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.
All I saw was an act of self-defense! It looks like the”Stand Down”law to me…
Surely there should be absolutely no arrests in this version of the”Stand Down”law, right America?