[Editor’s Note: This story was produced in partnership with the Garrison Project, an independent, nonpartisan organization addressing the crisis of mass incarceration and policing. Explore more of the project’s coverage, here.]

 

On September 5, the Baltimore City State’s Attorney’s Office announced that it would not pursue criminal charges against BPD detective Connor Johnson, who pressed his service weapon against the temple of a restrained and prone Baltimore man during a controversial May arrest. 

In July, WBAL-TV obtained body-worn camera footage of the incident and broadcast it, leading to a demand from the Police Accountability Board for Baltimore City that Johnson be suspended and required to undergo de-escalation and appropriate use of force and firearm training.

“It is unfortunate that in a city currently under consent decree that we have officers that would act so recklessly,” Accountability Board chair Joshua Harris, a former candidate for mayor, said in a statement at the time. “I am sure that nowhere in the officer training is it justifiable to point a gun at point blank range at the temple of an already subdued suspect.” 

Baltimore Police Commissioner Richard Worley defended Johnson shortly after the incident, saying he was “out there doing his job.” The Baltimore Police Department (BPD) has said Johnson was under investigation, but that he has not been suspended from the force. 

Meanwhile, an examination by The Garrison Project and Baltimore magazine of body-worn camera footage and reports filed by officers involved in the arrest of Jaemaun Joyner—including the statements of charges and probable cause—raise other questions about the incident as well as broader concerns about the BPD’s aggressive, plainclothes District Action Team.

Just after 1 p.m. on May 23, a group of Baltimore City police officers, including Johnson, stopped Joyner in front of a corner bodega in the East Baltimore neighborhood known as Broadway East. Two of the five officers—including Johnson—are members of the department’s District Action Team, or DAT. DAT is an approximately 80-person unit created in 2017 after the BPD disbanded its now-infamous Gun Trace Task Force.

Following a reported robbery in the area, officers searched for an individual matching the description of the suspect: a six-foot Black male wearing a brown hoodie and a ski mask. Joyner, a 24-year-old Black man, who stands roughly 5-feet-7 inches, was wearing a red and black shirt when he was first grabbed by DAT officer Austin Gutridge. 

“What’d I do?” Joyner can be heard asking in the body-camera footage of his arrest. 

He tried to run, but was quickly tackled by detective Phil Polanco. Four officers then held Joyner down on the sidewalk.

“He’s reaching for something!” detective Christian Agard screamed.

“I ain’t reaching for nothing,” Joyner responded.

One of the detectives pressed his knee into the chest of Joyner, who can be heard gasping; he once had a collapsed lung, according to his family.

“I can’t breathe,” Joyner said.

Officers pinned Joyner’s arms and torso. He began to squirm and shout. They reached into his pockets.

“What’d you just put in my pocket?” Joyner said.

Johnson then put one hand around Joyner’s neck and took out his service weapon, putting the barrel of the Glock 22 to Joyner’s temple.

“He put something in my pocket,” Joyner screamed as Johnson held his gun to his head.

About six seconds later, Johnson pulled the handgun away from Joyner’s head. Joyner was then handcuffed. 

Joyner was charged with handgun possession, possessing a loaded handgun, and drug possession. After spending 54 days in jail, all of those charges were dropped by the City State’s Attorney’s Office. 

Even though the charges against Joyner were dismissed and there was public condemnation over the arrest footage, the nearly two months in jail forced him to miss an early June start date for a new job. Joyner’s attorney Hunter Pruette described the stop and Johnson’s conduct as “outrageous.” 

“You have a young man who’s walking down the street and minding his own business, trying to move about his day, and the police jump out on him for no reason. They give him no explanation,” Pruette told The Garrison Project and Baltimore magazine. “He’s complaining he can’t breathe, saying something about they put something in his pocket, and the next thing you know, there’s a hand on his neck and a gun to his temple.”

In the statement of probable cause, officers described Joyner and a friend who was detained but not arrested as “two suspects that match the description of an armed robbery that just occurred.” Joyner, however, did not match the suspect description of a Black man in a brown hoodie. He was, as noted in the report, wearing, “a black jacket, red shirt, [and] a black romper suit.” 

