Retired Officer Jon Pease

16 Feb 2021  - Retired Police Officer Jon Pease passed away after working in his yard at his house at the age of 67. Many of us had the pleasure of working with Jon at the Central, and Southern districts. Others may have known him from his service with Springfield State Hospital, and Maryland transportation Authority. He was a giant that calmed a room just by entering, and what we in Baltimore call "Good Police" if you needed back-up and heard Jon was on the way, you knew you had genuine help on the way. There were times when I told the person I was dealing with, it might be best if he was in cuffs before my back-up arrived, because they don't like resisting an officers commands. If they knew it was Jon, they quickly complied. I was lucky, when I was 23 I joined the Baltimore Police department, I was formerly a welder, so it was a total fish out of water, but with guys like Kenny Byers, Mike Cichowicz and Jon Pease taking me under their wing to show me how to police, they were calling me a 6 month veteran very quickly and I was comfortable on the job and went on to have an excellent career, that was only possible because of the guys in that first squad. Guys Like Mike, Kenny and Jon that cared enough to help a rookie become a veteran We hope when you think of Jon you will think of old school Baltimore Police that believed in his oath to protect the public, always putting his partners, and the public's safety before his own he was one of the 99.9% or the good police everyone wanted to arrive when they were calling for help.. May he rest in peace

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U.S. Supreme Court again protects police accused of excessive force

By Andrew Chung

Oct 18 (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday signaled that it is not retreating from its inclination to grant a legal protection called "qualified immunity" to police accused in lawsuits of using excessive force, ruling in favor of officers on Monday in separate cases from California and Oklahoma.

The justices overturned a lower court's decision allowing a trial in a lawsuit against officers Josh Girdner and Brandon Vick over the 2016 fatal shooting of a hammer-wielding man in Tahlequah, Oklahoma.

They also overturned a lower court's decision to deny a request by police officer Daniel Rivas-Villegas for qualified immunity in a lawsuit accusing him of using excessive force in 2016 while handcuffing a suspect in Union City, California.

The brief rulings were unsigned, with no public dissents among the justices in the cases, both decided without oral arguments.

The qualified immunity defense protects police and other government officials from civil litigation in certain circumstances, permitting lawsuits ONLY when an individual's "clearly established" statutory or constitutional rights have been violated.

The rulings indicated that the justices think lower courts still are denying qualified immunity too frequently in police excessive force cases, having previously chided appeals courts on that issue in recent years.

"These are not the actions of a court that is likely to end or seriously reform qualified immunity," Chris Kemmitt, a lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund civil rights group, wrote on Twitter.

A 2020 Reutersinvestigation revealed how qualified immunity, with the Supreme Court's continual refinements, has made it easier for police officers to kill or injure civilians with impunity.

In the Oklahoma case, police responded to a complaint by the former wife of the slain man, Dominic Rollice, that he was inebriated and in her garage.

Officers told Rollice they were not there to arrest him, but rather to give him a "ride out of there," according to court papers, but he refused to go with them. A lower court found that the officers then advanced on Rollice, prompting him to back up and grab a hammer that he held above his head and refused to drop.

When Rollice appeared to raise the hammer further, Girdner and Vick fired multiple times, killing him. A third officer had decided that the situation called for him to "go less lethal" by putting his firearm in his holster and using his stun gun instead.

Rollice's estate sued Girdner and Vick, accusing them of using excessive force in violation of the U.S. Constitution's Fourth Amendment prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures. The police said they used force because they feared Rollice would charge at them or throw the hammer.

The Denver-based 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2020 denied the officers qualified immunity, finding that they may have unjustifiably escalated the situation. The Supreme Court on Monday declined to decide "whether recklessly creating a situation that requires deadly force can itself violate the Fourth Amendment," instead saying that no prior case had "clearly established" that the officers' actions were illegal.

In the California case, the justices ruled in favor of Rivas-Villegas for the same reason. That case involved the arrest of a man named Ramon Cortesluna at his home. Rivas-Villegas used his foot to push Cortesluna down, and then pressed his knee into the man's back while another officer handcuffed him.

The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last year ruled that Cortesluna's excessive force claim could go to trial, noting that the suspect had been prone and not resisting.

Congressional Democrats have sought to rein in qualified immunity as part of legislation to reform police practices. The House of Representatives passed a Democratic-backed bill that would eliminate qualified immunity for law enforcement, but Senate talks between Democrats and Republicans on police reform collapsed last month.

