Fox News’ Trace Gallagher reported that the leaked messages suggest that the prosecutors planned to charge the officers, regardless of what the evidence showed.
Detective Dawnyell Taylor reportedly revealed in case notes that she was handed a narrative by the prosecution that she read to the grand jury. She wrote that the narrative “had several things that I found to be inconsistent with our investigation.”
“I thought the statements in the narrative were misquoted,” the detective added.
In one of the leaked text messages, Taylor also reportedly told the top investigator she didn’t feel comfortable reading the script provided to her.
“I’m fine with finding the facts but between us I believe we omitted key things from their combined statements,” Taylor said.
Per “The Sage’s” style, Larry builds up to the point. He lays out his case well, and then seamlessly weaves it into a short-live “Twitter exchange” that exemplifies the depth of the Left’s thinking. They [the professional Left] love to label and mock — Russell Kirk once said: “Thinking in slogans ends with thinking in bullets” (http://tinyurl.com/jt5eza4). So while this is a fun exercise in facts trump emotion… remember, it is emotional support for ideology that killed a record number of people in world history by Leftists in the 20th Century.
The same Baltimore state’s attorney who basked in the national spotlight after arresting sixofficers in the death of Freddie Gray, who died after being arrested in a police drug crackdown, was behind the order for the police crackdown in the first place, internal documents Baltimore Police memos show.
About three weeks prior to Freddie Gray’s death, Baltimore city state’s attorney Marilyn Mosby instructed police to target the intersection where the controversial encounter began with “enhanced” drug enforcement efforts, defense attorneys for the six officers charged in the case revealed on Tuesday.
In a March 17 email, the division chief of Mosby’s “Crime Strategies Unit,” Joshua Rosenblatt, outlined the instructions he was apparently given about suspected drug dealing:
“State’s Attorney Mosby asked me to look into community concerns regarding drug dealing in the area of North Ave and Mount St,” he wrote.
[….]
“This is a case where the witness and the prosecutor are one and the same,” defense attorneys argued in court, according to the Baltimore Sun….
Larry Elder has predicted this for years! With police officers in the eye of the political correctness storm, these police are obviously protecting themselves by “playing it safe.” What is known as “passive policing.”
In the neighborhoods where this is happening, there have been crowds disrupting police arrests, lawsuits threatened, and criminal charges against police have been promised. So rather than endure a career ending move, they are circling the wagons.
Rightly so.
This consequence is WHOLLY lain at the feet of Democrats. 100%
Law And Order: Just two months ago, President Obama held up the Baltimore police force as a model of unbiased community policing. Now he’s investigating it for civil-rights violations. What’s changed?
In a March White House report on police reforms, Obama and his Task Force on 21st Century Policing praised Baltimore’s force and its black chief for “implementing national best practices for policies and training,” including “use of force” reforms. His task force even quoted Baltimore Police Commissioner Anthony Batts, who said he changed “outdated procedures” that “put officers at odds with the community.”
Yet now the Obama Justice Department is investigating the Baltimore police for a “pattern or practice of discriminating” against the black community in “arrests, traffic stops and other operations.” The federal probe is separate from an ongoing federal inquiry into the death of Freddie Gray, which focuses on the alleged misconduct of six Baltimore cops involved in his arrest, half of whom are black.
It’s absurd to think that black police officers under the direction of a black police chief are inherently biased against young black men. So why does Obama keep charging police bias where mixed-race juries weighing all the evidence conclude there is none?…
…For example, Maryland has one of the most generous welfare systems in the nation. A mother with two children participating in seven common welfare programs — Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), food stamps (SNAP), Medicaid, housing assistance, Supplemental Nutrition for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), energy assistance (LIHEAP), and free commodities — could receive benefits worth more than $35,000. Yet, nearly a quarter of the people in Baltimore still live in poverty. In 1960, Baltimore’s poverty rate was just 10 percent. While some of the increase since then is a result of demographic and other structural changes, we’ve clearly been throwing a lot of money at poverty in the city without much result.
