MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 14 , 2020. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE B5
BY JESSICA CONTRERAbaltimore — At least 45 people
were shot — 11 fatally — in a surge
of gun violence in Baltimore last
week. Among the dead is a 14-
year-old boy who was shot multi-
ple times Friday morning, police
said.
The city had seen a decline in
shooting deaths during the coro-
navirus pandemic. However, vio-
lence spiked over Labor Day
weekend with at least 14 shot, two
fatally. There were fatal shootings
every day that week.
There have been at least 233
homicides in 2020, compared
with 242 this time last year,
according to a database compiled
by the Baltimore Sun.
“Those are not just numbers —
those are people, those are fami-
lies, those are communities,” Bal-
timore City Council President
Brandon M. Scott said.
“This takes an overbearing sit-
uation of covid, of living in a city
that is a birthplace of racial
inequality via policy, in a city
dealing with the issue of gun
violence for longer than I have
been alive, and it just exacerbates
all of it,” said Scott, the Democrat-
ic nominee for m ayor.
The spike in violence began
just after midnight Sept. 6, when
police were called to northwest
Baltimore and found a 22-year-
old man with gunshot wounds.
Similar calls kept coming all
week.
A 51-year-old woman was shot
in the buttocks by an unknown
man in a black mask Monday
afternoon. On Wednesday, a dice
game was interrupted when
someone in a vehicle shot fivepeople. And on Friday, officers
arrived on Polk Street to find a
14-year-old boy suffering from at
least two gunshot wounds. Police
said investigators recovered a
handgun from the boy. He was
transported to Johns Hopkins
Hospital, where he was pro-
nounced dead. Police have not
released the boy’s name.
Police spokesman Jeremy Sil-
bert said Sunday that there were
no updates in the investigation of
the 14-year-old’s death. Commu-
nity members have marked the
spot where the boy was killed
with star- and heart-shaped bal-
loons. He was the seventh child
under 18 to be shot and killed in
the city this year.
The others who were killed in
the past week include Troy Poin-
dexter, 41; Shaheed Carter, 37;
DeAndre Davis, 31; Arnay
Mclean, 20; Tywon Rounds, 19;
Malique Georges, 21; Dominique
Whitby, 24; and Deion Jenkins,
24, according to the Sun’s data-
base. The shootings happened
across the city. Silbert declined to
comment on whether any of the
crimes were connected.
On Sunday, police announced
they had made an arrest in one
case, the Saturday night shooting
deaths of two women, ages 46 and
23, in northeast Baltimore. The
suspect, 24-year-old Dandre
Woods-Bethel, exited his home,
shot the women, then went back
inside to call 911, police said. He
has been charged with murder,
assault and handgun-related
counts. The names of the victims
have not been released.
Scott, citing police revisions he
hopes to institute if he becomes
mayor, said the more time that
passes without arrests in the oth-
er cases, the more he fears that
additional shootings will f ollow.
“Gun violence does not just
happen one incident to the next,”
he said. “It is a disease, it is a
cancer, that will spread.”
[email protected]MARYLANDA violent week leaves
11 slain in Baltimore
Dead include 14-year-old;
spike in shootings began
on Labor Day weekendwill inform in part a larger con-
versation about preventing offi-
cer misconduct.
Washington, the county del-
egate, p ledges transparency with
the work group’s recommenda-
tions. Many on the work group
agree that whatever recommen-
dations they develop, a crucial
part of implementation relies on
how committed those in power —
including the new chief of police
— are to making change.
“It is my hope that the county
executive and the council takes
these recommendations very seri-
ously, and I think they will, and
that they see the writing on the
wall that people want change,” he
said.
After Police Chief Hank Staw-
inski resigned this summer amid
calls for his ouster by the head of
the local NAACP, the county asked
residents to weigh in on what was
important for their next chief.