Reporting by Andrew Chung in New York; Additional reporting by Lawrence Hurley in Washington; Editing by Will Dunham

As usual people, and the press will try to turn this into a free for all allowing police to beat anyone they want. The truth of the matter is, it clearly says permitting lawsuits ONLY when an individual's "clearly established" statutory or constitutional rights have been violated. If an officer clearly violates the law, and clearly violates anyone's civil rights, that officer will be charged departmentally, criminally, and can be charged civilly. When Ken was on, an Internal Investigation could be open by anyone. So if an officer was involved in an altercation with someone and a passerby felt the officer was wrong, that passerby could go to IID and open an investigation. It was not easy on an officer, but the police like anyone, police have the same rights as any other citizen, with limited protections because they would be in court being sued for everything right, or wrong, not only wasting the courts time, but frivolous law suites would cause officers to become less likely to take the risks needed to protect us.  Today we have something Ken's police didn't have in that most agencies have body cameras. These cameras are to protect not only the public from what an officer might do, but and officer from what the public might do, or say. Look how often we hear a side of the story in the news about how an officer was rude, made comments unbecoming an officer, or was abusive and then the tape is rolled and we learn the reporting person lied. Police are human, with that we certainly have a few that should not wear the badge, but we are lucky that 99.9% of all police are good hard working men and women that want nothing more than to protect the public from the evils they see on a day to day basis. People can be cruel to each other, and without police, it would only get worse, just look at how much crime has risen, since the democratic cities have tied their hands. Still they will run toward gun shots while everyone else runs away from it, if they think they will save a life, or catch a bad guy. They put themselves in positions that would hopefully save lives, and when one defends himself, or someone else, it is scrutinized heavily as it should be, but people need to be realistic. We need to never forget the victims of crimes, we need to realize if someone is breaking the law, and decides they want to fight the police, it is a choice they made, not the police, and if our police are lucky enough to win that fight, they will then be investigated for it. Now days their body cam video will be shown, and we need to start saying, like they did when Ken was on, instead of people yelling at the police, (which they did,) but they also yelled to the suspect to give up, they understood that person was fighting the police, and the police just as anyone on this planet when attacked, will fight back. So what is excessive force, it is as easy as it sounds, it is force, that is excessive, if the suspect if fighting the officer can fight back, once the suspect stops fighting the officer also has to stop fighting, there is no parting shot, no get even punch, and once the cuffs are on, if an officer strikes the prisoner, I think everyone on the planet would agree it is cowardous. That goes for other police also, Ken never worked with an officer that felt it was OK to punch a suspect that was in handcuffs. We need to ask ourselves, if our mother was the victim of the subject the officers stopped, would we want them to let him go because he decided he wanted to resist their arrest. Then we have to ask if we were the police, and someone was fighting us, would we just let them go, or would we fight back. Obviously no one wants anyone to have to use force, but I think we all want the police to stop criminals from victimizing our neighborhoods, and this is obvious from the nearly one million, 911 calls most cities receive every year. So, we need police, we need them to do their jobs, we need to understand they have to make arrests, and we need to understand if the suspect they are arresting resists that arrest, the officer has to use force. Not all force is excessive force, and until we know the difference we need to let the courts do their thing. If we have real first hand information that we could testify to in the court against an officer, than we should go to court and testify, if we only have opinions or speculation, we need to sit on it, until we have real facts. Think of it as if you were in their shoes, would you want opinions and made up stories, or real eye witnesses. If an officer breaks the law, and there is real evidence they will be arrested and charged, just like any crime, by any criminal. We all know there are times when there is no evidence, and thank God they don't make arrests anyway, imagine if someone thought you did something and you didn't, would you want to be arrested just because everyone thinks you did it. We need to be realistic and stop hating without proof. 

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On this day in our Driscoll family history, 20 June 1631, Baltimore [Ireland] fell victim to a what has become known as a horrendous attack by pirates on the sleeping village of Baltimore known as "The Sack of Baltimore". At that time among the O'Driscoll family that lived in the village where a population of settlers from England who had arrived some years earlier to work the lucrative pilchard fishery under lease from the O'Driscoll chieftain, Sir Fineen O'Driscoll. Piracy was rife along the shores of West Cork, much of it of a home-grown variety; indeed the settlement's founder, Thomas Crooke, stood accused of involvement himself. However, the danger, in this case, was from much farther afield.

