Some Arrest Data That May Help Explain The Baltimore Riots



In the summer of 2006, the ACLU sued the city over the mass arrests. In the initial complaint, it highlighted the key stats at the heart of the program. During the prior year, police arrested 76,497 people without warrants. City prosecutors declined to charge 25,293 of them, or 30%, on the grounds that the cases presented were “legally insufficient.” As for the people who were charged with crimes, see the chart below for a sampling of those transgressions.



Baltimore was forced to settle with the ACLU in 2010 and enact a series of reforms. The initiative has now more or less ended, but the damage it caused obviously lingers. “Never mind what it did to your jury pool,” Simon told the Marshall Project. “Now every single person of color in Baltimore knows the police will lie.”