Baltimore asks Justice Department to review police practices

Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake on Wednesday called on federal investigators to look into whether the city's beleaguered police department has a pattern of using excessive force or discriminatory policing.

She said that even though complaints of excessive force and lawsuits alleging misconduct have gone down over the last few years, "we all know that Baltimore has a fractured relationship with community."

Her request came a day after new Attorney General Loretta Lynch visited the city.

In response to the mayor's call for a federal investigation, the Justice Department released a statement saying that it would consider launching one. “The attorney general is actively considering that option in light of what she heard from law enforcement, city officials and community, faith and youth leaders in Baltimore yesterday,” the statement said.

Baltimore saw days of unrest after Freddie Gray, a black man, was taken into custody on April 12 and suffered spinal injuries. He died a week later. After his funeral on April 27, protesters threw bottles and bricks at police, injuring dozens of officers. More than 200 people were arrested as cars and businesses burned.

The Justice Department is already investigating whether Gray’s civil rights were violated, and six officers face charges in his arrest and death, ranging from assault to second-degree murder.

The new investigation that Rawlings-Blake called for would be similar to the one that was conducted in Ferguson, Missouri, after the shooting death of an unarmed black teen by a white police officer.

Such wide-ranging investigations look for patterns of discrimination in a police department. They can examine how officers use force and search and arrest suspects.

Baltimore City Council President Jack Young has been calling for such an investigation since October, said his spokesman Lester Davis.

"The only way we're going to get the kind of lasting and meaningful reforms that are going to produce results is through a full-scale civil rights investigation," Davis said.

At the time the Ferguson inquiry was announced in September, it was described as part of a broader Justice Department effort to investigate troubled police departments and, where pervasive problems are found, direct changes to be made. The Justice Department said at the time that it has investigated 20 police departments for systemic misconduct in the past five years, more than twice the number of cases opened in the previous five years.

The investigations can sometimes result in a settlement known as a consent decree, in which a police department agrees to make specific changes and an outside monitor is appointed to make sure the police force complies with the agreement.

The Justice Department reached a court-supervised agreement in 2012 with the New Orleans Police Department that required the agency to overhaul its policies and procedures for use of force, training, interrogations, searches and arrests, recruitment and supervision.

In April the Justice Department issued a harshly critical report of the police department in Albuquerque, New Mexico, that faulted the agency for a pattern of excessive force and called for an overhaul of its internal affairs unit.

Al Jazeera and The Associated Press