After the day's work for the adults and the days play for the children they all went to bed thinking it was just another night in Baltimore. However, thanks to a captive named John Hackett who was out to save his own neck he knew the original target was Kinsale, but Hackett declared the harbor there 'too hot' to enter and in return for his freedom he offered to take Reis to a defenseless village of fishermen known as Baltimore. Undetected, the pirates anchored outside the harbor no more than a musket shot from Baltimore's beaches. Late in the evening of 20 June, they launched an attack on the sleeping town and before the dawn of the next day they had begun torching the thatched roofs of the houses and carrying off with both young and old whom they took from their beds. Moving on to the main village, the pirates took more captives before musket fire and the beating of drums alerted the remaining villagers and persuaded Reis to end the raid. By that time more than 100 men, women, and children had been taken. They were herded back to the ships, that took them away from the coves of West Cork and into the slave markets of North Africa.

The raid on Baltimore, immortalized in verse by the poet Thomas Davis, was the worst-ever attack by Barbary corsairs on the mainland of Ireland or Britain. Most of the names in the official report sound English, but it is likely that there were also a few native Irish among the prisoners and quite obvious O'Driscoll's were living among the fishermen in the town that were taken. Driscoll women married settlers and took their names. So where they could they kept the public from knowing Driscoll's were also the victims of the raid, but in the poem, there is a line after stabbing an attacker to death and some say perhaps taking her own life to avoid capture. comes the line "The maid that Bandon gallant sought is chosen for the Dey:  She's safe — he’s dead — she stabbed him in the midst of his Serai!  And when to die a death of fire that noble maid they bore,  She only smiled, O'Driscoll’s child; she thought of Baltimore…" This was believed to be in reference to one of the victims who had a maiden name of O'Driscoll, fighting back to kill her attacker and then take her own life.

Initially, O'Driscoll kept the names of his family off the list. Whether it was the embarrassment that his family were taken so easily, or to prevent others from getting ideas about kidnapping his family, we'll never know. But what we do know, is that three women were recorded as having been ransomed it is unknown how many others were ransomed O'Driscoll wasn't interested in admitting his sir name were taken he certainly wasn't going to admit to paying for their return. It is unknown what happened to the kidnapped men women and children, but for many, it would have been to end their days as galley slaves or concubines in the harems of Algiers.

For his part, John Hackett was arrested and hanged on a clifftop outside the village.

The Sack of Baltimore has been a feeding frenzy for conspiracy theories. They generally point the finger at the rapacious Sir Walter Coppinger who had been seeking to take the village from the O'Driscolls, oust the settlers and secure it for himself. Whether by accident or by design, the pirates carried out part of Coppinger's plan for him. As in the aftermath of the raid, the surviving villagers moved further inland to Skibbereen and elsewhere in search of greater security and Coppinger's plans for the village were realized. The Sack marked the end of the 400-year reign of the O'Driscolls as overlords of Baltimore, they went from Kings and fisherman to slaves but they never gave up and eventually.

The O'Driscoll's lands once stretched over a thousand square miles between the Kenmare and the Bandon rivers, ruled over by a king O'Driscoll. By 1200 their domain was a  coastal strip between Castlehaven and Roaringwater Bay.

They built nine castles around Baltimore. Dun na Sead, the fort of the jewels, is in the village; Dun na Long, the fort of the ships, is on Sherkin Island; Dun na Oir, the fort of gold, is on Cape Clear, and the other castles of Cloghane on the island in Lough Ine, Donegal at Reengaroga, Oldcourt, Castlehaven, Ardagh and Rincolisky at Whitehall. Ruins worth seeing include Baltimore, Cape Clear, and Sherkin Island.

Fineen O'Driscoll, the Rover, was the most well-known member of the O'Driscoll clan for both good and bad that he may have done to get what he had. At the end of the 16th century, he was the lord of Baltimore. He worked for the English by confiscating Spanish ships and was knighted in 1587.

It is said that when he died, he died lonely and poor

https://youtu.be/0mC70WvEdz4

In the Thomas Davis Poem, The Sack of Baltimore Davis Speculates about the fate of one of the women captives, in this verse a young man from Brandon - a "Gallant" was due to marry a woman named O'Driscoll. But she was abducted to Algiers, where the governing Dey selected her as his serai or harem:

His O'Driscoll's fate would have been particularly grisly. In the method of execution, victims were tied to a stake and surrounded by a bonfire. The heat of which would roast them slowly, cooking them the way a pig or other food is roasted over a fire. O'Driscoll's child would have hardly had anything to smile about.

