Baltimore’s police commissioner took aim at city judges and liquor board inspectors as he defended his officers and called for more accountability from residents and others to solve the crime problem, reports the Baltimore Sun. Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III said during a radio appearance yesterday that sentences for crimes committed against African-Americans in Baltimore are too often light, something he said was “beyond human comprehension. All of us should be outraged.”
He cited a case reported in the Sun in which Circuit Judge John Addison Howard sentenced two men to two years each in prison after they were convicted of second-degree assault in the kidnapping and torture of two teenagers in an attempt to elicit information about a stolen PlayStation. Family members said the teens did not have criminal records and were coming home from school when they were abducted. “Those guys got fairly nominal sentences for some heinous stuff that they did to these kids, and if it happened in a white neighborhood in any other community in this state, we’d still be talking about it, and people would be talking about life sentences,” Bealefeld said “And these people get out essentially with a slap on the wrist. People need to be speaking out about this.”