Indeed, at the scene of Joyner’s arrest the victim told police that Joyner was not the person who robbed him. Nonetheless, according to Joyner’s attorneys, the police account made it seem as though Joyner was still a suspect in the robbery when he was brought to the ground and detained.

“The investigation for the armed robbery is still ongoing,” Polanco, the officer who initially tackled Joyner, wrote in his subsequent report.

The statement of probable cause also entirely omitted that Johnson held a gun to Joyner’s head. “Detective Agard observed Mr. Joyner reaching for his right pocket and advised detectives on scene,” Polanco wrote. “This detective observed what appears to be a handgun in Mr. Joyner’s right pants pocket. Detective Gutridge retrieved a Phoenix HP22A handgun.”

Jessica Rubin, one of Joyner’s attorneys, said the body-worn camera footage shows a clear violation of the Consent Decree. “This was excessive force,” Rubin said in a recent interview. “And there was actually another officer with his hand on his service weapon, as well. When you have [Joyner] restrained like that, I don’t see how that many police officers could feel like they were in danger.”

Defense attorney Pruette said BPD Commissioner Worley’s defense of the incident—“If you’ve ever been fighting with a guy who has a gun and he’s trying to free his hands, then you try to do whatever you can to get him in custody”—represents the “’you must do as we say, because we’re the police’ mentality. Quite frankly, he’s an old school commissioner and these are the tactics that he grew up with, right? And these tactics terrorize people.”

The Baltimore City Police Department’s District Action Team has faced other allegations of misconduct and excessive force. 

In May 2023, Cedric Elleby, a DAT officer southwest in Baltimore shot a 17-year-old boy when he ran from officers. The BPD said “the officer observed him pull out” a gun and Elleby discharged his weapon. They said they later recovered a stolen 9mm Smith & Wesson. Elleby was placed on administrative leave. The State’s Attorney’s Office later said it would not charge him in the incident.

That June, Johnson and other DAT officers, including Gutridge, shot and killed a 40-year-old Black man named Daryl Gamble (the detectives were later cleared in Gamble’s killing.) In November, DAT officers shot and killed 27-year-old Hunter Jessup. 

The Garrison Project and Baltimore magazine obtained police reports and other investigative documents from another gun and drug case involving Johnson and Guttridge from around the time they killed Gamble in June 2023. 

A month prior, on May 25, 2023, Johnson, Gutridge, and detective Zachary Allman stopped A.A. (whose name is being withheld for privacy concerns*) for a broken tail light. When the officers approached the car, Gutridge claimed he could smell cannabis. While A.A. got his registration, Gutridge and others peered into his vehicle.

Allman told A.A. to open his passenger side window. Johnson looked in the car. “There’s definitely some shake [loose marijuana] on that seat,” Gutridge told Johnson.

A.A. was removed from the car. But body-worn camera footage shows no “shake” on the car seat. The officers asked if they could search the car and he said no. They asked again and he refused again. The officers searched the car anyway, telling A.A. that the cannabis smell meant they didn’t need his consent. But there was no cannabis in the car. Instead, the officers said they found a small amount of cocaine in his pocket and a handgun in the glovebox. 

A.A.’s lawyer argued that the DAT members did not have probable cause or consent to search the car.

“Three high-ranking officers were attending to a non-criminal traffic stop of a car with a single occupant inside. Within 90 seconds, that occupant provided law enforcement with all of the information necessary to run his documents and complete the mission of the stop expeditiously,” reads a motion to suppress by A.A.’s attorney. “Upon receipt of these documents, [DAT] prolonged the stop by urging the driver to open the passenger window to enable another detective to investigate the car’s interior, without reasonable suspicion that evidence of a crime would be located therein.” 

The State’s Attorney’s Office dismissed the charges against A.A. before a judge could rule on the motion.

