Long history of abuse behind Baltimore protests

The protests and rioting in Baltimore are not simply a reaction to the tragic death of Freddie Gray, but an eruption of long-simmering anger over community-police relations, specifically the treatment of African American residents by police. As President Obama said, "This has been a slow-rolling crisis; this has been going on for a long time. This is not new and we shouldn't pretend that it's new."

Many recent news stories have pointed to the $5.7 million Baltimore has paid since 2011 to settle police-brutality lawsuits. But the history of oppressive policing in Baltimore runs back decades, as I learned while spending the last year researching and writing about they city's police department.

In the 1960s and '70s, Baltimore was a city in flux. While the overall population declined 3.5 percent between 1960 and 1970, the African American share grew 11.7 percentage points to 46.4 percent. Public schools in the city flipped from 60 percent white in 1954 to 70 percent black by 1973, as white families fled to the surrounding suburbs. Jobs fled, too. According to a 2010 study, "Between 1955 and 1965, the city lost 82 industries, 65 to Baltimore County. … Additional jobs were lost when hospitals, colleges, corporations, and prestigious churches relocated to the county." Blacks made up just 3.2 percent of the county population.

Increasing poverty in the city was coupled with rising crime. Police department annual reports show that from 1970 to 1974, there were 1,457 murders, 2,542 rapes, and 32,874 aggravated assaults in Baltimore.

It was at this time that the city's police embarked on a bizarre campaign of illegal spying that targeted primarily African Americans. The arm of the department that executed the spying, the Inspectional Services Division, reported exclusively to Police Commissioner Donald Pomerleau.

ISD should not conjure scenes from the Baltimore-based HBO series The Wire, with officers painstakingly building complex cases against drug lords. Instead, ISD officers and citizen sources — both paid and unpaid — spied on civil rights leaders, student groups, reporters, and even black politicians. So paranoid was Pomerleau that ISD reports included whether or not he had been mentioned at a particular event or speech. Once, when asked by the Baltimore News-American if ISD was spying on politicians, Pomerleau responded: "Just the blacks, just the blacks, just the blacks."

ISD created dossiers on individuals who were never even suspected of criminal activity, and the information was then shared not only citywide, but with the FBI and the National Security Agency. Some of ISD's officers were trained by Army Intelligence, all for the daring work of covertly spying on things such as school board meetings, or African American candidates' campaigns for public office.

One ISD citizen recruit who spied on U.S. Rep. Parren Mitchell's reelection campaign — taking pictures of campaign workers to pass along to the police — might be familiar to Philadelphians. His name was Leonard Jenoff, later the confessed hit man hired by Rabbi Fred Neulander, of Cherry Hill, to kill his wife Carol.

All this information on ISD — and more — comes from a lengthy and damning 1975 report produced by a Maryland State Senate investigative committee. The fallout was minimal. Many saw the sacrifice of black civil liberties as a fair price for "law and order" — even though the work of ISD had almost no bearing on the city's crime problem.

Maryland's governor at the time, Marvin Mandel, said the report — and ISD's activities — had to be viewed in "context."

"I remember when the city was burning. I was there," he told the Baltimore Sun when the report was released. "I remember seeing the buildings busted into.… I remember the National Guard walking up and down those streets.… That's the atmosphere we're talking about.… If anyone would rather have the city burning, or have the University of Maryland burning, than to have possibly a few people inconvenienced because the police are trying to prevent crime from being committed rather than waiting until it's committed and find out who did it, that's a decision you have to make."

Mandel was referring to the city's 1968 riots after the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., when Baltimore saw $12 million in property damage, 5,500 arrests, and six deaths. It took the National Guard and federal troops to quell the violence.

Fear, poverty, crime, the feeling of a society coming apart — all exemplified in the '68 riots — created an atmosphere ripe for abuses by law enforcement. And the target of that abuse was the African American community.

The Baltimore Police Department is a far more just and able institution today than it was in the era of Pomerleau and ISD. The officers work to police a cash-strapped city with deeply entrenched woes. Many officers, I have no doubt, are courageous and good.

But they are part of an institution that has long viewed Baltimore's African American community as something to be feared, contained, and tamed. It is little wonder, with such a stained history, that frustration at times leads to violence.

The black politicians who broke racial barriers in Baltimore — State's Attorney Milton Allen, Congressman Mitchell, State Sen. Verda Welcome — yearned for a future when the hands of justice and equality would be joined in the city they loved.

Baltimore is still yearning.

Matt Nussbaum is a senior history major at Yale who will intern at the Denver Post this summer. matthew.nussbaum@yale.edu