Presidential Hopeful O'Malley Was Warned His Police Strategy Would Produce More Rodney Kings in Baltimore

Maryland's former governor and would-be president has a lot to answer for in Baltimore's black community.

Former Maryland Governor and before that, Baltimore Mayor, Martin O'Malley is expected to run for the Democratic nomination for the presidency, and he has been on the campaign trail portraying himself as a left-wing challenge to Clinton.

But as Baltimore unrest is making global headlines, it's worth mentioning that when O'Malley was mayor of Baltimore, he advocated harsh “broken windows”/”tough on crime” policing, putting more police on the streets and bringing in advisers from the New York Police Department. From a 2013 Washington Monthly profile:

In 1999, O’Malley stood at an intersection in Northwest Baltimore, a known drug-selling corner, and announced his intention to run for Baltimore city mayor. His platform? A single, resounding, and highly unlikely promise: to reduce the city’s crime rate by 50 percent. In a city riven by racial politics, the cards were stacked against the young, white councilman, but in August, in the nick of time, he got lucky. Former State General Assembly Delegate Howard P. Rawlings, who is black, endorsed him, and in September, O’Malley walked away with the Democratic primary—the equivalent, in Baltimore, of victory. (Twelve years later, O’Malley would return the favor, endorsing Rawlings’s daughter, the current mayor of Baltimore, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake.) O’Malley took the general election in a landslide.

Two days after election night, months before he’d even taken the oath of office, O’Malley recruited Jack Maple, the guru of CompStat [A New York City program designed to identify crime-heavy spots and deploy police to them], and his business partner, John Linder. Their task? Bring CompStat to Baltimore, stat. Almost immediately, the duo launched a comprehensive review of the Baltimore Police Department (BPD), and in early 2000 they delivered eighty-seven suggestions of reform to both O’Malley and his brand-new police commissioner, Ronald L. Daniel. That’s when the trouble began.

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