The part that I bolded above, does not seem correct, in my opinion. I think it has been shown that in a 'high crime' area, a cop has the right and the responsibility, to chase after someone running away from him.
But most important, is the back story to all of this. Marilyn Mosby ORDERED the police to go to this specific area, and clean up the drug dealing on that corner. And along comes FG, a KNOWN small time dealer, arrested many times for possession, who takes off running.
So Marilyn Mosby SENDS the police there to patrol that corner, in order to clean up the crime/drugs, and then when the cops chase down a known dealer with an illegal knife, they are arrested and she is outraged that he was stopped by them. I am sorry, but that is just nonsensical, on her part.
It is true that they need to get to the bottom of why and how he dies during the transport. But charging the other officers for detaining and arresting him is outrageous and pathetic, in my opinion. Especially when they were sent there by Mosby herself. :no:
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/crime/bs-md-ci-mosby-email-20150609-story.html
Baltimore prosecutor asked police to target area where Freddie Gray was arrested
About three weeks before Freddie Gray was chased from a West Baltimore corner by three Baltimore police officers — the start of a fatal encounter — the office of prosecutor Marilyn Mosby asked police to target the intersection with "enhanced" drug enforcement efforts, court documents show.
"State's Attorney Mosby asked me to look into community concerns regarding drug dealing in the area of North Ave and Mount St," Joshua Rosenblatt, division chief of Mosby's Crime Strategies Unit, wrote in a March 17 email to a Western District police commander.
I could write a dissertation in response to your post, but will spare you.
As briefly as my verbose self can be--
1. The knife wasn't illegal, and LE didn't know FG had one when he ran.
2. It wasn't illegal for FG to run AND it wasn't illegal for LE to pursue him.
3. There are varying accounts of when FG began running, but none allege that he did so AFTER being confronted by LE.
4. LE didn't have probable cause to arrest Gray AND it was not a crime to have arrested FG without probable cause, though making it a crime to arrest without probable cause seems to be exactly what Mosby was proposing to do with these cases.
5. Drug dealing on street corners cannot be tolerated for numerous reasons, not least because, unchecked, the neighborhoods where those corners are located disintegrate into violent, anarchic no-go zones abandoned by law-abiding peeps and small businesses.
AND.
B'more LE (part of that thankless job description) are charged with clearing the same corners of the same peeps, over and over, sometimes arresting peeps and literally having them return on the same day. LE is doing what is asked of them to "sweep" those corners, whether or not what they're doing is the slightest bit effective.
AND.
The peeps on those corners aren't even foot soldiers in the drug dealing universe in B'more. They are the the bittiest of small fry, the expendable pawns of pawns of pawns. Should they be allowed to break the law with impunity? No, of course not.
But at a bare minimum, neither should they be subjected to excessive force by frustrated LE sent by a frustrated mayor who needs to at least appear to be doing something to battle the drug epidemic in B'more.
Whether or not LE and the residents ( law-abiding and not) of the Freddy Gray neighborhoods in Baltimore and beyond benefit enough from these routine fruitless sweeps to justify the expense of every kind involved is a question B'more post-Freddy Gray seems no closer to asking, much less answering.
ETA (because brevity is a hopeless cause).
1. I'm not suggesting LE routinely uses excessive force during these drug sweeps. Reality is, they don't.
2. LE's frustration about this kind of exercise, though, is very real. I saw one result of one cause of that frustration, the " cutting of corners" up close when I served on a city jury for the trial of one of these penny ante corner dealers.
Long story short, we were sent back to the jury room mid -day, mid 2nd day of testimony, mid- testimony by the arresting officer. The judge came back herself an hour or so later to dismiss us, and when asked, told us she had to dismiss the case because the officer had perjured himself by attesting to the accuracy of a police report that was anything but.
The officer didn't act out of malice, or anything so grand. The errors stemmed in part from the fact the same officer had made so many similar arrests on the same day that he hadn't caught up with his paperwork til the end of his shift, and if I recall correctly, he mixed up two of the arrests he made that day. (I'm not even sure he was aware of the mistakes until the defendant's attorney caught them during testimony).
It is also reality that it isn't all that uncommon for LE to not seat belt some of the peeps they arrest during the kind of corner sweep we're talking about.
