David Simon Talks About Where the Baltimore Police Went Wrong | VICE | United States

David Simon Talks About Where the Baltimore Police Went Wrong | VICE | United States: The city eventually got sued by the ACLU and had to settle, but O'Malley defends the wholesale denigration of black civil rights to this day. Never mind what it did to your jury pool: now every single person of color in Baltimore knows the police will lie—and that's your jury pool for when you really need them for when you have, say, a felony murder case. But what it taught the police department was that they could go a step beyond the manufactured probable cause, and the drug-free zones and the humbles—the targeting of suspects through less-than-constitutional procedure. Now, the mass arrests made clear, we can lock up anybody, we don't have to figure out who's committing crimes, we don't have to investigate anything, we just gather all the bodies—everybody goes to jail. And yet people were scared enough of crime in those years that O'Malley had his supporters for this policy, council members and community leaders who thought, They're all just thugs.