Last March, the Baltimore City Council passed Resolution No. 18-0073R opposing the plan by Johns Hopkins to establish its own police department. Last week, four members of the council sent a letter to Interim Police Commissioner Gary Tuggle asking him to discontinue the supplemental deployment of officers to the campuses of Johns Hopkins University and Johns Hopkins Medicine, to which I will refer collectively as Johns Hopkins. The letter was an incredibly cheap shot aimed at Baltimore’s most important and prestigious private institutions.

It looks like those four members of the City Council, including its president, Jack Young and the Vice Chairman of the Public Safety Committee, Brandon Scott, want to give Johns Hopkins a double whammy, the old one-two punch. First, the council helped block the initiative by Johns Hopkins to set up and pay for its own police department to keep its campuses safe.

Now, four members of the council want to eliminate the city officers assigned to the vicinity of the medical campus that officers of the proposed Johns Hopkins police force would have replaced. What is going on? Do the four members of the council not care about the safety of Johns Hopkins students, patients and employees?

The background.

Legislation authorizing Johns Hopkins to establish its own police department was before the General Assembly for approval in the spring of this year. It received the support of former Police Commissioner Daryl DeSousa and Mayor Catherine Pugh. Companion bills to approve the proposal were filed in the Senate and the House of Delegates by Sen. Joan Carter Conway and Del. Cheryl Glenn, respectively. After the council passed its resolution opposing the proposal, however, the city’s delegation to the General Assembly withdrew its support for the bills and they died in committee.

The supplemental deployment of officers that is the subject of last week’s letter is modest. It consists of seven officers generally deployed between the hours of 2 p.m. and 10 p.m. in an area of the medical campus bounded by Eager, Broadway, Monument and Caroline Streets. There also are two regularly-assigned officers at Kennedy Krieger Institute and the Johns Hopkins Hospital ER. Those two posts are overtime assignments for which the city is reimbursed by Johns Hopkins.

Why did this nonsense happen?

The ostensible reason for wanting to end the deployment of the additional officers to Johns Hopkins campuses is the general shortage of officers in the city. The council members believe that the officers are more needed somewhere else. Where?

The supplemental deployment was initiated by former commissioner Kevin Davis and continued by former commissioner De Sousa and current interim commissioner Tuggle in response to a perceived need. In his testimony explaining why he believed that Johns Hopkins should establish its own police department, university president Ron Daniels pointed to the upsurge in violent crime in and around the campuses, particularly armed robberies.

One of the most important jobs of the police commissioner is to decide where limited personnel assets are needed most after carefully considering the best information available. If the commissioner isn’t capable of that, who is? The City Council? Can you imagine what would what happen if the decision on where to assign officers was given to any type of committee, much less to a legislative body such as the Baltimore City Council?

In my opinion, it was nothing more than petty politics that derailed the proposal by Johns Hopkins to establish its own police department. Long story short, members of the City Council got their noses out of joint when their blessing was not sought by Johns Hopkins before Johns Hopkins went to members of the General Assembly to seek support for the proposed police department.

There also was the matter of the city’s internal politics. It is hard to overstate the destructiveness of the competing power centers in Baltimore, where a weak mayor is up against a generally-obstreperous council president and young and ambitious council members like Mr. Scott. The contentious situation is producing more heat than light, and the Hopkins proposal went down in flames because of it.

The mayor was not free from fault. When Johns Hopkins went to the mayor to discuss its proposal, it was up to the mayor or one of her highly paid staff members like Chief of Strategic Alliances Jim Smith to help guide Johns Hopkins through the thicket of city politics. The council’s formal approval clearly was not required for the proposal, but if the mayor believed that it was prudent for Johns Hopkins to touch base with members of the council then it was her responsibility to say so.

I don’t know that we’ll ever know the full story. It is always possible that there was something else going on behind the scenes that citizens were not aware of. The fact remains that regardless of any political faux pas the Hopkins proposal never should have been made a political football by the City Council, which is exactly what it became.

What were you thinking, Delegate Glenn?

When Del. Glenn withdrew her support for her own bill she did not give petty politics as the reason. It was worse than that.

“I believe that the way you go about achieving something is very important, and right now this process has not been inclusive of the community at large,” she told the Baltimore Sun, adding:

“There are all kinds of ancillary issues that have been a part of Johns Hopkins University’s history that we would need some assurances as to their appreciation for diversity and how issues of diversity would be addressed.”

Baltimore’s striking history of structural and institutional racism is well-documented, and the effects linger to this day. No reasonable person disputes that, and Johns Hopkins was part of that history.

It was grossly inappropriate, however, for Del. Glenn to cite “all kinds of ancillary issues that have been a part of Johns Hopkins University’s history” as justification for holding the formation of a police department by Johns Hopkins hostage to her demands that the police department be sufficiently diverse – and I am sure she has very specific ideas of how diversity should be achieved.