The maid that Bandon gallant sought is chosen for the Dey: 
She was to marry a Gallant from Brandon - was chosen by the pirate for the Dey
She's safe — he’s dead — she stabbed him in the midst of his Serai! 
She is safe - there would be no way of being safe by killing the Gov, but if she killed a pirate she would be safe for the time being… especially if the pirate went to rape her as they raped and pillaged the town.
And when to die a death of fire that noble maid they bore, 
She may have now been in her home as the rooftops were lit on fire, and burned to the ground
She only smiled, O'Driscoll’s child; she thought of Baltimore…
So while she was dying, we can all agree she didn't smile, unless she lost her mind; but for the sake of Davis, let's try to find a reason she may have smiled. She could smile knowing she killed her attacker or knowing she wasn't taken as a prisoner, wouldn't be raped and was dying in her homeland of Baltimore. So while I doubt, she smiled, there were reasons to smile knowing she beat a terrible life of rape, beatings, and torture.

 It could also just be that Davis found the best words he could to make a rhyme and include an O'Driscoll in his poem. But, there was widespread belief that O'Driscolls were taken, but their names kept off the lists by Sir Fineen O'Driscoll to prevent future raids and future ransoms. 

Some say the story might be fiction as there were no cases of an Algerine Governor being stabbed by their harem slave. It has also been pointed out that there were no O'Driscoll's on the list of abductees. But, then again very few of the women taken were actually named and none of the married women named were provided with maiden names. It is not only possible but likely that one or more of the townspeople would have been an O'Driscoll and that Davis based his poem on oral tradition. There were a lot more stories told by town's people that were handed down over generations, more of those stories than stories that were recorded. Also, much of what was recorded was controlled. Davis suggests the noble young woman from Baltimore were selected as sexual playthings by rich powerful men, and he was absolutely right.

As for O'Driscoll killing the Governor, if it was a Governor and not a pirate than just as Sir O'Driscoll wasn't interested in announcing that his family was among those taken I am sure an Algiers Governor being killed by a slave wouldn't make front page news. But we could be reading this all the wrong way, the fire we see could have been on the night of the raid, and the life taken, could very well have been her own, smiling because she escaped capture, escaped having been raped, sold worked till death.

When Europeans Were Slaves: Research Suggests White Slavery Was Much More Common Than Previously Believed

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Editor's note (3/21/20): For an update on this story, visit:

Why is a 16-year-old book on slavery so popular now?

A new study suggests that a million or more European Christians were enslaved by Muslims in North Africa between 1530 and 1780 – a far greater number than had ever been estimated before.

In a new book, Robert Davis, professor of history at Ohio State University, developed a unique methodology to calculate the number of white Christians who were enslaved along Africa’s Barbary Coast, arriving at much higher slave population estimates than any previous studies had found.

Most other accounts of slavery along the Barbary coast didn’t try to estimate the number of slaves, or only looked at the number of slaves in particular cities, Davis said. Most previously estimated slave counts have thus tended to be in the thousands, or at most in the tens of thousands. Davis, by contrast, has calculated that between 1 million and 1.25 million European Christians were captured and forced to work in North Africa from the 16th to 18th centuries.

Davis’s new estimates appear in the book Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500-1800 (Palgrave Macmillan).

Robert Davis

“Much of what has been written gives the impression that there were not many slaves and minimizes the impact that slavery had on Europe,” Davis said. “Most accounts only look at slavery in one place, or only for a short period of time. But when you take a broader, longer view, the massive scope of this slavery and its powerful impact become clear.”

Davis said it is useful to compare this Mediterranean slavery to the Atlantic slave trade that brought black Africans to the Americas. Over the course of four centuries, the Atlantic slave trade was much larger – about 10 to 12 million black Africans were brought to the Americas. But from 1500 to 1650, when trans-Atlantic slaving was still in its infancy, more white Christian slaves were probably taken to Barbary than black African slaves to the Americas, according to Davis.

“One of the things that both the public and many scholars have tended to take as given is that slavery was always racial in nature – that only blacks have been slaves. But that is not true,” Davis said. “We cannot think of slavery as something that only white people did to black people.”

During the time period Davis studied, it was religion and ethnicity, as much as race, that determined who became slaves.

“Enslavement was a very real possibility for anyone who traveled in the Mediterranean, or who lived along the shores in places like Italy, France, Spain and Portugal, and even as far north as England and Iceland,” he said.