About 3,500 people shared their
thoughts, Alsobrooks said. A clin-
ical psychotherapist will prepare
an analysis of the community sur-
vey results, and a talent acquisi-
tion firm will soon begin contact-
ing the civic, retail and business
communities for feedback.
Alsobrooks said there have
been “a lot” of applicants for the
position from across the country
and in the D.C. region. She said
she hopes to select a chief by the
end of the year. She said she is
looking for someone who under-
stands the science of policing,
who is “justice-oriented” and who
is open to dialogue and change.
“We want someone who under-
stands the culture here, under-
stands the people here,” Also-
brooks said. “You can’t lead peo-
ple you don’t know and under-
stand.”
[email protected]protocols.
By 2009, the federal govern-
ment decided that the county de-
partment had adequately ad-
dressed its failings regarding use-
of-force practices.
“In a lot of ways, we got a head
start on most jurisdictions in the
country,” Ivey said. “Because we’re
uniquely positioned as a jurisdic-
tion, I think we need to assert that
again, and there are some things
that I think would really make
sense in this moment.”
Ivey said he is eager to scruti-
nize the policies surrounding pre-
textual traffic stops, which ex-
perts say can enable racial profil-
ing and precipitate a police shoot-
ing. Pretext stops allow an officer
to pull over a motorist for a small
infraction as a way to investigate
whether a more serious offense is
occurring.
Deputy County Attorney Jo-
seph Ruddy, a lifelong Prince
Georgian who worked as a pros-
ecutor under Ivey and Also-
brooks, said he sees simple ways
to increase transparency in the
department, including changing
the county code, revisiting the
Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of
Rights and rewriting training
protocol.
Ruddy also brings a deep un-
derstanding of police account-
ability when officers violate de-
partment conduct rules or use
excessive force. He reviewed and
prosecuted police officers in the
state’s attorney’s office, and he
now oversees the in-house attor-
neys who investigate and pros-
ecute bad-behaving officers as
part of the internal affairs proc-
ess.
The case involving Owen, the
officer who fatally shot a hand-
cuffed man in January, has al-
ready come up in meeting andty chapter of the Southern Chris-
tian Leadership Conference, Am-
ara Legal Center and the Tree of
Life Christian Ministries. The
committee also includes Florence
Felix-Lawson, the chair of the Cit-
izen Complaint Oversight Panel;
and S onia Pruitt, a retired Mont-
gomery County police captain
who is a past chairperson of the
National Black Police Associa-
tion.
Alsobrooks, who is a former
county s tate’s attorney, said she
put a great deal of thought into
whom she appointed. Some peo-
ple she approached. Others
reached out to her.
“These are people who care
very deeply about reform and care
about justice,” Alsobrooks said. “I
knew they had such a large stake
in the outcome, and I knew there
was no way we could put together
reforms without the public input.
We didn’t even need for the peo-
ple in the group to agree with each
other, and to be honest with you,
that was important to me, too.”
Glenn F. Ivey was the county
state’s attorney in the 2000s, as
the police department was man-
dated to reform under a federal
consent decree. That period came
on the heels of a huge demograph-
ic shift in the county from a ma-
jority-White to a majority-Black
population, which ushered in a
new attitude toward change, Ivey
said.
The new policies and account-
ability mechanisms that came
from the Justice Department in-
tervention included implement-
ing mandatory mental health
training, required annual instruc-
tion on the department’s “use-of-
force continuum” policies and de-
escalation techniques, creating a
layered system of accountability
and rewriting the police caninespecific demographic and histori-
cal dynamics of this D.C. suburb
that is in the middle of searching
for a new police chief. Prince
George’s is wealthy with a wealth
gap. It is at least 80 percent Black
and Hispanic, with a police de-
partment that is 41 percent White.
The county spent the 2000s
under investigation by the U.S.
Justice Department after commu-
nity complaints of excessive force,
later implementing many “8 Can’t
Wait” reform policies that have
entered the national discourse in
recent months.