First, it is insulting for her to imply that in 2018 Johns Hopkins needs to assure her or anyone else that it has an “appreciation for diversity.” Johns Hopkins Medicine has an excellent record when it comes to employing a diverse work force, whatever its history may have been. If Del. Glenn doesn’t trust Forbes’ assessment of that record, she can try blackdoctor.org for verification. Never let the facts get in the way of political rhetoric, I guess.

Second, I have a particular thing right now about the issue of diversity in police forces. If we have learned anything from recent experiences with the Baltimore Police Department (BPD), it is that that the quality and integrity of officers matters far more the color of their skin or where they live.

Here is what I would say right now to the folks in charge of recruiting officers to the BPD: Worry less about diversity and more about getting men and women into the department who aren’t going to fly off the handle and beat up citizens who verbally provoke them. I would say the same thing to Johns Hopkins if it had a police department.

I am in favor of diversity and trying to recruit more officers from the city. I am against the idea of elected officials from either the state or the city putting pressure of any sort on a law enforcement agency that results in the relaxation of entrance standards. I would like to believe that Del. Glenn feels the same way, but I am not so sure.

Third, let’s keep in mind that Johns Hopkins University and Johns Hopkins Medicine are private institutions. If Del. Glenn believes that private educational and medical institutions need to do more to promote diversity, then pass a law applying to all such institutions. Don’t use a piece of legislation on another topic as an opportunity to extract a commitment from a private institution on how many black employees it will hire.

And here’s what not to do.

City Council Res. No. 18-0073R called for the General Assembly to require that the Johns Hopkins Police Department be approved by ordinance of the City Council to assure proper “oversight” of the department. Based on the track record of the City Council, I can’t think of a worse idea than giving it more agencies to concern itself with. When it comes to trusting someone to stand up and “oversee” a first-class operation, I’ll take Johns Hopkins over the city or state any time.

It is known as looking a gift horse in the mouth.

Of course, there also is the fact a Johns Hopkins Police Department could be a tremendous asset to the city and its citizens. When the proposal was debated in the spring, I suggested that city and state leaders take a field trip to the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. As it happens, we have a good example right up I-95 of the contributions that the police department of a private university can make both to the institution and the city in which it is located.

The University of Pennsylvania has faced many of the same challenges faced by Johns Hopkins in having facilities located in urban neighborhoods. Its police department, founded about 40 years ago, now has about 120 sworn officers, including 13 detectives. The “Penn patrol zone” policed by the department is roughly 2.5 square miles.

By all reasonable accounts, the University of Pennsylvania Police Department has been an invaluable asset both to the university and Philadelphia. As one might expect in a university environment, it is firmly committed to community-oriented policing.

For ten consecutive years Security Magazine has rated it the best department in nation in the “Education (University)” category. The Security Magazine rankings are a benchmark in the industry and use a series of metrics to measure overall performance. There is no reason that an institution with the resources of Johns Hopkins could not emulate that success.

Baltimore is chronically short of money. Johns Hopkins wants to accept the financial burden of policing a small area of the city in the vicinity of its campuses, but the City Council seems determined to look the proverbial gift horse in the mouth.  The council’s action feeds the narrative that it is a poor steward of the taxpayers’ money.

The way forward.

I know that members of the City Council hear from the “all police are bad” element of the Woke Left. The number of citizens in the city who generally distrust police and categorically oppose the formation of another police department is not surprising, given the recent history of the BPD. That antipathy, however, cannot be allowed to discourage reasonable approaches to improving the manner in which the city is policed.

There is a form of provincialism peculiar to Baltimore, which I would describe as applying to this situation as follows: We don’t care what works in Philadelphia; this is Baltimore, and we need a “Baltimore” solution. I hate to be the one to bring this up, but Baltimore solutions aren’t working so well right now, and it might be time to look to other cities for proven ideas.

With about 45,000 employees, Johns Hopkins is by far the largest employer in the city, and its importance to Baltimore is inestimable. That does not mean that it does not have to cooperate with the city and abide by its laws. It does mean that the City Council should not go out of its way to jerk it around. I get the distinct impression that some members of the council get a thrill out of flexing their tiny little political muscles and showing such a large and elite institution who’s “boss.”

I trust that Interim Commissioner Tuggle will ignore the letter from the four members of the council and deploy officers as he deems necessary. When a bill to approve the establishment of a police department by Johns Hopkins is introduced in the next session of the General Assembly, the General Assembly should approve it without allowing it to be derailed by considerations that have nothing to do with its merits.

Once given the authority to establish the department, Johns Hopkins can begin working in earnest with the mayor and police commissioner to develop a program that enhances public safety in the city and that also serves the interests of the students, patients and employees of Johns Hopkins.  The City Council should be consulted and its input considered, but otherwise the council should try to stay out of the way.