The Baltimore chapter of the NAACP called for criminal charges against two city police officers who are accused of driving a 16-year-old to a Howard County state park last month and leaving him there without shoes, an incident that leaders said Tuesday might be more commonplace than reported.
Attorney Roland N. Patterson Jr. presented a sworn statement from the teenager, Michael Johnson Jr., and called the pace of an internal police investigation troubling. Patterson has asked Baltimore State's Attorney Patricia C. Jessamy and national NAACP headquarters to review the case.
"This case is not so complicated," said Patterson, flanked at a news conference by Marvin L. "Doc" Cheatham, president of the city NAACP chapter. "There's either an arrest or a kidnapping. We don't think there's any in-between."
Johnson, who did not appear at the news conference, said in a statement that on May 4 he was with friends when he was forced into an unmarked van by officers identified only by badges around their necks who hit him with a nightstick and threw the battery of his cell phone out the window. The officers said he needed to "show them respect" as they drove him down Interstate 95 to Patapsco State Park in Elkridge.
There, he said, he was told to take off his shoes and socks and pushed out of the van. Johnson found a pay phone and called 911, giving an account of the incident to Howard County police, according to a copy of a report obtained by The Baltimore Sun. He reported that his friend, Sean Quinn Woodland, had also been transported by officers from one area of the city to another.
Police said nine-year veteran Milton G. Smith III and six-year veteran Tyrone S. Francis, who are assigned to the department's Violent Crimes Impact Division, are suspended without pay as an internal investigation is completed. The agency's chief spokesman, Anthony Guglielmi, said part of the delay stems from an analysis of DNA evidence, though he declined to say how that evidence factors into the case.
Guglielmi said Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III has "made it very clear that any behavior that undermines the integrity of the agency will not be tolerated here."
Patterson, who acknowledged that Johnson has a juvenile armed robbery conviction, said the officers deserve due process but noted that while not an indictment of the Baltimore Police Department as a whole, the case raises serious questions.
"When an officer of the law is comfortable taking a citizen from his point of origin against his will, to a point elsewhere, we think there's a lot more of that going on," he said.