Last month, members of DAT were investigating a shooting in West Baltimore when they spotted 17-year-old William Gardner. DAT officer Zachary Allman—who was also present for A.A.’s arrest—chased Gardner as other detectives followed in their car. Gardner was shot and killed by three detectives from another BPD plainclothes unit, the Group Violence Unit or GVU. Police said Gardner, who did not fire his weapon, had aimed his gun at officers. He was shot a dozen times, prompting outrage from some residents in the neighborhood where Gardner lived and was killed. 

An investigation initiated in April by the Baltimore Police’s Public Integrity Bureau into DAT officers Antonio Queen and Trevor Hinton led to the suspension of their police powers. The investigation is ongoing and both detectives are working administrative duties.

Last year, The Garrison Project reported that DAT officers have been investigated more than 700 times, including 410 investigations for use of force and 257 Internal Affairs investigations. There have also been 21 Civilian Review Board investigations into DAT members and nine civil lawsuits. That story highlighted the case of Shogun and Julie Dowling, a couple stopped by Det. Connor Johnson on their way to a January 2023 Ravens-Steelers game. 

Johnson said after the stop that he saw a bag containing cannabis in the backseat of the couple’s vehicle. He and other DAT officers got the Dowlings out of the car and searched it, and Shogun subsequently was charged with several drug and gun charges. But Dowling’s attorney argued in a motion that “the police did not have reasonable articulable suspicion to stop or search [Dowling] and “did not have probable cause to seize or arrest [him]” making “the search and seizure…invalid.” 

Dowling’s charges were dismissed by the State’s Attorney’s Office. Shogun was later reindicted on federal charges, and he entered a guilty plea to one count of possessing ammunition while being a prohibited person; he is set to be sentenced in October.

Baltimore defense attorneys say that the District Action Team’s tactics recall the unit they replaced, the Gun Trace Task Force. In 2017, eight GTTF members were charged with racketeering, robbery, extortion, and overtime fraud. Six of the eight GTTF members pleaded guilty to various charges. The remaining two were convicted at trial in federal court in 2018. More commonplace GTTF misconduct was stopping people without a reasonable articulable suspicion or probable cause. 

Baltimore City District Public Defender Marguerite Lanaux​ said that the DAT exhibits the kind of “behavior that the consent decree intended to eradicate” and reintroduces many of the problems defense attorneys witnessed during the Gun Trace Task Force scandal.

“The public facing messaging continues to be that, [post-Freddie Gray], this type of policing was ended and the bad actors rooted out. That messaging doesn’t translate for the encounters our clients are experiencing,” Lanaux said. “We’re seeing the same things from the same officers in this same type of unit over again and we’re seeing these kinds of cases prosecuted.” 

Deborah Katz Levi, director of Special Litigation for the Maryland Office of the Public Defender, said that her office “spends a lot of time focusing litigation on DAT officers’ Internal Affairs files because the behavior coming out of the DAT units is so troublesome.”

“Anecdotally, we’re seeing lots of questionable stops and what appears to be falsely generated reasons for stops,” Levi continued. “We’re definitely seeing old school ways showing up again.”

For Joyner and his family, the connection between DAT and GTTF is even more direct. Joyner’s family and his attorneys say his older brother was arrested by GTTF detective Daniel Hersl. In 2018, Hersl was sentenced to nearly two decades in federal prison for racketeering conspiracy and racketeering offenses, including overtime fraud and robbery. According to Joyner’s family, Hersl’s questionable stop and search of Joyner’s brother caused his case to be dismissed post-conviction. 

The family was later approached by the FBI about testifying against Hersl during his federal trial, but chose not to, defense attorney Tony Garcia said.

Garcia, for one, believes it’s “wrong” that the City State’s Attorney’s Office did not bring criminal charges against Johnson, adding that claims of reforms and increased accountability “ring hollow” after the incident. “The state chose not to bring charges without ever talking to my client,” he said.

“I think the family is appalled,” Garcia said. “Because this isn’t the first run in with the police. This family was victimized by the Gun Trace Task force. This is their second run. They’re very disappointed that this officer will not be held accountable—and neither will the officers who saw what happened and failed to report it.”

---

*The Garrison Project and Baltimore magazine obtained the police reports on the May 25, 2023 arrest by Johnson, Gutridge, and Allman but anonymized the defendant as “A.A” because his attorneys could not reach him in order to gain his permission to use his name for this story. 

