The Baltimore Police Department does not exactly have a stellar reputation, having made national headlines several times in the past few years, most notably for Freddie Gray’s death in 2015 and the Gun Trace Task Force scandal in 2018. However, one area that Baltimore’s justice department seems to be handling right is juvenile justice reform. Juvenile arrests are significantly down, and less than a quarter of those arrested spend time incarcerated after trial. “No one would say Baltimore is a leader in juvenile justice reform,” said Nate Balis, Director of the Juvenile Justice Strategy Group in the Annie E. Casey Foundation, “but the unrest [in 2015] caused some in Baltimore to examine how we respond to crisis. Overall, Baltimore is doing a better job.” Unfortunately, the creation of a private police force at Johns Hopkins University threatens to undo the strides that have been made in juvenile justice.
Earlier this year, the Maryland State Legislature approved a bill to create a private police force to patrol Hopkins’ Homewood, Peabody, and medical campuses. This bill has received considerable pushback. One spot of concern is the impact this force may have on the children living near the university. The creation of this police force will bring armed officers to the front doorstep of thousands of youth currently living near a Hopkins campus.
“I grew up in Remington, but before attending Hopkins my only real interaction with the university was getting kicked off campus for riding my bike between the registrar building and admissions,” said Lance McCoy, a JHU graduate and current 4th grade teacher. Like many kids in the city, Lance did not grow up with a positive view of the university. Hopkins is seen not as a member of the community, but as an institution that wants to separate itself from the city it calls home. The creation of the private police force further perpetuates this theme; it will serve to further divide the city from the university and put the youth of the surrounding community under an even larger microscope. Referred to as “investigative stops” in order to avoid the negative connotations of stop and frisk, Hopkins police will be allowed to stop anyone they deem “suspicious” in and around campus. To see how enacting this policy in the home of so many young people might work, we can look to other cities with the same practices
New York City’s police department has come under fire several times in the past decade for racist stop and frisk policies. In 2013, the Vera Institute of Justice published a groundbreaking report that surveyed 500 youth in New York’s most patrolled neighborhoods. This study found that 44% of the young people surveyed reported being stopped nine or more times, nearly half experienced violence at the hands of an officer, and one in four were involved in a stop during which the officer displayed their weapon.
Like New York, Baltimore has a long history of unreasonable stop and frisk. The investigation into Baltimore’s Police Department by the United States Justice Department in 2015 found that the police engaged in unconstitutional stops and searches, and disproportionately targeted young, black people in poor neighborhoods. Although identifying this problem is a positive first step, we are years away from solving it. In January 2019, Kenneth Thompson, the leader of the team overseeing Baltimore’s police reform, told the House of Delegates’ Judiciary Committee in Annapolis that the department is “a long, long way from compliance. I don’t know how long it’s going to take to get this done.”
It is not unreasonable to think Hopkins police will align with these same practices; the university has consistently emphasized they will work closely with, and receive the same training as, the Baltimore police.
Given what we know about Baltimore’s history of stop and frisk, and the impact this policy has had elsewhere, it is not hard to picture how a private police force could negatively affect youth in the surrounding community. It is not uncommon for neighborhood kids to wander on to Homewood campus to skateboard down the sloping walkways, or play lacrosse in the historic stadium, but now these innocent decisions could have criminal consequences. Youth who enter any campus will be subject to potentially traumatizing removals or stops by police.
As Hopkins begins to implement its private police force, we must be aware of the impacts this may have on young people growing up near the university, and do anything in our power to mitigate these risks.