Baltimore’s state’s attorney, Marilyn Mosby, took aim at the city’s police union Saturday after union officials condemned a violent attack Friday night against a city police officer.
Mosby accused the police union of “fanning the very flames they then call on me to put out,” saying union officials responded to the violent attack with “inappropriate political rhetoric.”
A video posted on social media shows a Baltimore police sergeant wrestling on the ground late Friday with a suspect who allegedly spat in the sergeant’s face. The police officer is then repeatedly kicked by bystanders while trying to make the arrest.
The officer was not seriously injured but Maryland’s governor and the city’s mayor and police commissioner all condemned the crowd’s behavior – while also praising the work of the police officer.
But Sgt. Mike Mancuso, president of Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 3, said city officials shared in the blame for the attack, claiming it was “indicative of a broken city that is being led by people who have absolutely no real time crime plan or, it seems, even know how to formulate one.”
Baltimore enters 2020 after a year that saw the city set a per-capita record for homicides – and that saw City Hall disrupted by ex-mayor Catherine Pugh’s May resignation and her subsequent guilty plea on conspiracy and tax evasion charges in connection with a scam involving sales of her self-published children’s book.
“Crime in Baltimore is out of control,” Mancuso observed, “and until new leadership is elected and appointed, this lack of respect for the law and those who enforce it will continue and deepen.”
Just days earlier, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, expressed sentiments similar to Mancuso’s – that Baltimore’s Democrat city leaders lacked an adequate plan for addressing crime.
“It really takes some leadership in the city to star getting tough,” Hogan said Wednesday at a Maryland National Guard event, Baltimore’s WBAL-TV reported. “There’s no crime plan, there’s no continuity and it’s just simply unacceptable that people are being shot and killed in the streets every single day, and people are fed up with it.”