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AMERICA’S DESCENT INTO AUTHORITARIANISM MAY HAVE STARTED WITH
POLICING IN BLUE CITIES.  
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Stephen Janis and Taya Graham
May 12, 2025
real News Network
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_ As the Trump administration continues to press the boundaries of
the Constitution, Johns Hopkins Professor Lester Spence says we need
to understand one yet-to-be-examined source of the push towards
authoritarianism: urban policing. _

Protest in Baltimore after Freddie Gray's death in 2015,

 

Anyone who witnessed or was affected by Baltimore’s failed
experiment with zero-tolerance policing during the aughts remembers
the unrelenting chaos it created. As reporters working for a
newspaper, we witnessed the onslaught of so-called quality of life
arrests as a fast-moving crisis that seemed to accelerate with each
illegal charge.

The policy was driven by the idea that even the most minor infraction,
like drinking a beer on a stoop, was worthy of detainment in the
pursuit of stopping more violent crimes. However, it soon spiraled out
of control to roughly 100,000 arrests per year between 2000 and 2006.
It led to bizarre examples of over-policing, like Gerard Mungo, the
seven-year-old boy arrested for sitting on an electric dirt bike
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or the incarceration of attendees of an entire cookout over a noise
complaint
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[Many protesters gathered around the White house to demand justice
over George Floyd's death and request a change in policing system.
This photo was taken in Washington DC, USA on 5/30/2020.]

But aside from the individual horror stories of people who ended up in
jail without committing a crime, there was something else just as
shocking: all of the suffering occurred in a blue city, with little if
any political opposition or pushback from the Democratic
establishment.

If you’re skeptical, don’t be. Post 9-11 Democrats wanted to look
tough. And they were looking for a political superstar to replace
former President Bill Clinton.

Then-Mayor Martin O’Malley fit the bill. He was a rising political
star who the local Democratic establishment believed would eventually
ascend to the presidency. Throughout his tenure, he oversaw this
policy of mass arrests, hoping the ensuing drop in crime would bolster
his future candidacy. Predictably, his presidential aspirations
fizzled under the weight of the 2015 uprisings after the death of
Freddie Gray in police custody, and crime didn’t go down
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But the results were undeniably horrific: tens of thousands of people
placed in cuffs without committing a crime. An authoritarian policy
embraced by a Democratic establishment that seemed to have few qualms
with allowing police to create untenable conditions within
predominantly African-American neighborhoods.

During the zero tolerance heyday, prosecutors were so overwhelmed by
the onslaught of detentions that they invented a previously
unheard-of legal terminology to address it: ‘abated by arrest.
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It was a legal classification intended to reckon with the fact that
there was no legal basis for charging thousands of people police were
putting into handcuffs. In other words, the arrest was illegal;
prosecutors just invented a way to make it seem less so.

Zero tolerance was, in some sections of Baltimore, worse than
authoritarianism—it led to a reconfiguration of the Constitution.

The city’s Central Booking facility, constructed in the ’90s with
the expectation it would process around 40,000 arrests annually, was
so overwhelmed that many detainees would be given what was known as a
‘walk through,’ which entailed simply walking in and out of the
facility in a long serpentine line guided by corrections personnel.
This overcrowding was exacerbated by the jump-out boys, who would
arrive in predominantly Black neighborhoods to lead people, whose only
crime was living in an area police deemed suitable for mass illegal
incarceration, into the back of vans.

The point was, and is, that zero tolerance was, in some sections of
Baltimore, worse than authoritarianism—it led to a reconfiguration
of the Constitution. People would be illegally detained and then
disappear into the Central Booking facility for months without due
process. Many victims we interviewed were often released without
charging documents, unable to describe or otherwise recount the crime
that had landed them in jail. Baltimore was essentially
non-constitutional—a bastion of notably unlawful law enforcement.

All of this backstory is a prelude to the astonishing and terrifying
argument made recently by prominent Johns Hopkins professor of
Political Science and Africana Studies Lester Spence.

Spence is one of a handful of innovative political scientists who
examine national politics through the prism of urban governance. He is
the author of _Knocking the Hustle: Against the Neoliberal Turn in
Black Politics_. In it he argues that cities, once bastions of
progressive policymaking, have become laboratories for neoliberalism.

But Spence has taken this idea one step further by making an argument
that makes the Trump administration’s current unconstitutional
actions even more terrifying.

