Arrested For Driving While White

The Baltimore City police department is not one of the stellar police departments in the nation. It is full of incompetent people who arrest people for breathing. I am not a fan of most law enforcement because the agencies are filled with people on power trips who fail to realize they are public servants paid with tax dollars. The Baltimore police are worse than even those departments. In the past the Baltimore police have had officers plant drugs, rape suspects, and one man was killed while in the downtown lockup. Recently, a Virginia couple had the misfortune of encountering those incompetent officers.

Joshua Kelly and Llara Brook, of Chantilly, Virginia went to an Oriole baseball game and when they left they got lost. They ended up in Cherry Hill. I have been to Cherry Hill (when I was a kid I spent some time there) and that place is not friendly and it is not where you want to end up. The Virginians were driving around trying to find their way home when, as luck would have it, they found a cop. They asked for directions and the driver was told he ran a stop sign. He replied that he would be happy to pay the fine he just wanted directions to get home. The officer told him that he found his way there and he could find his way out. Another officer was driving by and the couple tried to flag him down. The original officer, a low life named Natalie Preston, intervened and told them that if she was not going to give directions her partner would not give them. The couple pulled over to the curb and the driver put the emergency flashers on while Brook talked to her father on a cell phone (to get directions). This is when the police pulled up behind the car and arrested the couple for trespassing. I would like to know how you can trespass on a public street.

The couple spent eight hours in jail and were never charged. They were probably arrested because they were white and in a predominantly black part of town. Whites get arrested for being there because the cops figure they are there to purchase drugs from one of the many drug dealers that cops like Natalie Preston seem to ignore. You see, it is OK to arrest white people for being white. They were not where they were supposed to be so it is OK to profile them as drug buyers. If a 19 year old black man drives through Cherry Hill in a $50,000 BMW they can not stop him (though he fits the very profile of a drug dealer) because that would be profiling. It is wrong to profile unless you happen to be a white person driving in the wrong part of town.

I grew up in Baltimore City and it has gone down hill over the years. It has had a long string of Democratic Mayors who claim to be tough on crime while the crime numbers keep rising. The current Mayor, and candidate for Governor, has been under fire for his creative math with regard to crime in the city. The creative geniuses in Baltimore decided that they would start making more quality of life arrests and stop all this nonsense of investigating murders. If you don’t call it a homicide it is not a homicide statistic.

Not all cops are bad but perception is often reality and the perception is that cops, especially in Baltimore, are crooked and do not have the best interest of the public in mind. There use to be a time when police officers were there to help. As kids we were told that if we were lost or being bothered by a stranger, to seek out a cop. If I were a kid today I would take my chances with the stranger and as for getting lost, well we can see what happened to the visitors from Virginia.

If Maryland thinks that Mayor Martin O’Malley will be a good Governor they need only look as far as the corrupt police department and thriving crime business to see why he is not the answer. As a Marylander I want to apologize to Collins and Brook. You came here for a good time and you deserved better. I suggest you sue the city for a lot of money and make them pay for what was done to you.

Source: WBAL TV

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One Response to “Arrested For Driving While White”

  1. Bosun says:

    Thanks for the heads up. I am headed to the Bethesda area and will be flying into Baltimore International. I am going to stick to freeways until I get out of Baltimore area.

    What a travesty of justice.