Police Commissioner Bealefeld: Downtown beating not a hate crime

Police chief warns of racial tensions over a crime he says was ‘drunken opportunistic criminality’

By Justin Fenton (The Baltimore Sun, 4/10/2012)

Baltimore’s top cop on Tuesday warned against “race-baiting” amid rising tensions across the nation, citing the Trayvon Martin case and cautioning that a video generating outrage on the Internet of a tourist being beaten and stripped in downtown Baltimore doesn’t appear to depict a hate crime.

Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III, appearing on WBAL’s C4 program, said the attack on a 31-year-old Arlington, Va. Caucasian man appears to be nothing beyond “drunken opportunistic criminality.” The comment came in response to a caller who said if the victim were African-American and the assailants white, civil rights leaders would be descending on Baltimore and the attackers would be charged with a hate crime.

Bealefeld, the white police commissioner of majority-black Baltimore, warned against “fear-mongering.”

“There’s no doubt it’s a crime. We need to vigorously hold criminals accountable, and we have to be careful not to be pulled into this race-baiting,” he said.

“I want to caution people, because, I think there will be ample national noise as we progress through the Trayvon Martin and the [Oklahoma shooting] cases,” Bealefeld continued. “As these things get going, I will urge caution of Baltimoreans to distinguish between criminality and racially motivated crime.”

Continue reading at The Baltimore Sun.

This entry was posted in 2010s, Baltimorons, Crime, Inner City. Bookmark the permalink.

2 Responses to Police Commissioner Bealefeld: Downtown beating not a hate crime

  1. C. Nat Hardy says:

    All I saw was an act of self-defense! It looks like the”Stand Down”law to me…

  2. C. Nat Hardy says:

    Surely there should be absolutely no arrests in this version of the”Stand Down”law, right America?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.