The number of Baltimore Police Department arrests lacking in “probable cause,” or a legally sound and properly documented reason to arrest someone, has dropped significantly in recent years, a recently released independent audit found.
The findings came from the latest assessment by the Police Department’s independent monitoring team, part of its federal consent decree that dates back to 2017. The report, focused on arrests lacking probable cause, found that the rate of improper arrests dropped from 10.4% to 4% in two random samplings of 200 cases in 2019 and 2021. It attributed the difference to the department’s revised policies and training procedures, which went into effect in between the two samplings.
A closer look at the improper arrests found that when the arrests did lack probable cause, they appeared to be “due to unintentional errors, rather than as part of a broader strategy to make arrests, even if unsupported by probable cause, as a means of reducing crime,” the report said.
The independent assessment adds weight to the argument made frequently by city leaders such as Mayor Brandon Scott and Police Commissioner Rich Worley: that the reductions in fatal and nonfatal…
