Why Baltimore Police Have 'Stopped Noticing Crime' | Trending"An interesting news story ran in Thursday’s USA Today. “Baltimore police stopped noticing crime after Freddie Gray's death,” read the headline.
“A wave of killings followed.”
What I found most interesting about it, though, was not the facts that were reported but rather that anyone should have found them surprising.
“Just before a wave of violence turned Baltimore into the nation’s deadliest big city,” the story begins, “a curious thing happened to its police force: officers suddenly seemed to stop noticing crime.”
The story goes on to describe how Baltimore’s police officers reported seeing fewer drug dealers out and about, fewer traffic violators, fewer people with arrest warrants, fewer of any type of person who previously would have attracted their attention. Note that the story does not say there were fewer of these lawbreakers, only that the police did not report seeing as many.
Surely if the officers were being candid, they would say they saw just as many as ever, but that they made the decision not to do anything about them.
And who can blame them?...
Read on.
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