Aug 13, 2016 4 min read

Imagine walking down the street in any community and having a police officer stop you and start questioning you even though you were doing nothing more than walking down the street.

Take it a step further and imagine that officer, perhaps now joined by a couple more, asking you to strip to your skivvies so you can be searched. In public.

It would not only be humiliating, it would also be unconstitutional, given the prohibitions against unreasonable searches and seizures in the Fourth Amendment, and the notion there must be a probable cause to subject citizens to interrogations and searches. Just strolling down the boulevard doesn’t clear that hurdle.

But that’s what many citizens of Baltimore have experienced in recent years, according to a searing report released by the U.S. Justice Department last week. Prompted by the death last year of 25-year-old black man Freddie Gray while he was in police custody – he was being held solely because he ran away at the sight of a police cruiser – it found 91 percent of those stopped by police and arrested on minor charges like “failure to obey” and “trespassing” were African-American, even though they make up only 63 percent of the population of Baltimore. They also made up 82 percent of the city’s traffic stops, despite being 60 percent of its drivers. Some residents reported being stopped and questioned again and again and again, some as frequently as 30 times in four years. Such relentless targeting of a certain class of residents clearly stepped over the line into discrimination and harassment.

The report contained several stories of Baltimore residents who were degraded by police officers for no valid reason: a teenage boy who was strip-searched in front of his girlfriend, and was subjected to another search by the same officer after he filed a complaint; a woman who was strip-searched and then given a ticket for a broken taillight; and a father and son told to get moving while standing and minding their own business in a city park.

Then there was the man beaten and Tased by police when he resisted arrest. His offense? Standing on a street with his hands in his pockets on a winter day, and having a kitchen knife in his possession.

As Radley Balko, a blogger on criminal justice for The Washington Post, pointed out, “I suppose defenders of these tactics will say black neighborhoods are disproportionately targeted because that’s where most of the crime takes place. I don’t doubt that may be true. But your constitutional rights aren’t determined by the behavior of people who look like you, or the behavior of the people who live in your neighborhood. Neither should the dignity and humanity afforded to you by the people who are supposed to be protecting you.”

The style of policing that became prevalent in Baltimore grew out of “zero-tolerance” policies instituted in the early 2000s during the administration of Martin O’Malley, who went on to become governor and, more recently, a failed candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. Whether or not crime was reduced, there’s little question “zero-tolerance” did quite a lot to erode relations between the community and the police.

Of course, most police officers do a very difficult job well and treat civilians with dignity and respect. But in the wake of this report, one wonders how many other Baltimores are out there?

Former “Daily Show” host Jon Stewart sagely pointed out a couple of years ago that you can hold police in high esteem “and still be troubled by cases of police overreach. Those two ideas are not mutually exclusive. You can have great regard for law enforcement and still want them to be held to high standards.”

That observation is more relevant than ever.