Is the Baltimore Police Department de-escalating too much? Consent decree judge wants to know

The judge overseeing the Baltimore Police Department’s federal consent decree on Thursday asked what he described as “awkward, and even ugly” question: What about incidents in which police should have used more force, but didn’t? The tangent came nearly two hours into the first quarterly consent decree hearing of 2023. The Police Department is about to enter its seventh year since the court adopted the consent decree, which follows a 2015 U.S. Department of Justice investigation that found widespread unconstitutional and discriminatory policing in the city, particularly in poor, predominantly Black neighborhoods.