Some people are offering a long arrest record as justification for Freddie Gray's death, but at some point, not being in jail with all those arrests points to a failure of the system, and it should be considered whether or not all those arrests were justified if so few led to convictions that he was out on the street. I have not been able to get good info on how many of those arrests led to convictions, but it seems likely that most of them did not, because he was still on the street. Maybe there was poor police work, maybe poor work by the prosecutor, maybe the best defense attorney ever. I expect some cominbination of the above.
There does seem to have been some poor police work on the day Freddie Gray died. What was the probable cause or the articulable suspicion for the initial attempt to detain him in the day he died? Without legal justification for the stop that day, the responsibility of the police goes beyond being slow to call for medical help and errors in their transportation protocols. What was the reason force was used that resulted in the broken neck? Without legal justification for the use of force that day, the police are criminally culpable for the death.
Publicizing a long arrest record without answering the more essential questions seems like a smoke screen to hide the lack of justification for the initial stop the day Freddie Gray died and for the use of force that directly resulted in his death. I think any police department needs to answer these kinds of questions when someone dies in custody.
At the same time, none of this is justification for the rioting, looting, and other criminal activities that some are participating in and claiming a relationship to Gray's death. Leaders in the community should make more concerted efforts to help citizens express and direct their frustrations more productively in ways that would increase police accountability without going beyond the kinds of passive resistance demonstrated by Ghandi and MLK.
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