Sign up, and we’ll send you the latest issue directly to your inbox!
If the Beat has ever informed you, moved you, or made you feel a deeper connection to our city, we ask you to help us continue this journey. Your generosity keeps our presses running, our journalists digging deep, and our stories reaching every corner of Baltimore.
Baltimore Beat
Black-led, Black-controlled news
A recent viral video of a Baltimore Police officer attempting to run down a young man with his car in Park Heights drew immediate condemnation from city and police department officials, but the practice of Baltimore police officers using their cars as weapons is nothing new.
On October 30, a white Baltimore Police officer, Robert A. Parks, was recorded attempting to run down a young Black man at the intersection of Park Heights and Wylie Avenues, driving erratically on the nearby streets in his pursuit before ultimately crashing into a resident’s fence. Parks has been suspended pending an investigation.
Want the latest issue in your inbox?
“(The officer) told him, ‘Come here,’ for no reason,” Slick Brown, the man who filmed the video, told WBAL. “So, my man said, ‘No,’ so he kept walking, for real. So, he walked through the alley. As soon as he walked into the alley, (the officer) hopped back into the car and started chasing him. Automatic, full speed, trying to hit him and all of that. So, my man started running. He running for his life. He ain’t going to stop, (the officer) was trying to hit him with his car.”
The video is shocking, but it is not unprecedented for BPD officers to use their vehicles as weapons — most notoriously in the case of the Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF), which resulted in 13 officers being charged following a March 2017 indictment of one of the department’s most “elite” squads, but also against dirt bikes and in “rough rides,” which prosecutors alleged led to the fatal injury of Freddie Gray in the back of a police transport vehicle in 2015.
Like the young man in the video, Gray was chased by officers based on the precedent of Illinois v. Wardlow, where the court ruled in 2000 that in a “high crime area,” police have the right to temporarily detain someone who flees from them. But David Jaros, University of Baltimore law professor and 4th Amendment expert, says this case is different.
“If the guy was simply saying, ‘No, I don’t want to stop, I’m going to walk away,’ and didn’t run, then that’s not the kind of flight that would qualify under Wardlow,” Jaros told Baltimore Beat.
“In fact, they took pains in (the ruling on the Wardlow) case to emphasize that it was the flight from the scene, not just his decision to exercise his constitutional rights to sort of walk away and not stop” that justified temporary detention.
It is clear on the video that the man is simply walking away, an action which would not trigger a stop according to Illinois v. Wardlow. WBAL reported that the young man told them he believed the officer wanted to talk to him about a failure to appear warrant for driving without a license, which makes the officer’s violent pursuit more egregious — committing a major vehicular violation to enforce a minor one — even if the standards of Wardlow were met.
“That’s not what we teach our officers to do,” Commissioner Richard Worley said following the incident. Though weaponizing vehicles is not part of the department’s official training, long-standing practices within BPD — not to mention a culture of copaganda car chases — may, in fact, contribute to such incidents.
In March 2014, Sergeant Wayne Jenkins and Officer Ben Frieman, both white, saw a Black man named Demetric Simon at a gas station in Northeast Baltimore. “When I got in my car to pull off, they followed me. I kept on going. They kept on following me. I did a little U turn. They did a U turn,” Simon told the Beat. “I didn’t know who he was. He was in an unmarked car.”
Simon got far enough ahead of the unmarked car to park and get out of his car. He walked through a yard and up onto a porch. Within seconds, Jenkins’s car was bearing down on him, jumping the curb and driving through the yard
“When I looked back and I seen a car in the air, it didn’t leave me with no more time to think,” Simon said. “That motherfucking car fell on me. He started trying to back the car up off me. I had to push my face in the mud so the wheel wouldn’t catch my face, and it caught my ass, spun me around in the mud.”
Simon was in severe pain, and he was terrified that he was paralyzed from the waist down. “I was just walking, and now I’m on the ground and I can’t move,” Simon said. “That’s a 3-ton car.”
