- A major initiative of State’s Attorney Ivan Bates to restart police enforcement of so-called “quality-of-life” crimes has gotten off to a rocky start, with officers writing few tickets and the vast majority of those that are written getting preemptively tossed without the defendant ever being notified.
- In the first two months since the Baltimore Police Department told its officers to resume citing low-level offenses — such as loitering, drinking alcohol or urinating in public — they’ve issued 50 citations, acting Police Commissioner Rich Worley told the public safety committee of Baltimore City Council.
- And yet there are major issues with how officers are writing the citations, as evidenced by the fact that 47 of the 50 tickets mentioned by Worley were flagged by an internal police department review as inadequate and never made it to the court docket.
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Baltimore Wants To Issue More Citations, But Its Cops Don’t Know How To Write Them
Baltimore Inner Harbor (Brendan Beale for Unsplash)
