City leaders addressed a compiled after-action report on Wednesday morning detailing numerous ways the city was unprepared for the Brooklyn Day block party– an annual event attended by several hundred people that ended with two dead and 28 others, mostly teenagers, injured.
During a press conference on Wednesday, they shared details on how their agencies were moving forward. Acting Police Commissioner Richard Worley shared that disciplinary actions and staff changes are already underway for certain offending BPD members.
The goal of the after-action report is to identify weaknesses in the city’s response along with solutions. “We are setting a path forward with the goal of ensuring every mistake outlined in these reports is never repeated,” said Mayor Brandon Scott, a Democrat who is up for re-election next year.
The shooting happened in the early morning hours of July 2nd at Brooklyn Homes, a housing project in south Baltimore.
The Baltimore Police Department sent in a 100-page report. It found officers in the southern district missed multiple opportunities to respond to the Brooklyn Day party before it became violent. The district was fully staffed and other officers were available to respond, but leadership chose to take a hands-off approach as the Brooklyn Day crowds swelled to nearly 1,000 people.
Acting Commissioner Richard Worley said Wednesday staffing changes are already underway in the southern district, which now has a new major.
“Public Integrity Bureau has already served some members with paid charging papers for different charges during the incident,” said Worley. “And they will investigate those and we will release what happens if anything.” Although he noted they would not release names. He also said there are more investigations to come and noted that “multiple” people received notice they would be under disciplinary investigation before the report was released.
According to the findings, police learned about the event on social media three days before the party but did not make any efforts to learn more or secure more resources. The department did not have anyone live-monitoring social media accounts on the day of the block party according to evidence in the report.
The report’s authors wrote that the perceived indifference could be seen as a “form of bias” by the community, which is predominantly Black.
Large events and “pop-up” events are something the departments deals with regularly, Worley told reporters, and he was frustrated that with 100 officers around the city, none were deployed to the scene.
“That has me scratching my head because we have dealt with incidents, not as large as this, But we deal with incidents every single day since COVID,” he said. “Pop-up parties and things that we don't know about, that we have handled that have never escalated anything like this, and we've dealt with multiple ones since then.”
The Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement, or MONSE, also issued their findings and recommendations. MONSE helps coordinate Safe Streets, a group of unarmed civilian violence interrupters who, according to the report, knew about the Brooklyn Day party for up to a week before it happened. But there was no formal process detailing how those workers should share knowledge about large or potentially unsafe events.
The report includes a proposed policy that would change that; it would require Safe Streets workers to report an event or situation to MONSE violence reduction staff if certain conditions are met.
For instance, if an event has 50 people or more it would be shared with MONSE. “ If there's prior intelligence about the potential for conflict at an upcoming event between, you know, let's say, two groups that potentially have challenges with each other. That's the kind of thing we want escalated,” said interim MONSE director Stefanie Mavronis.
Safe Streets suppressed five conflicts that night, two involved guns although MONSE reported there was no indication there would be an increase of violence. Their report specified that Safe Streets workers regularly mediate conflicts that involve weapons during a typical shift on the job.
Brooklyn Homes is run by the Housing Authority of Baltimore (HABC), who wrote in their report that they had no prior knowledge about the event.
CEO Janet Abrahams said they did not receive any calls to their emergency line before the shooting but she did admit some fault that there wasn’t more effort from the agency to know about the event.
“There were some breakdowns on our part,” Abrahams admitted. “Again, we as a HABC, understand that we should have better communications with our families. We can only do what we can do when it comes to our management team on site. They are the eyes and ears for the agency.”
She clarified that as a public housing agency, they don’t have permanent staff that live on site who would have been around during the evening hours of the party.
“Our staff went home on Friday, at three o'clock. They were not due back to the site until Tuesday morning, eight o'clock,” said Abrahams.
HABC is extending a program to hire private third-party security at all its properties, something it did not have at the time of the party.
Meanwhile, police say the investigation into the shooting is not winding down. The reward for information leading up to an arrest has been increased to $88,000.
Police have made one arrest directly related to the shooting. 18 year-old Tristan Brian Jackson was arrested earlier this month and faces 55 charges related the shooting at the block party including seven counts of attempted murder.