And while Baltimore’s high welfare benefits haven’t reduced poverty, they may well have exacerbated other social problems. For example, some studies have long shown that high welfare benefits correlate with high out-of-wedlock birth rates. It should not come as a surprise, then, that two-thirds of births in the city are to unmarried mothers, and almost 60 percent of Baltimore households are headed by single parents.
The unemployment rate in Baltimore in February was 8.4 percent, compared with just 5.5 percent nationally. In the Sandtown–Winchester/Harlem Park area, which is near the center of the unrest, more than half of the people did not have jobs, according to a February 2015 report from the Justice Policy Institute and the Prison Policy Initiative.
One reason for this is the city’s — and the state’s — unremitting hostility to business. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce reports that only seven states and the District of Columbia have a worse business climate than Maryland. The state’s tax burden is huge and growing. According to the Tax Foundation’s State Business Tax Climate Index, Maryland ranks a dismal 40th in terms of business taxes, and an even worse 45th in terms of personal-income taxes. According to this report, Maryland is one of just a few states where the personal-income tax creates “an unnecessary drag on economic activity.” The state’s small businesses face the nation’s seventh-highest marginal tax rates.
As if that were not bad enough, the city of Baltimore adds one of the highest property taxes among comparable cities. Despite a recent modest reduction in property-tax rates, Baltimore still has a tax rate more than twice the rate of most of the rest of the state. A recent study by the Minnesota Center for Fiscal Excellence and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy ranked Baltimore twelfth out of 53 major cities in terms of high property taxes. When the city taxes are combined with state taxes, Baltimore ends up with the ninth worst tax burden out of 50 major American cities.
The city’s schools represent another failure of government. Teachers’ unions are among the most powerful special interests in Maryland. To cite just one example, even as other states were enacting right-to-work laws for public employees, Maryland passed a law mandating that all teachers pay fees to the Maryland State Education Association.
Although Baltimore ranks fourth among major cities in per-pupil expenditures for districts with more than 40,000 students and spends $16,578 a year per pupil — roughly 52 percent above the national average — more than a quarter of Baltimore students fail to graduate from high school. Fewer than half of Baltimore high-school students passed the last Maryland High School Assessment test. SAT scores for Baltimore students are more than 100 points below the national average.
Yet Maryland has one of the nation’s most restrictive charter-school laws. There are just 52 charter schools statewide. In neighboring Washington, D.C., 44 percent of the city’s public-school students are educated in the District’s 112 charter schools, according to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. Even within the public schools, choice is extremely limited in Maryland; parents are not generally allowed to send their children to schools outside their assigned district. Needless to say, any larger efforts to give parents more control over their children’s schooling — such as vouchers or tax credits — have gone nowhere.
Larry Elder was interviewed by Dennis Prager and the discussion went — naturally — to Baltimore and the foundational issues. It is NOT black and white, but left v. right.
As only Larry can, he dismantles the Left’s racial rhetoric… quote-by-quote.
…Although Baltimore ranks fourth among major cities in per-pupil expenditures for districts with more than 40,000 students and spends $16,578 a year per pupil — roughly 52 percent above the national average — more than a quarter of Baltimore students fail to graduate from high school. Fewer than half of Baltimore high-school students passed the last Maryland High School Assessment test. SAT scores for Baltimore students are more than 100 points below the national average.
Yet Maryland has one of the nation’s most restrictive charter-school laws. There are just 52 charter schools statewide. In neighboring Washington, D.C., 44 percent of the city’s public-school students are educated in the District’s 112 charter schools, according to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. Even within the public schools, choice is extremely limited in Maryland; parents are not generally allowed to send their children to schools outside their assigned district. Needless to say, any larger efforts to give parents more control over their children’s schooling — such as vouchers or tax credits — have gone nowhere….
Schools:
The Baltimore school system ranked second among the nation’s 100 largest school districts in how much it spent per pupil in fiscal year 2011, according to data released Tuesday by the U.S. Census Bureau.
