Butler County SWAT responds to Baltimore

Butler County sent six members of its SWAT team to Baltimore Tuesday to aid that city’s 3,000 police along with 2,000 Maryland National Guard troops, Maryland State Police, and officers from other agencies.

Tensions over the death of Freddie Gray, 25, who died of a spinal cord injury sustained in police custody, spilled over with rioting in Baltimore on Monday and early Tuesday.

Butler County Sheriff Richard K. Jones said he sent the crew in response to Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake’s calls for assistance to riots. The deputies were due to arrive in Baltimore Tuesday night.

“It’s to help the police, but it’s also to help the citizens that don’t want anarchy and don’t want their businesses burned down,” Jones said.

More than 230 people have been arrested in Baltimore since Gray’s funeral Monday. Roughly 140 vehicles and 15 buildings were set on fire. At least 15 police officers have been injured during the ongoing riots. A state of emergency was declared Monday.

Maj. Daryl Wilson isn’t in Baltimore, but he knows what would calm tensions between police and the public.

It starts with conversation.

And it should have started awhile back.

“In Baltimore, it’s a boiling pot,” said the Montgomery County Sheriff’s division commander for the Support Services and Community Services.

Officers have to get out of squad cars and meet with citizens well before violence erupts in a community, said Wilson, a recent member of on the Ohio Attorney General’s Advisory Group on Law Enforcement Training.

One of the panel’s key discussions centered on resources so officers aren’t “running from call to call” and have time to build relationships, Wilson said. But police resources are typically only as abundant as the communities they serve, he said.

Hard economic times have affected large chunks of America’s cities, said Jeremy Forbis, associate professor of sociology at the University of Dayton.

“In the United States we have relative poverty,” Forbis said. “This is basically poverty where you generally have enough food and shelter to survive, but you also have the ability to see what’s going on all around you and you see wealth and you see people who are prospering and you sense a certain kind of fatalism that that’s not in the realm of possibilities for you so you get angry.”

The reaction following Gray’s death in Baltimore and Michael Brown’s in Ferguson, Mo. are flash points of a “deep kind of unrest” that transcends race, Forbis said.

“This is absolutely a poverty issue more than anything else,” he said. “The wealth inequality in this country right now is extremely high. This has to be dealt with or otherwise this is going to become more normative than any time in our past. The amount of inequality we have right now in this country is at dangerous levels.”

Ohio is not immune to Baltimore’s problems, said Rev. Damon Lynch, pastor at New Prospect Baptist Church in Cincinnati. Back in 2001, Lynch was appointed by the Cincinnati mayor to a commission formed in the wake of days of riots in the city following the shooting death of an unarmed black man by police attempting to arrest him for non-violent misdemeanor offenses.

Lynch said the protests and other demonstrations are a result of “multiple layers of frustration” he believes stems back to the 1970s when the war on drugs began. He said the prison population has grown from 300,000 to 2.3 million.

“When you locked up would-be fathers for these men on the street, coupled with loss of industry in America … coupled with poor education and an influx of drugs, you put all of that in the same pot as a stew and add police to the mix with little accountability, at some point the pot is going to boil over,” Lynch said.

Why has it been peaceful here?

Violent demonstrations, rioting and looting never transpired in the Dayton area after the August death of John Crawford III, of Fairfield, who was fatally shot by a police officer who mistook the air rifle Crawford picked up off a shelf in the Beavercreek Walmart for a more lethal weapon.

Tony Ortiz, associate vice president for Latino Affairs at Wright State University, said police in the Dayton region have done a far better job being visible in communities they serve. Ortiz was also a participant in the Attorney General’s advisory group formed in December to make recommendations to possible changes in law enforcement procedures following the deaths of Crawford and Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old with an air-soft pistol who was shot by police in a Cleveland. Both were black and shot by white police officers.

A huge problem in Baltimore, Ortiz says, is police are not being forthright with citizens about what happened to Gray on April 12 between the time he was placed in a police van and when he emerged 45 minutes later with spinal cord damage and a crushed voice box.

“There is a lack of information about what happened there. Everybody’s making assumptions. There’s been no transparency,” he said. “It comes down to what kind of policing has been happening in Baltimore that involved the community – or doesn’t involve the community.”

Even if they entire episode was precipitated by “one or two bad apples” in the Baltimore Police Department, that doesn’t absolve the community from partnering with police, Ortiz said.

“If there’s crime being committed in a neighborhood and the people in that neighborhood don’t speak up it’s not going to change,” he said. “You can’t blame the police for that.”

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Jones said as he watched the riots unfold Monday on TV, he could see how “exhausted and wore out” the Baltimore police were.

“When you see that, I call and get our people on standby,” Jones said. “The officers are exhausted; they’ve been dealing with this for seven days. They need, I assume, rest just like any other agency. Baltimore is so large compared to Ferguson.”

The SWAT team members will work with Baltimore police once they arrive to the city to “provide relief,” Jones said.

Sgt. Melissa R. Gerhardt of the sheriff’s office said it’s “undetermined” how long the crew will stay in Baltimore. They embarked on the roughly eight-hour road trip in three Butler County sheriff’s cruisers.

At this time, it’s unclear how much the trip will cost local taxpayers, but Gerhardt said the agency will not be short-staffed because of the trip.

“This stuff has the tendency to spread like cancer. … It’s going to be a long, hot summer,” Jones said. “And if you don’t send help, when you need help you won’t receive help.”

The Montgomery County Sheriff’s office is taking steps, including a weekly meeting with community members, to diffuse the potential for violent unrest in the Dayton area, Wilson said.

“I think you pray and hope that it could never happen here and hopefully you try to put things in place to where some of the calmer minds can cool the people who are hotheaded or agitated or upset and get them to think before they react,” Wilson said. “Because emotions and anger can have a long-lasting effect when the smoke clears.”

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