In March 2016, an elite Baltimore City police unit known as the Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF) broke into Oreese Stevenson’s home without a warrant, according to documents that would come out in a February 2018 trial. Stevenson had been dealing drugs since the mid-90s, but the GTTF caught him by accident. Sergeant Jenkins, leader of the unit, liked to stop black men on the street wearing a backpack, knowing that they often contained drugs or cash. One of those men happened to be making a drug deal with Stevenson who was inside his van. The officers proceeded to arrest Stevenson, steal his keys, and go to his house without a warrant in search of valuables.
They were not disappointed. There, the officers found $200,000 in a safe and pocketed half of it, as well as two kilos of cocaine and several watches. To cover up what they had done, the officers taped a video that purported to show them opening the safe for the first time, when in fact they had already taken their prize.
It was a far cry from the original purpose of the unit. In 2007, as violent crime rates surged in Baltimore, then-police commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III, set up the Gun Trace Task Force as part of an initiative to crack down on gun trafficking. He commissioned this elite plainclothes police unit to get guns off the street and make the city safer. In the first regard, they were successful. The task force captured guns every day, not to mention large amounts of drugs. Lt. Chris O’Ree praised them in the October 2016 issue of the Baltimore Police newsletter for their hard work, noting that the detectives had confiscated 132 guns and made 110 arrests in the past ten months.
Now, the BPD is struggling with the aftermath of this tough-on-crime approach. Thousands of people went to jail because of the GTTF, but too often they were victims of bad policing. Thus, it is up to the Post Convictions Defenders Division (PCD) to sort through all these cases and determine whose convictions need to be overturned. At the same time, Baltimore City Police must address corruption still festering within its ranks. In 2016, a Justice Department report found that the BPD engaged in a pattern of violating people’s constitutional rights. In 2017, the Justice Department placed the BPD under a consent decree, which brings them under the supervision of a federal judge. One thing they must recognize as they try to reform under the decree is that the force’s issues didn’t end with the arrest of the GTTF.
Neither were the BPD involved in bringing the GTTF to justice. On March 1, 2017, seven out of eight of the officers were arrested in an FBI sting operation. They eventually pleaded guilty to multiple counts of racketeering, extortion, and fraud. The following are just a few of the crimes they committed over the years.
In 2009, Detective Jemell Rayam and two other plainclothes stopped Baltimore resident Gary Brown while he was driving to the bank to deposit cash. They claimed that he did not buckle his seatbelt. They allegedly searched his trunk and found $11,000, which they stole. However, they did not give him a citation. Brown filed a complaint with Internal Affairs, a division of the Baltimore Police Department, and Rayam was subsequently charged with robbery. He would have been fired, but he appealed to a board of fellow police officers who cleared him of any wrongdoing. At the time, Internal Affairs ruled against officers in only 7% of investigations.
However, this was in the early years of the unit. They became even more corrupt under the leadership of Sergeant Wayne Jenkins, who was transferred to the GTTF in June 2016. He was previously the head of the Special Enforcement Section, another elite unit with known corruption issues. In fact, when Jenkins became the head of the GTTF, he already had internal reports of mishandling money and providing false testimony. One time in 2014, Jenkins and another officer conducted a traffic stop on a man named Walter Price. They arrested him after allegedly finding seven grams of cocaine in the vehicle. However, Price claimed that the officers planted drugs on him. At the same time, state attorneys found that Jenkins’ probable cause statement was wildly inconsistent with footage from a security camera and recommended that he be fired.
Instead of receiving any disciplinary action, Jenkins stayed on the force. Just two years later, he was granted a new position that gave him jurisdiction over the whole city. Under his leadership, the GTTF essentially became a crime ring.
As part of his scheme, Sergeant Jenkins supplied a bail bondsman with confiscated drugs. The bondsman would later testify at Jenkins’ trial that he sold the drugs at a total value of $1 million. Some of these drugs included pills that Jenkins took from looters in the post-Freddie Gray violence. Ironically, this happened at the very time when residents were protesting decades of police abuse.
Another time 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 allegedly stole $20,000, using an affidavit founded on made-up evidence.
