MECHANICS WANTED
Chairman of Baltimore City Police Review Commission, appointed by Mayor Pugh, refuses lawful order of an officer to provide license and registration SIXTY times during a traffic stop. – From The Baltimore Sun
In a tense traffic stop in East Baltimore last month, the chairman of a panel appointed to improve civilian oversight of the police department refused at least 60 requests for his license and registration. Marvin McKenstry, the chairman of the Civilian Oversight Task Force, argued the stop was unlawful.
The encounter, captured on police body-camera footage obtained by The Baltimore Sun this week through a Public Information Act request, drew at least four officers to the 200 block of Aisquith St. on the afternoon of April 13 — not long after McKenstry had left a downtown hearing on the city’s consent decree with the Justice Department in U.S. District Court.
McKenstry repeatedly asks fellow oversight panel member Danielle Kushner, whom he has just dropped off, to “call Ed,” and later addressed someone on the phone in the midst of the traffic stop as “Colonel.”
Police spokesman T.J. Smith confirmed that McKenstry reached out during the stop to Inspector General Ed Jackson, a former colonel who served on the oversight panel with McKenstry and Kushner before rejoining the police department in February to oversee its Office of Constitutional and Impartial Policing.
Smith said McKenstry’s outreach to Jackson “didn’t have any bearing on the outcome of the traffic stop.” McKenstry was given five citations totaling $500 in fines. MORE