During an interview for the TRNN documentary ‘Freddie Gray: A Decade
of Struggle
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Spence linked the wildly unconstitutional policing that precipitated
the uprising to the anti-democratic impulses from the Trump
administration that are infiltrating the country’s institutions.

“To the extent that if you looked at a map of the country and you
looked and you layered density and then voted on that map, what
you’d see is the most Democratic places are the densest places, and
all the rest is red,” Spence explained.

“Now, if you layer onto those values about democracy, should
everybody be able to get a right to vote? Should people accept the
results of elections? But then, should people have a right to
healthcare? Should people have a right to solid education? Should
people have a right to a living wage? All those attitudes are
concentrated in metropolitan areas. If you constrain the ability of
those spaces to articulate those values and policy, then you constrain
the ability to state on one hand… and then the nation-state on the
other to actually fight for those values,” he said.

“So the sort of authoritarianism comes out of the policing and the
lack of opportunity and the dysfunction of democracy.”

There are obvious connections that Spence is making here. Illegal
arrests have been proven to diminish political participation. Specious
criminal charges literally erode the type of citizenship that a
democracy depends on.

The easy-to-construct narrative that Democrats can’t and will not
impose order and don’t know how to do so has simply made right-wing
talking points more salient and appealing.

It estranges, isolates, and otherwise marginalizes entire swathes of a
community. Affected residents subsequently cannot access public
housing, student loans, or even admission to higher education. All of
these factors conclusively diminish the strength and vibrancy of our
citizenry, and, as Spence suggests, mute the constituency most likely
to advocate for progressive policies.

But Spence’s idea has even more profound implications if you delve
deeper into the history of policing in blue cities like Baltimore. To
understand its true significance, just consider a less direct force
undermining democracy which is precipitated by Democrats’ commitment
to aggressive law enforcement.

It starts with the conservative narrative of the failed city.

The so-called failed “Dem-run city” is shorthand for broader
attacks on Democratic competence. It boils broader ideas of liberal
excesses into simple narratives: The chaotic blue communities are
beset by criminals and immigrants. The lawlessness and moral
bankruptcy of cities that have run amok. All of it espoused by
Republican candidates and right-leaning news media outlets as probable
cause to run Democrats out of Washington.

The Rupert Murdoch-owned _New York Post_ published daily stories on
crime and dysfunction in San Francisco. Similarly, in our own
hometown, right-wing Sinclair Broadcasting has touted a ‘City in
Crisis’ series that again equates crime to failed Democratic
policies and the mayhem they supposedly engender. All of this,
manufactured or true, creates a perception that Democrats are wildly
incompetent.

That perception gains traction, according to Spence’s idea,
because—in some cases—it’s accurate.

That’s because cities under Democratic administrations have invested
billions in the ostensibly flawed idea that policing was a key to
reducing crime. Just like with zero tolerance in Baltimore, many
Democratic mayors and elected officials not just allowed but touted
aggressive and illegal policing as a proficient means to an end.

That commitment to a flawed policy has not only led to failure, but
has given Republicans plenty of fodder to justify the Trump
administration’s authoritarian rule. The easy-to-construct narrative
that Democrats can’t and will not impose order and don’t know how
to do so has simply made right-wing talking points more salient and
appealing.

Baltimore’s recent drop in homicides suggests that all this spending
overlooked what appears to be the most effective solution: investment
in community-based programs.

The irony is, as Spence points out, that blue cities like Baltimore
invested massive sums in policing for decades with meager results.
Defunding the police has hardly been the problem. Here in Baltimore,
for example, public safety spending has outpaced education spending
for decades.

Nevertheless, Baltimore’s recent drop in homicides suggests that all
this spending overlooked what appears to be the most effective
solution: investment in community-based programs.

Dayvon Love, public policy director for the Baltimore-based think tank
Leaders of Beautiful Struggle, made this point in the same
documentary. The Baltimore Police Department, he noted, has been
grappling with a historic number of vacancies, fluctuating somewhere
between 500 and 1,000 officers
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However, even with fewer officers to patrol the streets, violent crime
and homicides have dropped significantly. In 2024 homicides dropped to
201, a 20% decrease from the year prior. This year, nonfatal shootings
and homicides have continued to fall another 20% to a record low.

Some have attributed this to a broader national trend towards lower
homicide rates. But, as Mayor Brandon Scott recently pointed out,
Baltimore has always bucked fluctuations in homicides and violent
crime.

