Two Baltimore police officers convicted of
racketeering, robbery and fraud
By Harvey Simpkins
16 February 2018
Two Baltimore police officers were convicted in federal court on
Monday of racketeering, robbery and fraud associated with their activities
working for the now-defunct Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF), supposedly tasked with
reducing the number of illegal guns in Baltimore.
Daniel Hersl and Marcus Taylor, along with six others who pled
guilty to racketeering charges last month, engaged in a wide range of criminal
and unconstitutional activity, including repeated armed home invasions of city
residents, where they stole money, drugs and guns, only to resell the drugs and
guns on the streets.
In addition, these thugs with badges routinely planted guns on
innocent residents, chased and searched people without probable cause, and lied
under oath, leading to the conviction of innocent people. The Baltimore Public
Defenders Office believes there may be over 3,000 tainted cases dating to 2008
because of the involvement of the convicted officers. To date about 125 cases
have been dropped.
Debbie Katz Levi, head of special litigation for Baltimore’s
Office of the Public Defender, told the Associated Press, “Beyond the sheer
credibility issues that should have been raised at the time, given how embedded
their crimes were in their police work, all cases involving these officers are
tainted.”
One of the victims of the GTTF, Andre Crowder, was wrongly
pulled over in 2016 by three of the now convicted officers. On February 2,
Crowder told a press conference at his attorney’s office that the officers
pulled him over for an alleged seat belt violation, then searched his car,
finding a gun. The officers then proceeded to his home, where they took $10,000
from him. He was jailed for three days before he could post bail. During that
time, his three-year-old son passed away.
“It’s bigger than the charge they put on me,” Crowder said. “The
mark they put on my record, the cash that was took, all of that, it doesn’t
matter, because I wasn’t there to spend the last moments of my son’s life with
him because of this situation.”
Another victim, Jamal Walker, described a 2011 encounter with
the convicted leader of the GTTF, Wayne Jenkins. Walker was sitting in his
vehicle when Jenkins and a partner told him to get out. Inside, Walker had
$40,000 in cash; only $20,000 was reported seized by the officers. “The more it
went on, the worse it got,” Walker said. He said the officers thought “like
cowboys—we do what we want to do.”
All told, the eight convicted members of the now-defunct GTTF
stole more than $300,000 in cash, three kilograms of cocaine, 43 pounds of
marijuana, 800 grams of heroin, and jewelry worth hundreds of thousands of
dollars.
At the trial of Hersl and Taylor, the leader of the GTTF, Wayne
Jenkins, was described as a violent and corrupt officer who led the unit on a
continuous quest to shake down city residents and find big-time drug dealers
with assets to steal.
Jenkins also stole and sold prescription drugs that were taken
during the protests that erupted following the 2015 police murder of Freddie
Gray. At the time, police blamed the drugs recirculated by Jenkins for a sharp
increase in murders. Prosecutors also introduced two bags of items that Jenkins
accumulated for the GTTF to use in robberies, including balaclava ski masks,
black clothing and shoes, and tools such as a crow bar, battering ram, and a
rope with a grappling hook.
In further testimony at the trial, a dozen other officers and an
assistant state’s attorney were accused of engaging in similar criminal
activities or helping to cover them up as they interacted with the convicted
officers. The accused include the head of the police department’s Internal
Affairs, an officer who investigates robberies, and another assigned to the
police training academy. A fourth accused officer, Sean Suitor, was a city
homicide detective who was fatally shot with his own gun under mysterious
circumstances the day before he was to testify before a federal grand jury in
the case involving the GTTF. Many of the accused officers remain on the job.
Not surprisingly, Baltimore’s mayor and police commissioner have
both tried to paint the latest revelations of police corruption as “a few bad
apples.” The usual whitewash investigations and “anti-corruption” units have
been promised to supposedly “clean up” the department and ensure that similar
incidents do not happen again. None of these promises should be taken
seriously.
In 2016, the Obama Justice Department released a report showing
that Baltimore police engaged in widespread violations of constitutional
rights, including unjustified stops and searches, arrests without cause, racial
profiling, use of excessive force, sexual discrimination, and retaliation
against actions protected by the First Amendment, including detaining and
arresting people simply because they used speech perceived by officers to be
critical or disrespectful towards the police.
The Justice Department report stated: “There is reasonable cause
to believe that BPD [Baltimore Police Department] engages in a pattern or
practice of conduct that violates the Constitution or federal law.” More
specifically, the 2016 report noted, “During stops, BPD officers frequently
pat-down or frisk individuals as a matter of course, without identifying
necessary grounds to believe that the person is armed and dangerous. And even
where an initial frisk is justified, we found that officers often violate the
Constitution by exceeding the frisk’s permissible scope. We likewise found many
instances in which officers strip search individuals without legal
justification. In some cases, officers performed degrading strip searches in
public, prior to making an arrest, and without grounds to believe that the
searched individuals were concealing contraband on their bodies.”
The revelations of the extreme corruption of the GTTF police
officers fit into the pattern, established in the Justice Department report, of
a police department that systematically stampedes on the basic constitutional
rights of Baltimore’s working-class residents. Only a mass political movement
against capitalism, based in the working class, can put an end to these rampant
violations of fundamental democratic rights.
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