Pirates (called corsairs) from cities along the Barbary Coast in north Africa – cities such as Tunis and Algiers – would raid ships in the Mediterranean and Atlantic, as well as seaside villages to capture men, women and children. The impact of these attacks were devastating – France, England, and Spain each lost thousands of ships, and long stretches of the Spanish and Italian coasts were almost completely abandoned by their inhabitants. At its peak, the destruction and depopulation of some areas probably exceeded what European slavers would later inflict on the African interior.

Although hundreds of thousands of Christian slaves were taken from Mediterranean countries, Davis noted, the effects of Muslim slave raids was felt much further away: it appears, for example, that through most of the 17th century the English lost at least 400 sailors a year to the slavers.

Even Americans were not immune. For example, one American slave reported that 130 other American seamen had been enslaved by the Algerians in the Mediterranean and Atlantic just between 1785 and 1793.

Davis said the vast scope of slavery in North Africa has been ignored and minimized, in large part because it is on no one’s agenda to discuss what happened.

The enslavement of Europeans doesn’t fit the general theme of European world conquest and colonialism that is central to scholarship on the early modern era, he said. Many of the countries that were victims of slavery, such as France and Spain, would later conquer and colonize the areas of North Africa where their citizens were once held as slaves. Maybe because of this history, Western scholars have thought of the Europeans primarily as “evil colonialists” and not as the victims they sometimes were, Davis said.

Davis said another reason that Mediterranean slavery has been ignored or minimized has been that there have not been good estimates of the total number of people enslaved. People of the time – both Europeans and the Barbary Coast slave owners – did not keep detailed, trustworthy records of the number of slaves. In contrast, there are extensive records that document the number of Africans brought to the Americas as slaves.

So Davis developed a new methodology to come up with reasonable estimates of the number of slaves along the Barbary Coast. Davis found the best records available indicating how many slaves were at a particular location at a single time. He then estimated how many new slaves it would take to replace slaves as they died, escaped or were ransomed.

“The only way I could come up with hard numbers is to turn the whole problem upside down – figure out how many slaves they would have to capture to maintain a certain level,” he said. “It is not the best way to make population estimates, but it is the only way with the limited records available.”

Putting together such sources of attrition as deaths, escapes, ransomings, and conversions, Davis calculated that about one-fourth of slaves had to be replaced each year to keep the slave population stable, as it apparently was between 1580 and 1680. That meant about 8,500 new slaves had to be captured each year. Overall, this suggests nearly a million slaves would have been taken captive during this period. Using the same methodology, Davis has estimated as many as 475,000 additional slaves were taken in the previous and following centuries.

The result is that between 1530 and 1780 there were almost certainly 1 million and quite possibly as many as 1.25 million white, European Christians enslaved by the Muslims of the Barbary Coast.

Davis said his research into the treatment of these slaves suggests that, for most of them, their lives were every bit as difficult as that of slaves in America.

“As far as daily living conditions, the Mediterranean slaves certainly didn’t have it better,” he said.

While African slaves did grueling labor on sugar and cotton plantations in the Americas, European Christian slaves were often worked just as hard and as lethally – in quarries, in heavy construction, and above all rowing the corsair galleys themselves.

Davis said his findings suggest that this invisible slavery of European Christians deserves more attention from scholars.

“We have lost the sense of how large enslavement could loom for those who lived around the Mediterranean and the threat they were under,” he said. “Slaves were still slaves, whether they are black or white, and whether they suffered in America or North Africa.”

'Tonight, we pray': Baltimore police officer on life support after being dragged two blocks

Baltimore police officer on life support after being dragged two blocks

By: WMAR Staff
Posted at 8:44 PM, Jun 28, 2022
and last updated 11:13 PM, Jun 28, 2022

BALTIMORE — A Baltimore City police sergeant is fighting to survive.

Police said an officer was attempting a traffic stop around 8 p.m. Tuesday in the 5200 block of Park Heights Avenue, got engaged with the car and was dragged two blocks.

The sergeant, whose name was not released, was taken to Shock Trauma where the officer is on life support.

"He is critically ill and on full life support," Dr. Thomas Scalea said. "Our diagnostic studies are ongoing. He will be headed to intensive care unit in the not-so-distant future."

Police said the officer was doing what he should have been doing when he stopped the car.

Commissioner Michael Harrison said that once the officer got to the stopped car, the driver hit the gas and continue to drag the sergeant before ramming into another car.

"The officer was doing exactly what we want, being out there proactive, making sure citizens are being protected, finding people who are doing harm and making sure the Northwest district is a safe place," Harrison said. "Tonight, we pray and we ask you for your prayers for one of our sergeants who is recovering, but here at Shock Trauma."