Editor’s Note: This story was produced in partnership with the Garrison Project, an independent, nonpartisan organization addressing the crisis of mass incarceration and policing. Explore more of the project’s coverage, here. 

 

When Tyrie Washington saw Baltimore City Police roll past him a little after noon on a Thursday in July of 2020, he ran. He darted through an alley in West Baltimore—he knew the neighborhood well because he’d lived there for years—and then hopped a fence and hid.  

From the passenger seat of an unmarked police car, Detective Alex Rodriguez spotted the 21-year-old Washington, crouched by a bush in the yard of a residence. 

Moments earlier, Detective Drake Winkey of the Baltimore Police Department’s Northwest District Action Team (DAT) announced over the radio that someone was “running through the alley.” 

Rodriguez got out of the car shouting, “Stop.” Washington jumped a fence, but fell to the ground. Rodriguez grabbed him. 

“Stop bro, stop,” Rodriguez said. “Why you running?” 

Out of breath, Washington articulated what he believed were his rights. “All right, I got my ID,” he told Rodriguez. “You’re not gonna search me.” 

Washington was referring to his Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches and seizures. He believed that would prevent any search of his person and that all Rodriguez could lawfully do was ask for his ID. 

Then Detective Israel Lopez—who pulled up with Det. Winkey moments earlier—announced “gun,” reached into Washington’s pants and removed a handgun.   

“Y’all bitches don’t got nothing else to do?” Washington asked the three cops surrounding him. “[Than] lockin’ up people with guns on the streets?”

DAT Detective Darwin Noesi said. “Yeah.” 

“Exactly,” Rodriguez chimed in. “People like you.” 

The officers who arrested Washington were part of a District Action Team, a group of specialized units within the Baltimore Police Department, currently with 75 members in total. DAT officers do not answer calls or investigate homicides, but instead engage in proactive policing in neighborhoods they deem “high crime” areas. They look for people they perceive as suspicious and keep an eye out for crimes happening—or about to happen.  

Each of the department’s nine districts has at least one DAT unit. The officers operate in marked and unmarked police vehicles; their uniform is tactical vests and other “plainclothes” gear. While DAT officers engage in tasks like foot patrols, traffic stops, and executing warrants, their primary focus is violence reduction through gun and drug enforcement.  

District Action Team enforcement often looks like Washington’s arrest in 2020. Defense attorneys argue, however, that DAT officers circumvent Fourth Amendment protections and manufacture probable cause through a vast set of vague descriptors: “bulges” in clothing or backpacks, “furtive gestures,” nervousness including a  “visible carotid artery,” clothing out of season, and running from police. 

DAT was established in the summer of 2017, just months after the police disbanded the federally indicted gun- and drug-seizing unit Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF), whose members stole cash and drugs, dealt drugs, and planted evidence. Then-Police Commissioner Kevin Davis announced the new DAT squads would be a different kind of proactive policing than the plainclothes cops jumping out of unmarked cars to harass and arrest: “The ‘jump-out boys’ culture was just counterproductive to everything we have to do in the crime fight,” Davis said then.  

But in the 2020 final report from the Commission To Restore Trust In Policing—created in the GTTF’s aftermath—an officer noted little difference between DAT and specialized units disbanded post-GTTF: “Within a few months [of the GTTF indictment], however, the Department reorganized again, reforming plainclothes enforcement units as District Action Team (‘DAT’) squads.” 

Joseph Richardson, a professor of African-American Studies and anthropology at the University of Maryland College Park, agrees. “As we’ve seen across this country with the disbanding of these ‘anti-crime units,’ as soon as they get negative press . . .they’re often rebranded, repackaged, and then sold back to the public under a different name and still engaging in the same egregious practices,” he said. “That’s part of the public narrative that they sell: ‘We got rid of that.’”  

One of the issues that crosses over from GTTF to the DAT, says Deborah Katz Levi, director of Special Litigation for the Maryland Office of the Public Defender, is the disproportionate impact on low-income neighborhoods of color. 

