Martin O'Malley's drive for the White House hasn't been a secret. He's appeared in Iowa 13 times already with more than 35 events. The former governor has given speeches at places like the Kansas Democratic Party's yearly forum, in a keynote to promote his view of the future.
For all of these appearances, though, O'Malley hasn't managed to spark the interest of the electorate. I realize we have quite a few pro-O'Malley blogs here on DailyKos, but if after months of appearances in Iowa you can't break 2%, then my purely armchair quarterback assessment is that you are unlikely to make up the 40 points between you and your opponent.. as long as your opponent remains breathing.
As outrage stirred in Baltimore, though, former Governor O'Malley was reminded why he really has no chance at a Democratic nomination.
In discussing Freddie Gray, the creator of The Wire, David Simon, discussed how the city changed tactics - and it changed the way the community thought of police officers.
https://www.themarshallproject.org/...
The drug war began it, certainly, but the stake through the heart of police procedure in Baltimore was Martin O’Malley3. He destroyed police work in some real respects. Whatever was left of it when he took over the police department, if there were two bricks together that were the suggestion of an edifice that you could have called meaningful police work, he found a way to pull them apart. Everyone thinks I’ve got a hard-on for Marty because we battled over “The Wire,” whether it was bad for the city, whether we’d be filming it in Baltimore. But it’s been years, and I mean, that’s over. I shook hands with him on the train last year and we buried it. And, hey, if he's the Democratic nominee, I’m going to end up voting for him. It’s not personal and I admire some of his other stances on the death penalty and gay rights. But to be honest, what happened under his watch as Baltimore’s mayor was that he wanted to be governor. And at a certain point, with the crime rate high and with his promises of a reduced crime rate on the line, he put no faith in real policing.
But that wasn’t enough. O’Malley needed to show crime reduction stats that were not only improbable, but unsustainable without manipulation. And so there were people from City Hall who walked over Norris and made it clear to the district commanders that crime was going to fall by some astonishing rates. Eventually, Norris got fed up with the interference from City Hall and walked, and then more malleable police commissioners followed, until indeed, the crime rate fell dramatically. On paper.
How? There were two initiatives. First, the department began sweeping the streets of the inner city, taking bodies on ridiculous humbles, mass arrests, sending thousands of people to city jail, hundreds every night, thousands in a month. They actually had police supervisors stationed with printed forms at the city jail – forms that said, essentially, you can go home now if you sign away any liability the city has for false arrest, or you can not sign the form and spend the weekend in jail until you see a court commissioner. And tens of thousands of people signed that form.
This strategy, played out in the series "The Wire" was described as "runs & rips" worthless arrests that generated just stats while impoverishing the communities. Citizens found themselves missing work, facing fine based debt and feeling as though the police were not their to help them.
The city eventually got sued by the ACLU and had to settle, but O’Malley defends the wholesale denigration of black civil rights to this day. Never mind what it did to your jury pool: now every single person of color in Baltimore knows the police will lie — and that's your jury pool for when you really need them for when you have, say, a felony murder case.
This is a key point - one that Simon makes throughout both the documentary The Corner and drama in The Wire. The fact that the trust was so badly broken between communities and city officers helps lead to events like what happened in Baltimore.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/...
One former Maryland Democratic official, who requested anonymity to speak frankly about O’Malley, said his return to Baltimore only hurts his chances for 2016 because it reminds voters elsewhere how unpopular O’Malley was in the state when he left.
“If you look up the street to Philadelphia or you look down the street to Washington, D.C.—those cities have really turned the corner and Baltimore has not turned the corner. Going back there reminds everybody of that,” the official said. “If you are somebody in Iowa or New Hampshire and you are looking for the next president and you send a reminder that this was the city you were mayor of, and you are sitting in your living room in East Des Moines watching the city burning, and he says, ‘I can do for the country what I did for Baltimore’? I don’t think so.”
I'm not saying this to bash those who are rooting for an alternative to Hillary or to attack those who like O'Malley. But millions of Americans have watched and seen what has happened in Baltimore, and they are thinking to themselves: if this is what Martin O'Malley left behind, is this what we want?
2:53 PM PT: For those wondering on "where were these people", etc. I wanted to make sure that beyond the comments this was clarified in the body of the article
https://www.aclu.org/...
"It is so exciting to finally reach justice and announce this agreement," said Tyrone Braxton, a Plaintiff who in 2005 was wrongfully arrested, strip searched, and held at the Baltimore City Detention Center for 36 hours. "For me, it has always been about finally getting the police to do what is right, and I hope that now no one else has to experience what I went through."
"This settlement puts in place policies and structures that will improve policing in Baltimore, and lessen the likelihood that what happened to our clients will be repeated," said David Rocah, Staff Attorney at the ACLU of Maryland, and one of the lawyers for the Plaintiffs.