The driver took off, and has not been arrested.

Police said they are following leads from witnesses.

"We are in pursuit of leads for a suspect, and those leads are good leads. Detectives are pursuing those leads as we speak," Harrison said. "I would ask that everyone join us in their thoughts and prayers for our sergeant who is in Shock Trauma."

Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott said the sergeant on duty was at that location on Park Heights Avenue for good reason.

"I hear a lot about what our police officers in Baltimore aren't doing and what they won't do," Mayor Scott. "What we have tonight is a sergeant who is on life support because he was doing exactly what he should have been doing. If you have ever been to the 5200 block of Park Heights, you have seen the violence there and you know exactly why he was there."

No other information was provided.

Mayor Scott asks everyone in Baltimore to keep the officer in their thoughts and prayers.

"We need everyone in Baltimore to pray for this sergeant's recovery, for his family and for the members of our department and our city," Mayor Scott said. "Put your thoughts and prayers behind this officer. We continue to have people who have no regard for anyone's life. We will find this person and bring this to justice."

Copyright 2022 Scripps Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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Starting Friday, the Maryland State Police will officially begin patrolling Interstate 83 from the Baltimore County line to Fayette Street.

The troopers will handle criminal and traffic enforcement on the Jones Falls Expressway and a small portion of President Street. The troopers are part of an effort to bring more state and federal law enforcement support into the city, which is struggling with a shortage of police officers amid a rising crime rate and a competitive labor market.

Meanwhile, the Maryland Transportation Authority Police will conduct criminal and traffic enforcement along Route 295 within the city limits. The Maryland Capitol Police will assist both the state police and MDTA police along both roadways.

Maryland State Police to expand enforcement on I-83

Baltimore City Police Force. The first State agency to exercise police powers was the Baltimore City Police Force. Established in 1867 under a Board of Police Commissioners, the Force was elected by the General Assembly (Chapter 367, Acts of 1867). Baltimore had been developing a police force since the formation in 1784 of a night watch "very necessary to prevent fires, burglaries, and other outrages and disorders" (Chapter 69, Acts of 1784). Its police force, from 1867, was governed by a State board although jurisdiction was limited to the City. From 1900 to 1920, the Board of Police Commissioners was appointed by the Governor. After 1920, a single Police Commissioner of Baltimore City was chosen and also served on the Governor's Advisory Council. The Baltimore City Police Department remained under State governance until 1978, when the Mayor began to appoint the Police Commissioner, subject to confirmation by the City Council (Chapter 920, Acts of 1976).

In 1909, the Board of Police Commissioners of Baltimore City urged the creation of a State detective force since the Governor, the Fire Marshal, and State's Attorneys in the counties frequently sought help from Baltimore City's expert investigators. The first tentative step towards a statewide police force, however, was taken in 1914 as a corps of motorcycle officers under the Commissioner of Motor Vehicles began to enforce motor vehicle laws throughout Maryland (Chapter 564, Acts of 1914).

Personal Notes: Administrative page, in hidden page/folder, if you found this page, please exit and visit the authors page(s)
This page is for administrative use as notes, and or research for future historical references

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Captain Charles W. Gittings

Captain Charles Gittings took his life on 11 September 1916 after a long illness. He had retired from the job on 18 December 1911 after a successful career. May he rest in peace

Tombstone History

In 1877, the City of Tombstone was founded by Ed Schieffelin. At the time, there was a scouting voyage in Tombstone against the Chiricahua (chir-i-cow-uh) Apaches. 

Ed was part of this mission and was staying at a place called Camp Huachuca (wa-chu-ka) During his stay, he would leave the camp to look for rocks within the wilderness despite the fact that fellow soldiers at his camp warned him not to.

The soldiers told him that he wouldn’t find stones out in the wilderness and would only eventually find his own tombstone. Fortunately, for Ed, he did not find his tombstone, but he did find something: silver.

Taking the advice his fellow soldiers gave him, his very first mine was named The Tombstone.

Word quickly spread about his silver strike. It wasn’t long before homesteaders, cowboys, speculators, prospectors, lawyers, business people and gunmen headed to the area. Known as Goose Flats back then, a town site was situated near the mines in 1879 and was named Tombstone due to the first claim of silver mining by Ed Schiefflelin.