Direct Action Teams “take part in aggressive policing practices predominantly in Black and Brown communities,” Levi said. “It is our belief that they engage in a similar type of ‘proactive policing’ that landed our city into a consent decree for unconstitutional policing practices. What we know from the past is that these tactics help cement and perpetuate a culture of policing that destroys trust and harms our community.” 

But DAT’s specialized units are a pillar of Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott’s Group Violence Reduction Strategy (GVRS), a community-oriented approach to gun violence launched in late 2021. The strategy pairs arrests of violent offenders with outreach in the form of social services and counseling. GVRS is what some call a “carrot and stick” approach to violence reduction based on the popular program of focused deterrence: people identified as committing gun violence are offered assistance such as social services (carrot) or they are threatened with arrest and incarceration (stick). 

GVRS services offered include counseling, life coaching, employment and housing assistance, and emergency relocation. In 2022, 71 people accepted GVRS services. 

Critics of focused deterrence, like Philip McHarris, a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of African American Studies and the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab at Princeton University, say that the program is “framed as an alternative to mass incarceration because of its purportedly more precise approach to violence, but is instead part of the same criminal legal system that wreaks havoc on Black, Latinx, and other criminalized communities.” 

The Gun Violence Reduction Strategy, which has significant support via $50 million in American Rescue Plan funding and philanthropy, is part of the city’s Comprehensive Violence Reduction Plan, in effect through 2026. The plan was launched because since 2015, Baltimore has seen more than 300 homicides per year—the overwhelming majority of which were gun-related.  

 

“As soon as [these ‘anti-crime units’] get negative press . . .they’re often rebranded, repackaged, and then sold back to the public under a different name, but still engaging in the same egregious practices.”

 

While Scott’s goal to reduce murders and shootings by 15 percent each year starting in 2021 was not met, homicides and nonfatal shootings have declined in the Western District where GVRS was piloted in 2022. 

Based on those one-year results, Scott announced the expansion of the Gun Violence Reduction Strategy to other districts. With that expansion comes more involvement from DAT squads, which are considered a GVRS “resource.” 

In an email to The Garrison Project and Baltimore magazine, Baltimore Police Director of Public Affairs and Community Outreach Lindsey Eldridge said the purpose of the District Action Teams is to assist the BPD’s Gun Violence Unit (GVU) under its broader Group Violence Reduction Strategy. “This includes working alongside GVU on investigations, intelligence-gathering, and serving as a force multiplier following violent incidents,” Eldridge said. “While DAT and GVU work hand-in-hand, the DATs remain under the control of the District Commanders and will not be assumed into GVU.” 

The members of DAT have another similarity with the members of the disbanded Gun Trace Task Force: DAT officers have frequently engaged in misconduct. The Baltimore Office of the Public Defender (OPD) has identified more than two dozen current or former DAT officers they consider having significant discipline histories or excessive force settlements.  

“The data that OPD is analyzing and relying upon came from BPD itself, so either the agency is not checking their own data, or they simply don’t care,” Levi said. “It should not be the job of the Public Defender to hold watch over a police department, particularly a police department under a consent decree.”  

Many current or former DAT members are on former State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby’s 90-person “do not call” list. Officers on that list were not called to testify in court because past conduct makes them unreliable. 

 

The Baltimore Office of the Public Defender has identified more than two dozen current or former DAT officers they consider having significant discipline histories or excessive force settlements.  

 

DAT members also appear on Mosby’s broader list of 301 officers highlighting “integrity issues.” That list, however, did not exclude them from testifying.  

While on DAT, three officers have been indicted by the State’s Attorney’s Office: Charles Baugher (for assault and misconduct), as well as former officers Michael O’Sullivan (for perjury) and Leon Riley (for two assaults). 

DAT squads have been involved in at least two fatal police shootings (in 2018 and 2020) and a car crash that killed a 17–year-old in 2022. 

Levi added that “unlike the GTTF, which was comprised of only a small number of officers, there are many more DAT team members throughout Baltimore engaging in what we suspect to be unconstitutional policing. That DAT team members have significant misconduct histories and civil settlements, should be a red flag for BPD.” 