The city’s $15,483 per-pupil expenditure was second to New York City’s $19,770. Rounding out the top five were Montgomery County, which spent $15,421; Milwaukee public schools at $14,244; and Prince George’s County public schools, which spent $13,775.
The Census Bureau also noted the first decrease in per-pupil spending nationally since 1977, the year the figures were first tracked….
The public schools in Washington, D.C., spent $29,349 per pupil in the 2010-2011 school year, according to the latest data from National Center for Education Statistics, but in 2013 fully 83 percent of the eighth graders in these schools were not “proficient” in reading and 81 percent were not “proficient” in math.
These are the government schools in our nation’s capital city — where for decades politicians of both parties have obstreperously pushed for more federal involvement in education and more federal spending on education.
[….]
In 2013, students nationwide took NAEP reading and math tests. When the NCES listed the scores of public-school eighth graders in the 50 states and the District of Columbia, D.C. came in last in both subjects.
D.C. eighth graders scored an average of 248 out of 500 in reading, and Mississippi finished next to last with an average of 253.
Only 17 percent of D.C. 8th graders rated “proficient” or better in reading. In Mississippi, it was 20 percent.
In math, D.C. public-school eighth graders scored an average of 265 out of 500, and only 19 percent were rated “proficient” or better. Alabama placed next to last with an average math score of 269, with 20 percent rated “proficient” or better.
Some might argue it is unfair to compare, Washington, D.C., a single city, with an entire state. However, D.C. also does not compete well against other big cities.
The Department of Education’s Trial Urban District Assessments program compares the test results in 21 large-city school districts, including Washington, D.C.
In these assessments, the scores of students from charter schools were removed and the average reading score for D.C. public school eighth-graders dropped to 245. That was below the national large-city average of 258, and tied D.C. with Fresno for seventeenth place among the 21 big cities in the TUDA.
In math, minus the charter school students, D.C. public-school eighth graders earned an average score of 260. That was below the national large-city average of 276, and put D.C. in a tie for sixteenth place, this time with Fresno and Baltimore.
The NCES database indicates that in the 2010-2011 school year, Washington, D.C. public schools spent a total of $29,349 per pupil, ranking No. 1 in spending per pupil among the 21 large cities in the TUDA.
Here is an excerpt from the John Nolte article Larry Elder reads from at about the midpoint of the audio:
Contrary to the emotional blackmail some leftists are attempting to peddle, Baltimore is not America’s problem or shame. That failed city is solely and completely a Democrat problem…
…Liberalism and all the toxic government dependence and cronyism and union corruption and failed schools that comes along with it, has run amok in Baltimore for a half-century, and that is Baltimore’s problem. It is the free people of Baltimore who elect and then re-elect those who institute policies that have so spectacularly failed that once-great city. It is the free people of Baltimore who elected Mayor Room-To-Destroy.
You can call the arson and looting and violence we are seeing on our television screens, rioting. That’s one way to describe the chaos. Another way to describe it is Democrat infighting. This is blue-on-blue violence. The thugs using the suspicious death of Freddie Gray (at the hands of a Democrat-led police department) to justify the looting that updates their home entertainment systems, are Democrats protesting Democrat leaders and Democrat policies in a Democrat-run city.
Poverty has nothing to do with it. This madness and chaos and anarchy is a Democrat-driven culture that starts at the top with a racially-divisive White House heartbreakingly effective at ginning up hate and violence.
