Baynard Woods - I Got a Monster

BALTIMORE ALMOST HAD a revolution.

On an April morning in 2015, Baltimore Police officers tackled a young black man named Freddie Gray and pulled him screaming into a van where his spine was broken and his throat was crushed. His death kicked off weeks of protest and one day of rioting that ended with cop cars and pharmacies in flames, an illegal curfew, and National Guard troops and police occupying the streets. To many people in the embattled, deeply segregated, postindustrial city, this uprising had been a long time coming.

When the citys top prosecutor, Marilyn Mosby, brought criminal charges against the six officers involved in Grays death, the nation briefly saw Baltimore as a beacon of hope for police reform. After that, though, the story goes, cops got scared, slowed down, took a knee, and stopped making arrests. Some cops said they were afraid they might be charged with a crime if anything went wrong, and others didnt want to be the next viral video.

Soon, the citys murder rate rose to crisis levels, and the police commissioner was replaced by Kevin Davis, a savvy cop from the county who needed both to stop the bloodshed and to address the concerns of furious citizens traumatized by decades of illegal policing.

Daviss response to 2015s near revolution was a cop counterinsurgency in the form of re-emboldened plainclothes police squads, known as knockers or jump-out boys, who prowled the city looking for trouble.

Plainclothes were directed by a newly created War Room, where BPD commanders, elite operations units, and federal task forces shared information enabling them to target the people they thought were most likely to pull a trigger, even if they could not prove that those people had actually committed a crime.

The war in Baltimore had been going on for generations. The War Room made it official. And because it was a war, where all is fair and stakes are high, police command and politicians looked the other way as long as plainclothes units racked up arrests and brought in the statistics that assured the public that, however bad things looked, the good guys were winning.

On the streets, these counterinsurgency techniques did little to stop the violence, and, by targeting violence-intervention groups and disrupting the underground economy of the streets, they often engendered it. Afraid of criminals and cops alike, more and more Baltimoreans armed themselves for protection.

In this environment, one plainclothes squad thrived: the Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF).

Sergeant Wayne Jenkins ran the GTTF like a war machine. He did not take a knee. He took territory, guns, and drugs, and police brass loved him for it. He was the kind of guy theyd all grown up watching in war movies and cop showsa hard-charging hero who was willing to break some rules and cause some chaos to bring in the bad guys. For years, high-ranking allies covered for Jenkins, helping him escape scrutiny coming from what they considered minor infractions.

Jenkins had been using his squad as a front for a vast criminal enterprise. It had been a nearly flawless scheme, going back nearly a decade. Robbing drug dealers was lucrative and safe. They werent going to call the copsand if they did, no one would listen.