Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott is still seen by police as “hostile actor” despite signing off on a budget that increased funds for police by millions, according to Baltimore-based policing and inequality reporter J. Brian Charles.
According to Charles, the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) in Baltimore still view Scott unfavorably because he continues to meet with activists who call for the police to be defunded.
“The FOP here … wants to basically say that yes he’s a hostile actor because he basically meets with these folks right? Like he’s willing to sit down, so the folks that are in that coalition are folks that Mayor Scott meets with on a regular basis to talk about what the future of policing looks like.”
Charles noted that another factor complicating the issue of defunding the police is a consent decree that the Baltimore Police Department (BPD) has been under since 2017.
Consent decrees are essentially used by the Department of Justice to make local police departments address violations of law. The decree placed on the BPD, like many entered into in recent years, is related to civil rights violations.
As Charles reported, U.S. District Court Judge James K. Bredar, who is overseeing the decree, has said that while there are factors of defunding the police that he agrees with, the BPD must first be reformed before it can be defunded.
See part of Charles’s interview above.
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