Instead, Scott attributes the drop to the city’s commitment to
community-based programs like the Gun Violence Reduction Strategy,
which uses a coordinated community-based approach to persuade
high-risk residents to get a job rather than commit a crime. The city,
with the help of the state of Maryland, has also made historic
investments in Safe Streets, a violence interruption program in which
former felons mediate disputes before they turn violent.

All of this points to the fact that Democrats’ past use of
aggressive policing has been a boon for Republicans because it was not
just the wrong solution, but a prescription for electoral failure as
well. Whether or not the Republican depiction of this policy has been
fair, the fact remains that Democrats across the country have invested
countless billions into authoritarian policing with little impact on
crime, and as a result have paved the way for an authoritarian
national movement.

If these two trends continue, as Spence suggested is possible, then we
are in big trouble.

Just consider the findings of the Justice Department report that was
released after its 2016 investigation into the Baltimore Police
Department in the wake of the death of Freddie Gray in police custody.
It found that, among other abuses, police arrested one man 44 times.
It also revealed that several extremely poor and mostly
African-American neighborhoods were targeted with mass arrests to the
point that a person could be detained for simply walking in an area
where they did not live.

If that sounds scary, consider the fact that the editor of the paper I
worked for was arrested after we published the overtime earnings of
all the officers on the force during the zero-tolerance era
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Police contrived a crime to effectuate the arrest, accusing him of
pointing a shotgun at his neighbors
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The case fell apart after his lawyers pointed out that all of this
occurred in the privacy of his home and that the aggrieved neighbor
had only witnessed the infraction through a shut window. However, that
did not stop a cadre of heavily armed officers from dragging him into
the same Central Booking facility as the other victims of the city’s
mass arrest movement.

Even more troubling were the sheer numbers of arrests effectuated by a
relatively small number of officers. At its peak, BPD had roughly
3,000 sworn cops—and the number of people they managed to arrest was
thousands of times greater. Imagine if the vast federal bureaucracy
embarked on a similar program of nationwide detentions.

That program is, actually, already happening. The Trump administration
has enlisted the FBI and IRS to help arrest immigrants, a task usually
outtside their respective purviews.

The point is, we have witnessed how over-policing changes the contours
of government, and if this same mentality pervades the federal
institutions and agencies, it will be more terrifying than it’s
already been.

Spence’s insight should be heeded as not just a cautionary tale, but
a call to action. Baltimore has made positive changes to commit
resources towards a community based approach to crime intervention.
The question is, will it be enough?

_Stephen Janis is an award winning investigative reporter turned
documentary filmmaker. His first feature film, The Friendliest Town
was distributed by Gravitas Ventures and won an award of distinction
from The Impact Doc Film Festival, and a humanitarian award from The
Indie Film Fest. He is the co-host and creator of The Police
Accountability Report on The Real News Network, which has received
more than 10,000,000 views on YouTube. His work as a reporter has been
featured on a variety of national shows including the Netflix reboot
of Unsolved Mysteries, Dead of Night on Investigation Discovery
Channel, Relentless on NBC, and Sins of the City on TV One._

_Taya Graham is an award-winning investigative reporter who has
covered U.S. politics, local government, and the criminal justice
system. She is the host of TRNN’s “Police Accountability
Report,” and producer and co-creator of the award-winning podcast
“Truth and Reconciliation” on Baltimore’s NPR affiliate WYPR.
She has written extensively for a variety of publications including
the Afro American Newspaper, the oldest black-owned publication in the
country, and was a frequent contributor to Morgan State Radio at a
historic HBCU. She has also produced two documentaries, including the
feature-length film “The Friendliest Town.” Although her reporting
focuses on the criminal justice system and government accountability,
she has provided on the ground coverage of presidential primaries and
elections as well as local and state campaigns. Follow her on Twitter
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_THE REAL NEWS NETWORK (TRNN) MAKES MEDIA CONNECTING YOU TO THE
MOVEMENTS, PEOPLE, AND PERSPECTIVES THAT ARE ADVANCING THE CAUSE OF A
MORE JUST, EQUAL, AND LIVABLE PLANET. We broaden your understanding
of the issues, contexts, and voices behind the news headlines. _

_We are rigorous in our journalism and dedicated to the facts, but
unafraid to engage alongside movements for change, because we believe
journalism and media making has a critical role to play in
illuminating pathways for collective action. _

* policing
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* Baltimore
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* Freddie Gray
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