how people perceive their legitimacy. Here’s Yale Law School professor Tracey Meares, writing in a 2013 paper called “The Good Cop” that cites psychology research by her colleagues Tom Tyler and Jeffrey Fagan:

[I]f a police officer treats a person rudely during an encounter, that person will process that treatment a s information relevant to how legal authorities tend to view her, as well as the group to which she belongs… Tyler and Fagan demonstrate that the police can give a person a ticket or even arrest her while simultaneously enhancing police legitimacy if they are respectful and fair to the person they are dealing with. By affirming and enhancing a person’s status within society, the police are giving that person something valuable—a positive sense of self and identity—that is more important to them than the valence of their outcome.

In a national survey of 2,000 people that Meares conducted with Tyler, she found that most people would prefer to be treated with kindness and respect by an officer who violated their Fourth Amendment rights than to deal with an officer who respected constitutional boundaries but acted “like a jerk.” In an interview, Meares told me that her research in multiple cities has indicated that “when people complain about what police do, they’re usually complaining about police being rude, and not police shoving them or using unreasonable force or anything else.”

The question of surface-level civility is not separate from the more complex factors that have caused so many of Baltimore’s residents to distrust the police. Meares hypothesizes that the reason so many cops in Baltimore indulge in hostility and bullying when doing their jobs is that they’ve been trained to believe that stopping people for low-level violations, like loitering, is the best way to prevent more serious crime. “To engage in that kind of policing you have to believe that the people you are stopping are bad guys,” Meares said, stressing that this is just a theory and not an empirical finding. “The psychology of this dynamic is … ‘I am stopping all these people for BS things because I believe that they have committed or are about to commit a crime, or they’re going to do something else that’s going to make this place more dangerous.’ It’s easier for you to do that if you believe that they’re all bad guys, and that feeds into an ‘us and them’ dynamic.”

Meares added, “The whole thing becomes self-reinforcing. You tell yourself that not only are these people you’re being mean to different from you—they’re different from the other people in the community that you’re trying to keep safe.”

For the past several years, Meares has been advocating for and overseeing training for police officers in what she and other scholars call “procedural justice.” The basic concept is that, by treating people with respect, officers can convince people that they have a legitimate claim to their status as enforcers of the law. “The point of legitimacy is that people will comply with the law if they think it’s the right thing to do,” Meares said. And while achieving that legitimacy is not just a matter of teaching  officers to be nice—“too many people think all procedural justice is about is being polite, and it’s not,” Meares emphasized—you can’t really have the former without the latter.

The takeaway is not that the Baltimore Police Department can salvage its disastrous standing with residents just by instructing patrol officers to say please and thank you while continuing to trample over people’s rights. But affording potential suspects and witnesses a baseline level of dignity when engaging them in conversation, and approaching those people with a demeanor that acknowledges their humanity, would be a good place to start.