The popular in Tombstone increased to approximately 7,500 by the mid-1880s. However, this figure only consisted of the white males over the age of 21 that were registered vote. The figure that consists of women, children and other ethnicities, the population was at least 15,000 and possibly as much as 20,000. Tombstone was considered to be between San Francisco and St. Louis as the fastest populating city. Tombstone was home to more than 100 saloons, a multitude of eateries, a huge red-light district, a larger popular of Chinese, newspapers, churches, schools, and one of the original Arizona community swimming pools, which is still being used today.

2 years later at the end of 1881 on October 26, the Earp Brothers and the Clanton-McLaury gang tore it up in the O. K. Coral making Tombstone, the Earp brothers, Doc Holliday and the Clanton-McLaury famous

Gunfight at the O.K. Corral

October 26, 1881

On the cold afternoon of October 26, 1881, four men in long black coats strode purposefully down the dusty Fremont Street. Around the corner, in a narrow vacant lot behind the O.K. Corral, waited six cowboys. In a fateful thirty seconds, nearly thirty shots were fired at close range. The gunbattle between the Earps – lead by Marshal Virgil Earp, his brothers Wyatt and Morgan and their friend, Doc Holliday – and the Clanton-McLaury gang left Billy Clanton and the McLaury brothers dead and Virgil, Morgan, and Doc wounded.

Here's a few great stories of Tombstone from a Baltimore newspaper 1929 just 50 years after it was founded in 1879

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Terry vs Ohio

The Terry case involved an incident that took place on October 31, 1963, in Cleveland, Ohio. Police officer Martin McFadden was on duty in downtown Cleveland and noticed two men standing on a street corner. One of the men, John W. Terry, walked down the street, stopped in front of a certain store and looked through its window, then briefly continued on before turning around and returning to where he started, stopping on his way back to look in the store window again. The other man, Richard Chilton, then did the same. McFadden watched the pair repeat this routine about a dozen times. A third man then joined Terry and Chilton and the three walked up the street together toward the store. McFadden suspected that the men had been "casing" the store in preparation for robbing it, so he followed and confronted them. He asked the men's names, but they gave noncommittal mumbling answers. McFadden then grabbed Terry and Chilton, spun them around, patted down their exterior clothing, and discovered that they both had pistols in their jacket pockets.

McFadden arrested Terry and Chilton, and they were charged in the Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas with illegally carrying concealed weapons. At trial, Terry's lawyer filed a motion to suppress the evidence of the discovered pistol, arguing that the "frisk" had been a violation of the Fourth Amendment and therefore the pistol McFadden discovered during it should have been excluded from evidence under the exclusionary rule. The trial judge denied his motion on the basis that the "stop-and-frisk" was generally presumed legal, and Terry was convicted. He appealed to the Ohio District Court of Appeals, which affirmed his conviction, then appealed to the Supreme Court of Ohio, which dismissed his appeal. He then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which agreed to hear his case and granted certiorari.

Supreme Court decision

On June 10, 1968, the Supreme Court issued an 8–1 decision against Terry that upheld the constitutionality of the "stop-and-frisk" procedure as long as the police officer performing it has a "reasonable suspicion" that the targeted person is about to commit a crime, has committed a crime, or is committing a crime, and may be "armed and presently dangerous".

Opinion of the Court

Chief Justice Earl Warren,

The author of the majority opinion in Terry

 

Eight justices formed the majority and joined an opinion written by chief justice Earl Warren. The Court began by accepting Terry's arguments, which Ohio had disputed, that policeman McFadden's stopping, questioning, and frisking of Terry and Chilton constituted actual "searches" and "seizures" under the Fourth Amendment. But the Court ruled that the Fourth Amendment "searches" and "seizures" that occurred during a "stop-and-frisk" were not "unreasonable" under the Amendment's first clause. Both the initial "stop" and the subsequent "frisk" were so "limited" and "brief" that a lesser justification sufficed, rather than requiring the police to have probable cause beforehand.

If this case involved police conduct subject to the Warrant Clause of the Fourth Amendment, we would have to ascertain whether "probable cause" existed to justify the search and seizure which took place. However, that is not the case. We do not retreat from our holdings that the police must, whenever practicable, obtain advance judicial approval of searches and seizures through the warrant procedure, or that in most instances failure to comply with the warrant requirement can only be excused by exigent circumstances. But we deal here with an entire rubric of police conduct—necessarily swift action predicated upon the on-the-spot observations of the officer on the beat—which historically has not been, and as a practical matter could not be, subjected to the warrant procedure. Instead, the conduct involved in this case must be tested by the Fourth Amendment's general proscription against unreasonable searches and seizures.

