'Enjoy your ride': Baltimore police check vans after photos show sign inside

[Eugene]

Source: The Guardian

'Enjoy your ride': Baltimore police check vans after photos show sign inside

Jana Kasperkevic in New York
Friday 3 July 2015 18.31 BST

The Baltimore police department is inspecting all of its vehicles, after photographs posted on Facebook showed the door of a police van emblazoned with a message that read: “Enjoy your ride, cuz we sure will!”

The sign, on the inside of the van door, would be visible to anyone detained by the police and placed inside the van.

The photographs surfaced less than two weeks after an autopsy report revealed that Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old African American man whose death in April sparked protests across the nation and serious rioting in the city, suffered a “high-energy injury” while riding in a Baltimore police van.

Gray, 25, died a week after he was arrested. His death was ruled a homicide and was found to be the result of officers’ failure to follow procedures.

The photos of the sign in the police van were taken on Tuesday near the Central District Police Station on Baltimore Street, where the van was parked with its doors left open, according to WBAL-TV 11 News.

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Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jul/03/baltimore-police-vans-sign-freddie-gray

[99th_Monkey]

1. Meanwhile Cops buy Dylann Roof a Burger King take-out on way to jail.

I don't know if this is true or not, but it wouldn't surprise me at all.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3135477/Cops-treated-Dylann-Roof-free-Burger-King-meal-Charleston-church-shooter-complained-feeling-hungry-reveals-police-chief.html
http://www.donotlink.com/framed?729921

[nadinbrzezinski]

2. The police chief said they did

and in small towns, or far from my local prison, this is not as unusual as it sounds.

The optics are terrible, but this happens more often with all kinds of suspects, than people would like to think.

It is quite simply, as one officer put it to me one day, a matter of logistics. You can take them to jail, where it takes hours to process them, no food. Or you can feed them, they might make spontaneous statements that are fine and admissible after the Miranda warning, and then take them to jail.

[99th_Monkey]

3. Snopes cites a similar rationale

yet the contrast between Roof's treatment and the "rough ride"
a lot of wrongly arrested blacks get is a travesty, never-the-less.
http://m.snopes.com/2015/06/22/dylann-roof-burger-king/

[nadinbrzezinski]

5. I know. Why I said optics are terrible

[awoke_in_2003]

6. Yes, the food stop is normal...

but what frustrates me is the way suspects are handled. If the suspect is black, and it is not know whether he is armed or not, he is going to get the ever living piss beat out of him, or killed. If the suspect is white, and known to be armed, then they almost forget to put handcuffs on him before putting him in the car. They knew the little punk had a gun, which he used to kill 9 people, and they treated him like a Faberge egg.

[nadinbrzezinski]

7. I watched the vid released by pd on the arrest

it was not quite faberge. There is a lot of structural racism. And trust me more than I would like to imagine. We have been covering law, prison and other lovely abuses. But the food stop gets me riled in the least.

Now criminal code (CA) 182.5, that does...not working citizen review boards, yup...cops beating the shits out of people of color, yup. Having a young man arrested for finding a lighted place, yup. Food stops, not really.

[awoke_in_2003]

9. We desperately need civilian review boards

having cops investigate cops is like asking a fox to investigate who is eating all the chickens.

[nadinbrzezinski]

10. Operative word here, effective boards

San Diego has had one since the mid 1980s, for SDPD. Care to guess how many officers have been disciplined by this board? Zero.

Several officers have gone to jail though. On edit and for clarity not one thing to do with the board and there were complaints.

Here, reforms wanted.

http://reportingsandiego.com/2015/06/12/activists-seek-substantial-changes-in-the-crb/

[Katashi_itto]

11. Who cares about the burger. They do that regularly with lots of prisoners. To save time.

Roof will fry in the end anyway burger or not.

[forsaken mortal]

4. Where I live

Some of the police cars have bumper stickers with yellow smilies on them that say "smile, I could be behind you." It never struck me as being very professional that they have those on some of their cars. I should take a photo the next time I see one, but they'd probably beat me to death if they saw me doing it.

[Lulu Belle]

14. That is funny- lighten up Francis.

[Solly Mack]

8. K&R

[davidpdx]

12. I'm wondering if another possibility is someone got a snap shot of the van

and then photo-shopped it in.

[1939]

13. Rural versus urban plus distance

Most rural police do not have paddy wagons and use their cars for transport. Roof was being moved some distance from western NC back to Charleston so it wasn't just a hop to the station for processing.

[demwing]

15. Photo here: