Coming to Terms with the Painful History of the Gun Trace Task Force

Picture this: the new private police force at Johns Hopkins University, established to ensure the safety of the campus, turns into a criminal enterprise. In broad daylight police stop people on the sidewalks, especially black male students, and take everything in their wallets before speeding away. Or, they barge into fraternity parties, claiming to smell marijuana, and confiscate anything that looks valuable. Other officers help gang members sell heroin from behind the library. All the students know this is happening, but the school administration wants to maintain the image of a perfect police force so badly that it never pursues these allegations.

In this scorched-earth scenario, admitting to police corruption on such a scale would smear the school’s name and scare off anyone thinking of coming to Hopkins. This is the dilemma the Baltimore City government faces now in the wake of the Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF), a disgraced police unit convicted by federal prosecutors in 2017. And, given the precedent, this is the danger in any new police force faces when it comes to oversight.

While the GTTF detectives are not the only officers involved in the drug trade, their actions make the others’ pale in comparison. In 2007, then-police commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III created an elite force to get guns off the street and reduce the high number of homicides in the city. In the first measure it was successful. The officers captured guns every day, not to mention large amounts of drugs. Within a 10-month period in 2015 alone, they confiscated 132 guns and made 110 arrests. Thus, their supervisors were willing to turn a blind eye to accusations against them. Even though residents complained about the task force for years, the officers were never pulled off the force.

This unit would likely still be active except that, in March 2017, federal investigators, after a months-long undercover operation, arrested them. The ensuing trial held shocking revelations. The federal indictment of officers Antonio Shropshire and four other detectives state that the defendants “…distributed heroin to customers, which resulted in multiple overdoses, including overdose deaths,” and spied on its own police department to ensure that they did not interfere with the drug trafficking ring.

As The Sun and other media outlets have reported, GTTF also committed plenty of robberies. In July 2016, the officers arrested a married couple as they were leaving a Home Depot, despite lacking evidence that they were breaking any laws. Then they interrogated the couple in a police station. At this point the husband, Ronald Hamilton, mentioned that he had $40,000 in cash in their home. The officers then drove to the couple’s house and stole $20,000, using an affidavit founded on made-up evidence.

The impact the task force had on the police’s relationship with the community is devastating. And yet, Baltimore cannot effectively address crime if its residents do not trust the police.

From 2014 to 2018, there were more than 300 homicides per year. The last time homicide rates were this high was in the early 1990s. And yet, there is a serious lack of transparency within the Baltimore police. Internal Affairs, the office which is meant to keep officers accountable, rarely upholds allegations against officers. They are also not required to disclose how they made their decisions. In fact, several GTTF officers already had charges of robbery and lying under oath before they were promoted to the task force. This is indicative of a much wider net of corruption within the department that the city government is loath to come clean about.

However, there is hope that the police force can change. In April 2017, the Justice Department placed the Baltimore Police under a consent decree. This put the police department under the supervision of a federal judge to ensure that people’s constitutional rights are not violated. Furthermore, the new police commissioner Michael Harrison successfully led the New Orleans Police Department under its own consent decree. His reforms in New Orleans brought the city’s murder count to the lowest it has been since 1971. However, every new police commissioner has promised change, and many of them have lost their jobs with little to show for it. Commissioner Harrison will need to be able to admit to and address difficult truths about the police in order to repair people’s trust and make the city safer.