"The drug trade is so insidious in some neighborhoods of Baltimore that when I was a detective there I sometimes had to arrest children for selling narcotics. Sad as that was, a drug counselor told me, they learned to do it from the people around them.
Police officers learn egregious behavior from those around them, too, I thought, when I read the Department of Justice report issued last Wednesday about the Baltimore Police Department’s systematic abuse of black citizens and violation of their rights.
In one incident mentioned in the report, a Justice Department investigator went on a patrol with a sergeant. The sergeant saw a group of young black men on a street corner and told an officer to order them to leave. The officer said he had no reason to do so. “Make something up,” the sergeant replied.
That the sergeant would do this in front of a federal official investigating civil rights violations may be astounding, but it demonstrated his mind-set. He didn’t think he was doing anything wrong. He must have been in the department for years and had probably been taught to take such action by his field training officer, and even the department’s commanders. It was learned behavior, part of a culture rooted in an “us versus them” mentality."
When Police Are Poor Role Models for One Another - The New York Times
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