It is also a place where police
officers of color have alleged ra-
cial discrimination within the de-
partment in a federal lawsuit, and
where former officer Michael A.
Owen Jr. was charged earlier this
year with second-degree murder
after fatally shooting a hand-
cuffed man.
“I don’t think there is one mod-
el that could fit Prince George’s
County,” said Del. Alonzo T. Wash-
ington (D-Prince George’s), who
Alsobrooks appointed to chair the
group along with Prince George’s
County Circuit Court Judge Mau-
reen M. Lamasney. “We know that
Prince George’s County is a
unique place.”
Alsobrooks r ecruited 21 others
to the work group, including
elected officials, former law en-
forcement officers, current or for-
mer prosecutors and public de-
fenders, religious leaders, com-
munity organizers and an aca-
demic.
In recent weeks, the group has
been presented with a trove of
statistics.
“This is one of the first times
we’re going to get a lot of trans-
parency and data that usually you
cannot get,” said Krystal Oriadha,
the co-founder of PG Change
Makers, which was formed after
Floyd’s death. The group is calling
for a repeal of the Law Enforce-
ment Officers’ Bill of Rights in
Maryland, which gives police
more due-process rights than all
other U.S. residents. The group
also wants to redirect funds from
the county’s police budget toward
economic, mental health and edu-
cational resources.
As a representative of the activ-
ist community on the work group,
Oriadha said she wants to fight
for the people who have been
demanding change “way before
the conversation took the nation-
al stage in 2020.”
“ I know I am probably one of
the more progressive voices,” she
said. “I definitely wanted to make
sure we had a seat at a table. And I
say ‘we’ because I do mean we, the
community.”
Other voices include represen-
tatives from the NAACP, the coun-
REFORM FROM B1
Years after police overhaul, Pr. George’s tries again
An image of a virtual meeting of the Police Reform Working Group in Prince George’s County. It has
been t asked with scrutinizing the hiring, training and use-of-force practices in the police department.hours that the sites are open.
They’ll be secured by a steel lock,
guarded by an attendant and emp-
tied daily, said Gary Scott, general
registrar of elections in Fairfax
County.
Virginia’s General Assembly
voted Aug. 28 to allow drop boxes,
which left local and state elections
officials scrambling to procure
them. It wasn’t possible for Fairfax
to order heavy-duty outdoor drop
boxes that would arrive in time,
Scott said.
The state legislation to expand
absentee voting was specific to
this year’s general election and
does not appear to permanently
change the laws in Virginia bar-
ring drop boxes. So unlike in
Montgomery or Prince George’s,
where officials expect to use drop
boxes for all future elections, offi-
cials in Fairfax see it as a “single-
use” voting option for this year,
Scott said.
For these reasons, the boxes the
county bought — also supplied by
Recyclingbin.com — cost $116
apiece, less than one-tenth the
price of the ones in the Maryland
suburbs.
Other Virginia jurisdictions are
still in the process of figuring what
type of drop boxes they want and
how to get them. In Loudoun
County, officials have ordered 14
lightweight drop boxes to be
placed at early-voting sites. In Ar-
lington and Alexandria, officials
were still seeking appropriate ven-
dors as of last week.
“It’s not something you can just
go to Walmart and buy,” said
Gretchen Reinemeyer, Arlington
County’s director of elections.
Only a few vendors are still taking
requests, she said, and some say
they can deliver the boxes only a
week before the November elec-
tion.
That would be far too late for
officials to legally notify the public
where the drop boxes will be locat-
ed, Reinemeyer added.
[email protected]Patricia Sullivan and Michael Brice-
Saddler contributed to this report.Board of Elections website, Zelaya
said.
There will be 55 drop boxes in
the District placed outside librar-
ies, recreation centers and other
public locations. They’ll be moni-
tored by surveillance cameras but
not necessarily by guards on-site,
local election officials said. Police
may also add the drop box loca-
tions to their patrol detail.