Levi cited the example of former DAT member Valentine Nagovich. Nagovich was a member of a proto-DAT “flex squad,” whose lockers were searched in 2005, revealing drugs “stashed” in their lockers. In 2010, Nagovich took part in a warrantless search a federal judge called “unacceptable.” In 2011, he hit a teen hard enough that the teen required surgery (the teen later received a $75,000 settlement). Nagovich is on the SAO “integrity issues” list.  

Former DAT officer Luke Shelley’s Internal Affairs files were described by The Real News in 2022. The files detail complaints of biased policing, brutality, and an incident in which seized drugs were found in the trunk of his police vehicle. Shelley is on the “integrity issues” list. 

Sergeant Jorge Omar Bernardez-Ruiz currently oversees the Northeast DAT. In 2013, Bernardez-Ruiz was one of the officers who beat, tased, and pepper-sprayed Tyrone West, who died in police custody. Weeks before West’s death, Bernardez-Ruiz beat Abdul Salaam during a traffic stop. The city later paid out $70,000 to Salaam and $1 million to the West family.  

Bernardez-Ruiz is on the SAO “integrity issues” list.  

James Craig, a current member of DAT, was one of many officers sued after the Baltimore Uprising for excessive force. On April 28, 2015, Craig chased Myreq Williams onto a bus because he believed Williams had a gun. In 2018, a jury ruled that Craig had used excessive force when he broke Williams’ arm and Williams was awarded $130,000.  

Craig is also on the SAO “integrity issues list.”  

According to an Internal Affairs file summary for Craig obtained by the Garrison Project and Baltimore magazine, there is a sustained allegation against Craig for choking a man in April 2018. The file also contains allegations from last year against Craig for improper search during a car stop and improper search and excessive force during another car stop. 

The Northwest DAT officers who arrested Washington have also been involved in misconduct and excessive force complaints. 

Detective Israel Lopez was one of four cops who fired more than 30 shots at Keith Davis Jr. in 2015, hitting him three times. Davis, who was arrested and charged with a handgun possession after the shooting, was later charged with a murder connected to that handgun. After being tried four times for murder, Davis was exonerated earlier this year. 

On July 14, 2020, video of Northwest DAT’s Drake Winkey tackling a man outside of a shopping center was posted to the popular Baltimore Instagram account @BaltimoreMurderInk.  

 

The irony is, the brand of proactive gun policing pursued by units like DAT has had little to no effect on crime reduction in Baltimore and other cities across the country.

 

According to an Internal Affairs Summary obtained in reporting this story, in August 2020, Winkey had an excessive force allegation lodged against him for shoving a man to the ground after the man stopped running. The allegation was sustained. 

“Due to their role and enforcement function, we understand that our DATs are subject to a greater number of complaints in the execution of their duties,” Eldridge, the Baltimore Police Director of Public Affairs and Community Outreach, wrote in an email to the Garrison Project and Baltimore magazine regarding allegations of DAT misconduct. “When we notice problems, those issues are flagged to the Chief of Patrol’s Office and other Command Staff for proper course correction and disciplinary action.” 

Of the officers mentioned in this article, two are no longer with BPD—Riley was fired and O’Sullivan resigned—and Baugher, while still on the force, currently has his police powers suspended. 

​​​Other officers mentioned are no longer in DAT, though they are still with Baltimore Police: Lopez, Nagovich, and Shelley are now on patrol; Noesi and Rodriguez are part of Criminal Investigations.  

“Moving from one unit to another does not necessarily denote a disciplinary action of a BPD member,” Baltimore Police’s Eldridge wrote.  

The Mayor and the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement (MONSE) declined to comment about DAT’s involvement in GVRS for this story and directed all questions to Baltimore Police. 

The irony is, the brand of proactive gun policing pursued by units like DAT has had little to no effect on crime reduction in Baltimore and other cities across the country, according to academic research and studies commissioned by major cities. In Philadelphia, for example, a 2022 report examining 2,000 shootings noted that increased gun arrests have not resulted in reducing or solving homicides or nonfatal shootings. “The current intense focus on illegal gun possession without a license is having no effect on the gun violence crisis,” the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office wrote in the report.  

