Dear Commissioner Davis,
We are eighth grade students from the Park School of Baltimore. We are doing a project called Advoc8. It is a project where we pick a topic and we feel we can make a change in. Our topic is police brutality. We are contacting you because you are the police chief of Baltimore and you probably know that police brutality is a problem.
One reason for police brutality may be the police not having a good relationship with the community they work in. There are officers that don’t even live the same state that they work in. If they don’t even live in the same state why would they care about that community?
We think that hiring people that live in our community would be better because they would care more about their job and how they handle things in that area. We read an article that about police officers in Philadelphia can’t live outside the state of Pennsylvania. Why can’t similar restrictions be put in place for Baltimore police officers?
Another cause for police brutality could be officer training. We are concerned that the cadets are not being trained as well as they might be in some situations. According to news reports, some police are trained to assume a phone is a gun. Another thing is that some police assume that when they are in a high drug area most people will have drugs. When police are in training they should be trained in how to respond differently in different situations. Could they be trained to presume innocence more often than guilt?
We think one of the root causes of police brutality is the police making implicit assumptions about the community they are policing. Some cops have biases against groups of people and that affects how they handle many of the situations. For an example 27% of the population in Maryland is Black and the percent of Black people that get pulled over is 39%. However, 64% of Maryland’s population is White and of people pulled over, only 47% are White while 53% are Black. We think if the police had a better relationship with the Baltimore community they would not make assumptions about the communities they police.
We would like to hear back from you on this topic. This is something that is happening now and it is important to stop it. We know we can’t stop it ourselves but if enough people try we could make change.
Thank you for your time,
Jordan Blum, Ryan Bradley, Garrett Potts, and Ben Charlow are eighth graders at the Park School of Baltimore. Their teachers, who assisted with this project, are Geoff Myers, Paul Worley, Lisa Gottlieb, Rich Estey, and Rommel Loria.
