The inquiry is the product of more than a year’s worth of investigation. In the aftermath of Gray’s death in April 2015, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake sacked police Commissioner Anthony Batts and asked the Justice Department to intervene. Attorney General Loretta Lynch, in her first week on the job, agreed to the request. In response to the scathing report, the city is expected to agree to a consent decree or memorandum of agreement with the Department of Justice, promising to address the problems. Other deeply troubled departments, including Cleveland and Ferguson have reached similar consent decrees, which can cost tens of millions of dollars to implement.

The report applauds the mayor and current Commissioner Kevin Davis for cooperating. One of the more striking elements of the report is that there’s little disagreement about the dire straits in Charm City.

“Almost everyone who spoke to us—from current and former City leaders, BPD officers and command staff during ride-alongs and interviews, community members throughout the many neighborhoods of Baltimore, union representatives of all levels of officers in BPD, advocacy groups, and civic and religious leaders—agrees that BPD has significant problems that have undermined its efforts to police constitutionally and effectively,” the report states.

President Obama and other leaders have noted that police are often asked to grapple with problems they are neither hired nor equipped to answer, from entrenched poverty to public-health crises to systemic racism. The report does not stint on those issues, including, for example, a history of redlining. But it also makes clear this “does not excuse BPD’s violations of the constitutional and statutory rights of the people living in these challenging conditions.” Indeed, “BPD’s law enforcement practices at times exacerbate the longstanding structural inequalities in the City” [emphasis added].

It’s impossible to sum up the breadth of the report succinctly, but these are a few of the most surprising, troubling, and disturbing findings. They involve not only racial disparities, but dismissive attitudes toward sexual assault, violence against the mentally ill, and a culture of retaliation against whistleblowers.

Constitutional Violations

The report comes down hard on “zero-tolerance” policing, a variation on the “Broken Windows” style that was laid out in a 1982 Atlantic article and was until relatively recently in vogue in major cities around the nation:

Starting in at least the late 1990s, however, City and BPD leadership responded to the City’s challenges by encouraging “zero tolerance” street enforcement that prioritized officers making large numbers of stops, searches, and arrests—and often resorting to force—with minimal training and insufficient oversight from supervisors or through other accountability structures. These practices led to repeated violations of the constitutional and statutory rights, further eroding the community’s trust in the police.

Police frequently arrested people for minor offenses. More recent city and department leadership have rejected that policy, but the report documents how that message hasn’t made it down to mid-level commanders and officers on the beat:

Many BPD supervisors instruct officers to make frequent stops and arrests—even for minor offenses and with minimal or no suspicion—without sufficient consideration of whether this enforcement strategy promotes public safety and community trust or conforms to constitutional standards.

Many of BPD’s stops lack the reasonable suspicion required to justify them, and many of the arrests they make are unconstitutional, too: They either lack a warrant and probable cause, or officers failed to inform people they were engaged in unlawful activity. In many cases, they also end without a citation or arrest. Strong evidence of the flimsiness of many arrests comes from the fact central booking and local prosecutors rejected more than 11,000 charges between 2010 and 2015.