For District Action Team units, making gun arrests means not only pushing the boundaries of probable cause, but allegedly manufacturing it on occasion. The Garrison Project and Baltimore magazine viewed a 2022 video of a DAT officer telling a man he arrested that the man could “get paid” $500 if he pointed DAT toward a person with a gun. The officer explained that the man can text DAT the location of a person with a gun and they’ll arrive to make an arrest and leave the informant out of it altogether. “Say, ‘this the dude,’” the DAT member tells the man. “We establish our own probable cause.” 

While gun seizures and weapons arrests by the Baltimore Police have remained steady, the homicide clearance rate (the number of murders police solve by arrest or exceptional means) has continued to plummet. According to the FBI, the national average is around 50 percent. In 2022, BPD’s homicide clearance rate was 36.3 percent, and its nonfatal shooting clearance rate was 23.3 percent. 

Between 2021 and April 2023, the Northwest District, where Washington was arrested, has only cleared 11 percent of its homicides and 15 percent of its non-fatal shootings, according to data obtained by the newsletter Protect and Serve. 

This year, the Maryland State Legislature passed bills that further restricted where someone can carry a gun, raised the gun possession age to 21, and increased the maximum penalty for adults convicted of “illegal” gun possession from three years to five years. The increased maximum penalty—House Bill 0481/Senate Bill 0889—was supported by current Baltimore City State’s Attorney Ivan Bates.  

Richardson, the University of Maryland professor, said that increased penalties for gun possession are part of the growing shift away from the disastrous “war on drugs” to an equally ineffective “war on guns.” 

“This war on guns is very similar to the war on drugs—and the draconian approaches to it,” he said. “It’s beginning to feel like the gun has now replaced crack.”

Richardson characterized the Maryland bills as “a page out of the war on drugs,” adding, “[they’re] creating and pushing for legislation, as if incarceration was the sole alternative and panacea to the gun problem. We know we’re not going to incarcerate our way out of it.” 

As gun laws in other states become less strict, licensing differs state-by-state, more guns are trafficked, and the production of guns has vastly increased. According to a recent analysis by The Trace, gunmakers produced 11 million guns in 2020. 

Public defenders and academics are calling for more sophisticated approaches to gun policing than going after those with unlicensed firearms. For example, “proper cause” requirements for obtaining a gun license—often favored by gun control advocates—can disproportionately criminalize and incarcerate Black and Brown citizens.  

In 2021, New York public defenders opposed the state’s proposed “proper cause” requirement for obtaining a gun license arguing it was unconstitutional and harmful to their clients. They also noted that in 2020 that Black people made up 18 percent of New York’s population, but accounted for 78 percent of the state’s felony gun possession cases.  

That case—New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen—was heard by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2021. In June 2022, the justices ruled that the requirement was unconstitutional. 

“As public defenders, we represent too many people of color who face years in prison not for shooting, but for simply possessing an unlicensed gun—something that is legal in close to half of the country. New Yorkers prosecuted for simple gun possession are branded ‘criminals’ and ‘violent felons’ for life,” the Bronx Defenders, Brooklyn Public Defenders, and others wrote in response to the Supreme Court’s Bruen ruling.  

 

“This war on guns is very similar to the war on drugs—and the draconian approaches to it. It’s beginning to feel like the gun has now replaced crack.”

 

Richardson argued that an effective violence reduction strategy is community violence intervention. Unlike policing or even GVRS—which combines community work with carceral approaches including large-scale indictments and DAT teams—violence interruption programs such as Safe Streets have been shown to be effective. In late March, a study by the Center for Gun Violence Solutions at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health showed that Safe Streets has had a sustained, long-term impact on violence reduction in places where it has operated the longest. 

“I don’t think policing has worked up until now, so why not invest in another alternative, which seems to be working if we put the right resources into it?” Richardson said. 