Despite all that, we don’t riot here in Watauga County. Thankfully, we have not been poisoned by the same left-wing culture that is rotting Baltimore, and so many other cities like it, from the inside out. We get along remarkably well. We are neighbors. We are people who help out one another. We take pride in our community, and are grateful for what we do have. We are far from perfect, but we work out our many differences in civilized ways. Solutions are our goal, not cronyism, narcissistic victimhood, and the blaming of others…
Andrew Klavan adds the following summation of what people get when they treat our Republic like a Democracy:
I can only add this excellent passage from a wonderful book I just read. I’ll have more to say on Theodore Dalrymple’s Admirable Evasions soon, but for now, here’s just a relevant taste:
Seeing victims everywhere you look is the zeitgeist, it is what gives people license to behave as they like while feeling virtuous. Virtue is not manifested in one’s behavior, always so difficult and tedious to control, but in one’s attitudes towards victims. This view of virtue is both sentimental and unfeeling, cloying and brutal: for it implies that those who are not victims are unworthy of our sympathy or understanding, only of our denunciation. Thus a dialectic is set up between libertinism on the one hand and censoriousness on the other, the latter being precisely the characteristic that seeing victims everywhere, and disguising from them the degree of their own responsibility for their situation, was designed to avoid.
Don’t think for a minute, though, that these brilliant diagnoses constitute a cure. The problem with democracy is that we get what they deserve. The democrat victim machine may have created the problem of Baltimore, but it’s the rest of us who are going to have to solve it.
Wednesday, March 4: Fulton County police detective Terence Avery Green was killed, shot in the head by a suspect. According to WXIA-TV, Atlanta: “Police responded to a shots fired call early Wednesday. They were told the suspect was possibly intoxicated. Neighbors said the man was going from house to house, banging on doors and firing a long barrel gun….
“(Fulton County Assistant Police Chief Gary) described the situation as an ambush, saying the officers ‘were trying to do their job, they were trying to protect this neighborhood from someone who was shooting. And they had no other option but to do their job. And the way it appears to me, they were ambushed without warning.’
[….]
“Green was a veteran officer with nearly 22 years of service. He is survived by his parents and his four sons.”
...TWO
Thursday, March 5: Officer Robert Wilson III, while on duty and in uniform, walked into a game store to purchase a gift for his son. Two men robbed the store, and shot and killed Officer Wilson. According to CNN: “Wilson was standing at the counter across from employees at the GameStop store when two brothers, Carlton Hipps and Ramone Williams, walked in carrying guns, police said.
“They allegedly stuck up the store with at least five patrons and two employees inside.
“‘They said they thought it was going to be an easy target,’ said police spokesman Capt. James Clark. … Wilson confronted (the suspects), and a firefight broke out, police said.
“The officer, an eight-year veteran, stepped away from others in the store to keep them out of the crossfire, police said after watching the store’s security camera footage.
“He was a hero and a warrior, Clark said. “He fought until the very, very end, firing at both of them.”… Within 30 to 40 seconds, 50 shots fell, he said. …
“Wilson was 30 years old. In addition to his son, he leaves behind a 1-year-old daughter. His son turns 10 on Monday. The game was also going to be a birthday present.”
...THREE
Saturday, March 7: Police Officer Brennan Rabain was killed while trying to make a traffic stop on a speeding driver. The officer lost control of his squad car and crashed into a fence. According to the local NBC affiliate news: “Police are searching for anyone who may have witnessed a crash that killed a Prince George’s County police officer. … Rabain had been off duty, but when he initiated the traffic stop, he went back on duty, police said.” Rabain, 27, had been with the department less than two years, and leaves behind a 3-year-old daughter.
....FOUR
Tuesday, March 10: Deputy U.S. Marshal Josie Wells, 27, was killed in a shootout near Baton Rouge, Louisiana, as he attempted to apprehend a fugitive accused of killing a brother and sister.
According the Associated Press: “The fugitive, Jamie D. Croom, 31, was shot and taken to a hospital. … Croom was wanted in the shooting deaths of a brother and sister in New Roads, Louisiana. …
“The shootout took place in Scotlandville, an area north of Baton Rouge. A task force made by federal Marshals was serving an arrest warrant when the shootout happened. … Croom, a resident of New Roads, had a lengthy criminal record, (local Sheriff Beauregard) Torres said. ‘He was a dangerous criminal,’ Torres said. ‘It was a very high price to pay for this warrant to bring this man into custody. It was a very, very high price.’
