Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, who will take over soon as mayor of Baltimore, has a different perspective on policing from that of her predecessors because she has served as a public defender, says the Baltimore Sun. Rawlings-Blake told the Sun she is skeptical of “zero-tolerance” policing, saying “the problem is you get these abhorrent situations where someone’s kid who was home from spring break from some college, comes home and was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and gets roughed up by officers that are focusing on keeping the corners clean. It’s not a one-size fits all proposition.”
She did endorse what the Sun called the current mantra of Police Commissioner Frederick Bealefeld III of focusing on “our most violent offenders [and] on partnerships with the state and federal government – I know for a fact that the work of Project Exile, the federal gun prosecutions change behavior. You work that in with parole and probation – it’s not guesswork. People that are shooting and being shot are in the system. And community policing. I spent a lot of time walking with neighborhoods on patrol, and you get a sense of what matters in the community, and you work with police to make sure their standards of public safety are met.”