Furthermore, the officers reported hundreds of overtime hours, even while they were actually on vacation or doing home renovations. A cash-strapped city paid them tens of thousands of dollars each in overtime. For instance, in the 2016 fiscal year, Jenkins’ annual salary was $85,406. On top of that, he was paid $83,345 in overtime, which nearly doubled his pay. If nothing else, this should have been a clear red flag to the BPD that something was seriously wrong. However, the officers held a protected status because of the guns and drugs they were able to confiscate.
Had federal investigators not arrested this unit in March 2017, they would mostly likely still be active today. The investigators did not start out looking for corrupt officers. FBI undercover agents were investigating a notorious drug gang in Baltimore. After placing wiretaps on several gang members, they overheard a police officer on the phone with a member, advising him on how to get rid of a police tracker. That officer was Momodu Gondo, who was helping the gang sell heroin and avoid surveillance from his own police department.
Through this connection, the investigators widened the scope of their wiretaps and caught the officers red-handed. One time in 2016, a man ran a red light and the officers went on a high-speed chase. The Baltimore Police Department’s own policy prohibited this, but the officers involved thought that the suspect might have had guns or drugs on him. During the chase, the man hit another car and was thrown from the vehicle unconscious. Unbeknownst to the officers, an FBI wiretap caught their entire conversation contemplating how to cover up the accident. Meanwhile, the victim laid on the street injured for at least thirty minutes.
For that man and many other GTTF victims, it was justice coming far too late. The detectives’ arrests cannot undo the trauma they suffered, the money they lost, and the time they spent in jail.
For the lawyers who represented these victims, it is a bittersweet vindication. Ivan Bates, a private defense attorney, knew about the task force members’ crimes years before the federal investigation exposed them. He has represented 19 clients who were arrested by task force members and managed to get 17 of them cleared from charges.
One of his clients was Oreese Stevenson, whom the GTTF arrested after finding drugs in his house. While in jail, he called his wife and realized that the detectives had taken their money. The couple then decided to hire Ivan Bates. This was not the first time Bates had represented a victim of the task force. In a previous case, Jenkins broke into the home of a young couple, and the woman pulled a silent alarm. Jenkins testified that he entered with a warrant, but records from the alarm company showed that he had actually gone in before the judge issued a warrant. “There are only so many ways you can lie,” Bates said about Jenkins. “He makes the same lies over and over.”
For the attorneys tasked with undoing the convictions of people arrested by the GTTF, the work is overwhelming. The officers often testified in court against the people they arrested. Now that their credibility has been called into question, the cases have to be reviewed. Some people were convicted based on false evidence. Walter Price’s case was just one of many times that GTTF detectives planted drugs on someone. Others, such as Oreese Stevenson, were arrested by improper means.
That means a lot of work for the Post Convictions Defenders Division (PCD), which is tasked with overturning prior convictions. While the state is working with them in GTTF-related cases, building evidence for each case is not easy. Police operate within a shadow of secrecy in Maryland. The state has a strong police bill of rights, part of which mandates that investigations by the Internal Affairs Division (IAD) against police officers be kept confidential.
When PCD requests IAD files, it meets resistance from the state’s attorney’s office and police department. The court must order Internal Affairs to give up documents pertaining to an officer. To make the process even more frustrating, the files may be restricted to only the attorney who requests them, and therefore cannot be used for cases that their colleagues are working on. Initia Lettau, Chief of the Post Convictions Defenders Division, estimates that they have undone 300-400 cases tainted by the GTTF, with thousands more to go.
While the Post Convictions Defenders Division tries to clean up the mess left by the GTTF, they cannot address the source of the injustice: corruption in the BPD. Brandon Soderberg, author of a forthcoming book on the GTTF, says, “ ‘Where there’s smoke, there’s fire’ is like an understatement.”
At the same time, there have been more than 300 homicides annually from 2014-18. The last time homicide rates were this high was in the early 1990s. “I think the crime numbers can be directly attributed to communities that don’t trust the police department,” Bates says. “The Gun Trace Task Force played a major role.”
Soderberg has taken a skeptical view. He once hoped that the arrest of the GTTF would be call to action for the BPD, but has since seen little change.
Similarly, Lettau acknowledges that there are still deeply rooted problems within the BPD. “I would love to think that they got everyone out that was dirty. I am quite certain that’s probably not true. I hope that with Harrison [the new police commissioner] there, it will be a priority for him so he can show the community that he’s taking this seriously, and he’s not going to tolerate police that are going rogue and violating people’s rights.”
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