“Wells was a graduate of East Central High School in Hurley, Mississippi, and of Jackson State University. ‘He was a tremendous student,’ East Central Principal James Hughey told WLOX-TV. ‘He was very well liked.’ … Wells’ father, Obie Wells Sr., is a retired Jackson County sheriff’s deputy. His brother, Obie Wells Jr., is an officer with the Jackson Police Department in the state capital.
“‘His dad was so proud of him for being a U.S. marshal,’ (Mississippi state Rep. Manly) Barton said.” The day after his death, Wells’ wife — who is pregnant with the couple’s first child — learned the sex of their baby. She is having a boy, and she plans to name him Josie Wells, Jr.
…This isn’t Mississippi in 1955, where Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy, was brutally murdered, only to have the obviously guilty killers acquitted by an all-white jury.
This is not the 60s of white-run cities, with nearly all-white police departments policing all-black communities.
In New York City, for example, most officers are people of color. Los Angeles had back-to-back black police chiefs, and as with New York City, the majority of L.A.’s street cops are people of color or women.
And it is not true, as some protesters claim, that “it doesn’t happen the other way around.”
In Mobile, Ala., in 2012, a black police officer shot and killed a white teenager. The white teen, high on drugs, was completely nude, and still the officer — fearing for his life — shot and killed the suspect. An investigation cleared the cop and — despite public pressure — a grand jury refused to indict him. No cameras. No CNN.
Just two days after police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., a “not white” cop in Salt Lake City, Utah, shot and killed an unarmed 20-year-old man whose race has been described as Hispanic. The family of the dead man believes that the cop is a murderer. No cameras. No CNN.
So why riot in Baltimore? The answer is, for some people, facts and reason don’t matter. It’s about anger, excitement, disruption.
But the 800-pound elephant in the room is the absence of fathers — responsible, involved fathers.
Obama has said that a child growing up without a father is 20 times more likely to end up in jail. Today over 70% of black children are born to unwed mothers compared to 25% in the 1965.
To earn their near-monolithic 95% black vote, the Democratic Party repeatedly tells blacks of their continued oppression. In 2012, Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, accused Republicans of seeking to “literally drag us all the way back to Jim Crow laws.”
So, when a questionable white cop/black suspect takes place, some, conditioned to react with anger and distrust, lash out — it’s “us against them” and “they’re trying to oppress us.”
Come election time, Democrats exploit this anger. Rep. Charlie Rangel, D-N.Y., for example, said this: “Everything we believe in, everything we believe in (Republicans) hate. They don’t disagree — they hate. … Some of them believe that slavery isn’t over and that they won the Civil War.”
This is how Democrats get 95% of blacks to vote one way — by telling them the other side is evil, that “the system” is corrupt and racist….
A few weeks ago, there was an election in Ferguson, Mo., the result of which was to treble the number of African Americans on that unhappy suburb’s city council. This was greeted in some corners with optimism — now, at last, the city’s black residents would have a chance to see to securing their own interests. This optimism flies in the face of evidence near — St. Louis — and far — Baltimore, Detroit, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Atlanta, Los Angeles, San Francisco…
St. Louis has not had a Republican mayor since the 1940s, and in its most recent elections for the board of aldermen there was no Republican in the majority of the contests; the city is overwhelmingly Democratic, effectively a single-party political monopoly from its schools to its police department. Baltimore has seen two Republicans sit in the mayor’s office since the 1920s — and none since the 1960s. Like St. Louis, it is effectively a single-party political monopoly from its schools to its police department. Philadelphia has not elected a Republican mayor since 1948. The last Republican to be elected mayor of Detroit was congratulated on his victory by President Eisenhower. Atlanta, a city so corrupt that its public schools are organized as a criminal conspiracy against its children, last had a Republican mayor in the 19th century. Its municipal elections are officially nonpartisan, but the last Republican to run in Atlanta’s 13th congressional district did not manage to secure even 30 percent of the vote; Atlanta is effectively a single-party political monopoly from its schools to its police department.