Voters in D.C. and Maryland
will be able to drive or walk to
these outdoor drop boxes starting
in about three weeks. In Maryland,
ballots will be mailed to the people
who requested them starting
Sept. 24; in D.C., ballots will be
mailed to every registered voter in
the first week of October.
But in Fairfax County, Virginia’s
most populous jurisdiction, voters
in most cases will have to wait till
mid-October and enter a building
to drop off their ballots. Mail-in
ballots will be available in Virginia
starting Sept. 18 and distributed
on a first-come, first-served basis.
Fairfax will distribute about
260 drop boxes for the general
election — one at each of its 14
satellite voting locations and 243
Election Day polling places.
The boxes — 3^1 / 2 -foot-tall fold-
able containers made out of plastic
— will be available only during thetampering and has an access door
sealed by a high-security padlock.
It has an open slot that fits a ballot,
but not much else.
“It’s 400 pounds and can be
mounted to the ground,” said Scott
Gardner, the company’s chief exec-
utive. “It’s not like you can just huff
and puff and blow them down.”
In Prince George’s County, each
of the 40 or so drop boxes will be
monitored by a 24/7 security cam-
era as well as a person from the
sheriff’s office, police department
or Department of Parks and Rec-
reation, said Daneen Banks, depu-
ty administrator of the Board of
Elections. In Baltimore City, offi-
cials plan to hire a private security
company to guard the boxes over-
night, Jones said.
In Montgomery County, once a
ballot is slipped into a drop box, it
will be transported to the county’s
elections office within 24 hours,
said Gilberto Zelaya, a spokesman
for the elections board. At least
twice a day, bipartisan teams of
election workers will open the
drop boxes, inspect “tamper”
tapes and seals to ensure that the
box was not prematurely opened,
collect the ballots and place new
seals for the next collection cycle.
Voters can track the status of their
ballot on the Maryland StateThey are not Covid sanitized. A big
fraud!”
Local election officials and out-
side experts roundly rejected the
president’s characterization of the
voting tool.
“There should be no concern
about security,” said Jim Shalleck,
a Republican appointed by Mary-
land Gov. Larry Hogan (R) to chair
the Montgomery County Board of
Elections. “We know who votes,
and we can detect if someone tries
to vote twice — that’s our job.”
In Maryland, 13 percent of vot-
ers used drop boxes in the June
primary election, when officials
deployed 75 of them. The state
ordered 200 more boxes for the
general election, at $1,400 apiece.
That cost does not include trans-
portation or surveillance.
Nikki Charlson, deputy admin-
istrator for the Maryland State
Board of Elections, said voter de-
mand for drop boxes has surged in
light of ongoing public concerns
over whether the U.S. Postal Serv-
ice will be able deliver ballots on
time.
“If voters are at all worried
about returning their ballot, we’re
telling them to find drop boxes,”
Charlson said.
Armstead Jones, who has
served as election director for Bal-
timore City since 2007, said he has
not witnessed as much anxiety
over the voting process before. “A
lot of people right now... they’re
not trusting any part of the proc-
ess,” Jones said.
In recent weeks, he added,
many residents — including Balti-
more Mayor Bernard Young (D) —
dropped off their applications for
an absentee ballot directly at the
elections office to avoid any mail
delays.
The outdoor drop boxes that
will be used in Maryland and D.C.
are designed by a North Carolina
manufacturing company called
Recyclingbin.com. Each one is
made of thick, weatherproof steel
that has been smoothed to prevent
VOTING FROM B1
Different plans for ballot drop boxes in D.C., Md., Va.
SCOTT GARDENER/RECYCLINGBIN.COM
The outdoor drop boxes that will be used in Maryland are designed
by Recyclingbin.com, a North Carolina manufacturing company.12 months 0% interest
AND no payments
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then monthly payments
as low as $69.
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