WASHINGTON — Baltimore’s mayor on Wednesday fired the city’s police commissioner, citing a recent crime surge as the primary reason.
Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake acted hours after the police union issued a report critical of the department’s response to the riots set off by the death of Freddie Gray, an unarmed black man who suffered a fatal spinal cord injury while in police custody in April.
At a City Hall news conference, Rawlings-Blake said debate over Anthony W. Batts’s leadership had been “a distraction” that took away from her mission to make the city safer.
“Recent events have placed an intense focus on our police leadership, distracting many from what needs to be our main focus: the fight against crime. So we need a change,” the mayor said.
She continued, “This was not an easy decision but it’s one that is in the best interest of the people of Baltimore.”
The mayor’s office said Kevin Davis, the deputy police commissioner, would run the department on an interim basis, effective immediately.
Rawlings-Blake and Batts, who are both African-American, had been watched closely in the aftermath of Gray’s death because it was the first time since disturbances in Ferguson, Mo., that a city led by African-American officials had faced the same kinds of tensions over police conduct in the death of an unarmed black man. Such deaths in the St. Louis suburb and in New York City had led to a series of divisive protests.
The mayor appointed Batts in 2012 after he had resigned as the police chief in Oakland, Calif., hailing him as capable of overhauling a police department that had been mired in scandal and had faced accusations of brutality.
Six officers have been indicted in Gray’s death. The report released Wednesday by the city’s police union, the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 3, was highly critical of the department’s handling of disturbances that devolved into rioting and arson after the death.
After the unrest, arrests in the city plummeted and homicides spiked. Baltimore’s homicide total this year is 155, according to police. That’s a 48 percent increase compared with the same time last year. Shootings have increased 86 percent.
In one of the latest examples, gunmen jumped out of two vans and fired at a group of people a few blocks from an urban university campus Tuesday night, killing three people.
The union said its members reported they “lacked basic riot equipment, training and, as events unfolded, direction from leadership.”
The report complained that “the passive response to the civil unrest had allowed the disorder to grow into full-scale rioting” and that officers had followed direct orders from their commanders “not to intervene or engage the rioters.”
Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.