Responding to the latest crisis to strike the Baltimore Police Department, this time over police brutality, the city released a report outlining on-going changes in departmental procedures for handling complaints against officers.

Most of today’s 41-page report was lifted from previous reports commissioned by Police Commissioner Anthony W. Batts. Two reports came from outside consultants and two from review boards appointed by Batts to review the deaths of Tyrone West and Anthony Anderson while in police custody.

The latest effort, titled “Preventing Harm,” calls for increased staff – including at least 12 more detectives for the Internal Affairs Division and 10 detectives for the Force Investigative Team, plus a dozen new cars, cell phones, voice recorders, digital cameras, computers and other equipment – to properly investigate cases of police misconduct.

The report also echoed a recommendation from November 2013’s “Strategy Plan for Improvement” to consider equipping officers with body cameras. “The Baltimore Police Department should form a panel to assess the cost, privacy, storage and policy concerns for implementation of a body camera program,” it said.

This idea has become popular among several members of the City Council as well as criminal defense lawyers and other critics of the department.

Outcry over Video

Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake had ordered Batts to develop a “comprehensive” plan to address police brutality after a video surfaced last month showing a police officer repeatedly punching a man during an arrest on North Avenue.

On the heels of the video and other photographic evidence of police violence were reports in the Baltimore Sun and City Paper of injuries sustained by residents from encounters with police, many of them culled from the out-of-court settlements that the mayor routinely approves at Board of Estimates meetings. (See here and here for recent examples.)

The adverse publicity created a crisis atmosphere at the Police Department, which has been beset by periodic upticks in homicides and an outcry in the black community over the deaths of several men while under arrest or in police custody.

Batts and Rawlings-Blake today said they were fully committed to restoring public trust in the department, while insisting that much of the brutality took place in the Sheila Dixon and Martin O’Malley mayoralties.

Rawlings-Blake replaced Dixon as mayor in February 2010, and Batts, a former Oakland, Calif., police chief, was appointed commissioner in September 2012.

Neither directly named Dixon and O’Malley, but today’s report cites O’Malley’s “zero tolerance” crime-fighting strategy as leading to “a misguided policy of mass arrests” and public distrust of the police.

Likewise, Frederick H. Bealefeld III, the former police commissioner, is not mentioned by name, but the number of brutality cases – and apparent lack of internal investigations of police under his watch – figure prominently in the statistics cited in the report.

Reforms Making a Big Impact, Batts Says

By contrast, the report praises Batts for taking bold steps to “instill the ethic of protect and serve” through the 3,000-officer force after he arrived in Baltimore.

“It isn’t flashy and it doesn’t make headlines,” the report said of his efforts, “but he and his team have been doing the hard work of reforming the internal discipline process so that bad actors are punished and bad cops are fired.”

The conviction rate of police officers brought before the police trial board has gone up from 57% in 2012 to 89% so far this year, the report said, while the use of force and civilian discourtesy complaints are down by 30% margins. Today 39% of officers charged with misconduct are accepting punishment or resigning rather than facing a department hearing, compared to 32% in 2012.

In addition to more staffing, the report recommends that Commissioner Batts be given more power in disciplining officers. Currently, a “Charging Committee” metes out recommended punishment to an officer, who has the option of accepting it or requesting an administrative hearing trial.

The report recommends that the Charging Committee’s recommendations be reviewed and approved by the commissioner or his designee.

As in last November’s “Strategic Plan,” today’s report emphasizes the importance of better training of officers in “interpersonal and administrative skills, cultural and community sensitivity, and police integrity.”

It also describes Batts’ voluntary request for a review of the agency by the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. Several large police forces, including Los Angeles and New Orleans, have been forced to undergo extensive fact-finding by federal investigators about their use of force policies, stop and search procedures, and “discriminatory policing” based on race, ethnicity and gender status.

The aim of the Baltimore review is to establish DOJ monitoring of the department through an eventual court-supervised consent decree that will assure that local police services are “delivered in a manner that fully complies with the Constitution and laws of the United States,” the report stated.