More than a year after Washington’s 2020 arrest by DAT, he pleaded guilty to handgun possession and having a loaded handgun. “It was to really get the situation over with because I have a child,” Washington said. “It’s like, even if it’s a feeling in my heart that I know they broke the Fourth Amendment [against illegal search and seizure], it’s just a feeling knowing that all the odds are against you. It’s like peer pressure.” 

His guilty plea was conditional, meaning that he reserved the right to appeal one aspect of his case: the gun seizure. Washington’s attorney argued that the charges should have been dropped because the seizure violated the Fourth Amendment. There was no probable cause for stopping and searching Washington—he was only stopped because he ran from the police. 

A judge denied that motion in 2021. In 2022, his case was appealed to Maryland’s Supreme Court. In the meantime, Washington began his prison sentence: 10 years with five suspended and upon release, two years supervised probation and registration on the Gun Offender Registry for five years. 

“I’m not one of those guys that’s getting locked up for doing armed carjacking and armed robberies and stuff, it’s more just protecting my freedom,” Washington said from the Maryland Correctional Training Facility in Hagerstown. “I look at it like if I had my gun permit, I wouldn’t have the charges. If I had a gun license, I would just be trying to protect my life. That’s it—especially in a city like Baltimore.” 

Washington’s prior weapons-related arrests are all for gun possession. 

Washington was 17 when he was caught with a gun for the first time. In 2015, he was arrested when a plainclothes squad kicked in the door to serve a warrant. There were guns in the house as well as cannabis and packing materials for drug sales. Washington and four others—three of them also under 18—were arrested. Washington was charged with possession of one of the guns.  

In 2016, Washington picked up more gun charges after he went to the emergency room for a gunshot wound to his right leg. Detectives said the wound was “self-inflicted,” so he was charged with possession. He did four months in jail and was put on a monitoring service, the Violence Prevention Initiative. 

In 2017, Washington was again arrested for possessing a handgun. According to police, officers stopped the car Washington was in because its driver wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. Police said they smelled marijuana in the vehicle and observed “furtive” movements by people in the backseat. Washington was searched and cops found a handgun on him. He was sentenced to two years. 

 

“They used a ‘high crime area’ situation [to stop] me,” Washington said. “What’s a ‘high crime area’? The whole Baltimore City’s a high crime area.” 

 

Washington’s 2015, 2017, and 2020 handgun arrests all took place between the 4800 and 4900 block of Reisterstown Road near Oakmont Avenue, less than 500 feet from one another and 300 feet from Washington’s residence during his teenage years. 

According to recent Baltimore Police public safety plans, this area has been both a “Focused Patrol Zone” and “DAT Activity Zone.” Police strategy has consistently targeted where Washington lived and hangs out—they refer to it as a “high crime area.”  

“They used a ‘high crime area’ situation [to stop] me,” Washington said. “What’s a ‘high crime area’? The whole Baltimore City’s a high crime area.” 

Washington’s attorney Claire Rasin Caplan said that designation allows DAT and other specialized police units to more easily justify the constitutionality of their stops. 

“Taken to its logical extension, allowing a person’s presence in a ‘high crime area’ or allowing different police action in a ‘high crime area’ than in a non-‘high crime area’ creates two Fourth Amendments: one for people who live in high crime areas and one for people who don’t,” Rasin Caplan said. 

On December 19, 2022, the Maryland Supreme Court upheld Washington’s arrest. “We hold that . . . a court may consider whether unprovoked flight is an indication of criminal activity that, coupled with evidence of a high-crime area and any other relevant factors, establishes reasonable suspicion for a stop,” the opinion read. 

Washington doesn’t think he’ll return to Baltimore when he gets out of prison. He doesn’t want cops—like the ones in DAT—to stop and search him again, or do something far worse. 

“If I go back to Baltimore City, I could be walking freely without any weapons or drugs or anything and just one of those days, a police may be having a bad day,” Washington said. “He might plant something. You never know what the police can do. But me being locked up at this time, I know Baltimore City may be my downfall.” 

Brandon Soderberg reports on cops, guns, and drugs. He is the co-author of the book, I Got a Monster: The Rise and Fall of America’s Most Corrupt Police Squad, which was made into a documentary this year.