— Terry, 392 U.S. at 20 (citations omitted).

Reasoning that police officers' need to protect themselves outweighed the limited intrusions involved, the Court ruled that officers could "stop" a person if they had "reasonable suspicion" that criminal activity was afoot, and could then "frisk" the person who was stopped if they had "reasonable suspicion" that the person was "armed and presently dangerous." Neither intrusion required that police have the higher level of "probable cause" that would be needed to arrest or to conduct a full search. The Court defined this new, lesser standard of "reasonable suspicion" as being less than "probable cause" but more than just a hunch, stating that "the police officer must be able to point to specific and articulable facts which, taken together with rational inferences from those facts, reasonably warrant [the] intrusion."

Our evaluation of the proper balance that has to be struck in this type of case leads us to conclude that there must be a narrowly drawn authority to permit a reasonable search for weapons for the protection of the police officer, where he has reason to believe that he is dealing with an armed and dangerous individual, regardless of whether he has probable cause to arrest the individual for a crime. The officer need not be absolutely certain that the individual is armed; the issue is whether a reasonably prudent man in the circumstances would be warranted in the belief that his safety or that of others was in danger. And in determining whether the officer acted reasonably in such circumstances, due weight must be given, not to his inchoate and unparticularized suspicion or "hunch," but to the specific reasonable inferences which he is entitled to draw from the facts in light of his experience.

— Terry, 392 U.S. at 27 (footnotes and citations omitted).

The Court held that this "reasonable suspicion" standard must apply to both the initial stop and the frisk. First, it said that a police officer must have reasonable suspicion to stop a suspect in the first place. Second, it held that an officer could then "frisk" a stopped suspect if he or she had reasonable suspicion that the suspect was armed and dangerous, or if, in the officer's experience, the suspected criminal activity was of a type that was "likely" to involve weapons. The officer's "frisk" could only be for the sole purpose of ensuring the suspect was not armed, and so had to be limited to a pat-down of the suspect's outer clothing.

The Court then applied these legal principles to McFadden's actions with Terry and found that they comported with the "reasonable suspicion" standard. McFadden had years of experience as a policeman and was able to articulate the observations that led him to suspect that Terry and the other men were preparing to rob the store. Since McFadden reasonably suspected that the men were preparing for armed robbery, he reasonably suspected that Terry was armed, and so his frisk of Terry's clothing was permissible and did not violate Terry's Fourth Amendment rights. 

The Court ended its opinion by framing the issue very narrowly, saying the question it was answering was "whether it is always unreasonable for a policeman to seize a person and subject him to a limited search for weapons unless there is probable cause for an arrest." In answer to this limited question, the Court said it was not. It ruled that when an American policeman observes "unusual conduct which leads him reasonably to conclude in light of his experience that criminal activity may be afoot and that the persons with whom he is dealing may be armed and presently dangerous", it is not a violation of the Fourth Amendment for the policeman to conduct a "stop-and-frisk" of the people he suspects.

Concurring opinion of Justice White

Justice White joined the opinion of the Court but suggested that

There is nothing in the Constitution which prevents a policeman from addressing questions to anyone on the streets. Absent special circumstances, the person approached may not be detained or frisked but may refuse to cooperate and go on his way. However, given the proper circumstances, such as those in this case, it seems to me the person may be briefly detained against his will while pertinent questions are directed to him. Of course, the person stopped is not obliged to answer, answers may not be compelled, and refusal to answer furnishes no basis for an arrest, although it may alert the officer to the need for continued observation.

With regard to the lack of obligation to respond when detained under circumstances of Terry, this opinion came to be regarded as persuasive authority in some jurisdictions, and the Court cited these remarks in dicta in Berkemer v. McCarty, 468 U.S. 420 (1984), at 439. However, in Hiibel v. Sixth Judicial District Court of Nevada, 542 U.S. 177 (2004), the Court held that neither of these remarks was controlling in a situation where a state law required a detained person to identify himself.

Dissenting opinion of Justice Douglas

Justice William O. Douglas strongly disagreed with permitting a stop and search absent probable cause:

We hold today that the police have greater authority to make a 'seizure' and conduct a 'search' than a judge has to authorize such action. We have said precisely the opposite over and over again.

To give the police greater power than a magistrate is to take a long step down the totalitarian path. Perhaps such a step is desirable to cope with modern forms of lawlessness. But if it is taken, it should be the deliberate choice of the people through a constitutional amendment.