American cities are by and large Democratic-party monopolies, monopolies generally dominated by the so-called progressive wing of the party. The results have been catastrophic, and not only in poor black cities such as Baltimore and Detroit. Money can paper over some of the defects of progressivism in rich, white cities such as Portland and San Francisco, but those are pretty awful places to be non-white and non-rich, too…
[….]
The other Democratic monopolies aren’t looking too hot, either. We’re sending Atlanta educators to prison for running a criminal conspiracy to hide the fact that they failed, and failed woefully, to educate the children of that city. Isolated incident? Nope: Atlanta has another cheating scandal across town at the police academy. Who is being poorly served by the fact that Atlanta’s school system has been converted into crime syndicate? Mostly poor, mostly black families. Who is likely to suffer from any incompetents advanced through the Atlanta police department by its corrupt academy? Mostly poor, mostly black people. Who suffers most from the incompetence of Baltimore’s Democratic mayor? Mostly poor, mostly black families — should they feel better that she’s black? Who suffers most from the incompetence and corruption of Baltimore’s police department? Mostly poor, mostly black families.
And it’s the same people who will suffer the most from the vandalism and pillaging going on in Baltimore, too.
The evidence suggests very strongly that the left-wing, Democratic claques that run a great many American cities — particularly the poor and black cities — are not capable of running a school system or a police department. They are incompetent, they are corrupt, and they are breathtakingly arrogant. Cleveland, Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore — this is what Democrats do.
And the kids in the street screaming about “inequality”? Somebody should tell them that the locale in these United States with the least economic inequality is Utah, i.e. the state farthest away from the reach of the people who run Baltimore.
Keep voting for the same thing, keep getting the same thing.
To say that the many, many issues that plague our inner cities are entirely the fault of the Democrats is repugnant and unfair. These people have no hope. They have been left behind with absolutely nothing to lose. I’m certainly not trying to justify what they are doing, no one can legitimately…but lets at least breath enough oxygen to realize that there are more than a few Republican state officials in Maryland, including the governor himself, and trying to pin these criminal actions on one political party seems to me to be cheap and tawdry..regardless of the ineptness of the mayor. And oh by the way…maybe if less black men were to be killed at the hands of white policemen without a rational justification or explanation, well then maybe this country wouldn’t be a powder keg waiting to explode.
...I Respond:
I would not say entirely, but a majority of. From the mixing of Marxist cultural and economic principles into faith, from secularizing society, to subsidizing failure through welfare paying for the 70% of black kids born into single family homes, from multi-cultural studies that create a separateness identity (E Pluribus Pluribus), to teaching them about “white privileged,” an over exaggerated history (for instance, how slavery is taught, and the “genocide” against American Indians… as two examples), to supporting groups like the Nation of Islam and other cults as equal to traditional faith, to not allowing liberty in free-markets and taxing businesses out of areas to allowing rioters space to destroy… on-and-on.
ALL these are Democrat supported by-and-large, and NOT Republican supported, by-and-large. A powder keg doesn’t just — “walla” — magically occur. It is supported and supported by some ideology. The question is — which ideology? The Party that wants to keep 67% of single women voting for them? You mean the Democratic Party WANTS to help keep women married when a higher percentage of married women vote Republican?
Please. They encourage illegitimacy in order to win. They encourage “victim-hood” (race, class, gender) in order to create angst alive via cultural Marxism in order to get votes.
[….]
I forgot: to keeping education a monolithic failure and not allowing freedom to send kids (via vouchers) to better schools. Washington DC, the majority of black parents want vouchers… people like Sen. Reid vote against every-time, but then blames poor education on the Senate floor for Baltimore.
“Give me your tired, your poor, your ignorant masses yearning to breathe free.”
...I Respond:
And let the left shackle them in legislation, fines, taxes, political correctness, welfare, teaching white privilege, etc., etc., so in the end it is no longer “E Pluribus Unum”, but “slaves to the state” with a new moto, “E Pluribus Pluribus.”
