What the hell are we going to do about the Baltimore City Police Department? Seriously.
Many of the sordid details of how seven Baltimore City police officers, five Black, two White (all living outside of Baltimore City), allegedly operated a criminal enterprise beneath the ubiquitous blue covering of the BCPD, have been made public since their arrest last week.
Sean Yoes (Courtesy Photo)
The Department of Justice was investigating the BCPD in 2016, while these cops were allegedly jacking drug dealers and legit businessmen alike for hundreds of thousands of dollars, and simultaneously shaking down the City of Baltimore for hundreds of thousands of dollars in mostly fraudulent overtime pay.
According to the DOJ, Det. Momodu Gondo, 34, on a salary of $71,400 collected $29,100 in overtime pay, which incredibly was the lowest amount collected by the seven last year. The largest amount of overtime pay went to Sgt. Wayne Jenkins, 36, who on a salary of $85,400 nearly doubled his money with overtime payments of $83,300.
“How easy it is to steal overtime from the Baltimore City Police Department and from the City of Baltimore,” said Stephen Janis a veteran investigative reporter with The Real News Network, and a recurring contributor to First Edition, during the, “Mod Squad,” segment.
“This is one of the big parts of this indictment…with the overtime there is a lot of evidence that they actively, fraudulently put in for overtime and they weren’t there. Given the fact we have a $40 million budget in overtime, which is like $30 million over budget and a school budget deficit…it’s important to pay attention to this indictment, because it shows there’s no culture of accountability. They were doing whatever they wanted… it sounds like…there was never a time when it seems like a supervisor intervenes,” Janis added.
To my knowledge, not one member of the BCPD, rank and file, command staff, outside of fired police commissioner Anthony Batts, was spotted leaving police headquarters carrying a box in the wake of the uprising in April 2015. And it was deja vu all over again in August 2016 following the release of the Department of Justice, “patterns or practice” report on the BCPD, one of the most scathing in the history of the DOJ. Again, nobody got fired (to my knowledge).
So, who’s going down as a result of the latest BCPD scandal? If past is prologue, nobody. Nothing to see here. And that may be the real issue, what we see with this latest incident of misconduct is just the tip of the iceberg, according to all the people I’ve talked to in law enforcement and in politics.
One draconian solution seems to be resonating with more people, disband the BCPD. And for those who believe tearing down the department and building a new one is absurd, it happened just to our north in New Jersey five years ago.
In November of 2012, the city of Camden, New Jersey, which was being overrun by crime, disbanded their police department, laying off or firing hundreds of their officers and hiring a nonunionized force of 400 officers.
Of course, there is a great disparity in size between the Camden Police Department and the BCPD, but many of the ills that plague Camden are the same that ravage Baltimore, poverty, substandard public schools, lack of affordable housing, lack of jobs, drug addiction and rampant police corruption.
The DOJ says in order for the BCPD to correct course, the City of Baltimore will most likely have to invest many millions of dollars over the course of several years. But, we’ve been sinking more money into law enforcement for decades and how has that been working out for us?
I’ve said publicly and privately on dozens of occasions, the vast majority of the men and women sworn to protect and serve the citizens of Baltimore, do their jobs professionally. I know some of them personally and they perform heroically day in and day out.
But, I once asked Commissioner Kevin Davis, if a good cop turns a blind eye to corruption by his brothers and sisters in blue, can he or she still be a good cop. He said, no.
So, how many good cops do we really have in the Baltimore City Police Department given the amount of corruption that so many believe is pervasive?
Perhaps the time has come for Baltimore City residents to abandon the BCPD, (or at least implement a Serpico-esque purge of dirty cops) which seems dysfunctional on every level and start all over.
Sean Yoes is a senior contributor for the AFRO and host and executive producer of, AFRO First Edition, which airs Monday through Friday, 5 p.m.-7 p.m. on WEAA, 88.9.