Jenkins filed false paperwork, signed by Frieman, that claimed Simon was about to shoot him and Jenkins was forced to use deadly vehicular force in order to save his partner. Then, because Simon didn’t have a gun, Jenkins called another BPD sergeant, his former supervisor Keith Gladstone, to bring a BB gun they could plant on Simon. Aided by Officers Carmine Vignola and Robert Hankard, who helped obtain the air gun, Gladstone drove to the location on Belair Road and planted the air gun under a nearby car.
Though Simon was charged with the gun, he beat his case. “The judge said there’s no procedure to run you over with a 3-ton car,” he recalled.
Parks’ apparent attempt to run down the man in Park Heights seemed to follow a similar strategy: If someone doesn’t stop for you, run them down.
You can’t stop somebody with a car. You can only kill him with a car. You can only run him over with a car.
“As soon as I seen (the video), I thought about me,” Simon said. “There should be no point when he’s jumping in his car and have intentions to stop you with his car. You can’t stop somebody with a car. You can only kill him with a car. You can only run him over with a car.”
The Simon incident wasn’t just an anomaly. It was, for Jenkins, an example to be followed. According to testimony, he later instructed his team to always carry BB guns in case something like that happened — which was likely, given that Jenkins and his team conducted up to 50 “door pops” on a single night, where their car would approach any group of young Black men they saw standing around at a high speed, according to the testimony of GTTF member Maurice Ward. They would slam on the brakes just before hitting the men and pop the doors open, then one cop would jump out to run after whoever fled, while the rest followed in the unmarked car.
“It was just common knowledge that he turned his car into a moving fortress to do what he had to do with it.”
“It was just common knowledge that he turned his car into a moving fortress to do what he had to do with it,” Donny Stepp, a former bail bondsman who testified to committing burglaries and selling cocaine for Jenkins, told the Beat.
Jenkins and his team also frequently engaged in high-speed car chases, which, unsurprisingly, sometimes went awry. Calling the sergeant to come and bring something to plant when it did, in the case of Simon, was in a sense a reprise of a 2010 car chase, where Jenkins called another sergeant for an ounce of heroin he could plant in the car they were chasing after the illegal pursuit led to the death of an elderly man named Elbert Davis Sr.
In 2016, Jenkins and other GTTF members caused a crash near Lexington Market and sat nearby listening to the police radio without rendering aid or even seeing if anyone was harmed, worrying only about being caught.
Other officers have engaged in reckless driving that proved fatal for both those being chased and others who were unfortunate enough to be on the road at the same time, such as a 2013 case when the high-speed chase of a young man named Terrell Young resulted in the deaths of Young and two others.
The old BPD technique of the “rough ride” is another way that BPD officers turn their vehicles into weapons. A rough ride involves putting an unsecured prisoner in the back of a transport van and then driving erratically to sling the prisoner around and harm them. The prosecution of the officers in the Freddie Gray case alleged that they severed Gray’s spine with a rough ride, though that was never proven in court, and video and eye-witness testimony supports an alternate theory that the officers injured Gray either before or as they threw him into the back of the police van. Nevertheless, countless Baltimoreans have suffered through rough rides.
In a 1992 incident, a man named Kenneth Mumaw was falsely arrested, handcuffed, and put unsecured in a van that “proceeded to the Northern District Police Station at a high rate of speed,” according to a lawsuit, in which Mumaw was later awarded $100,000 for his injuries.
In 1997, Jeffrey Alston was paralyzed from the waist down after a trip in a transport wagon. He settled with the city for $6 million. And in 2005, at the height of zero-tolerance policing in Baltimore, a man named Dondi Johnson Sr. was arrested for public urination and thrown in a transport wagon, where he sustained injuries that would also leave him paralyzed. His family was awarded more than $7 million. Though they paid out, the city never acknowledged wrongdoing in these cases.
It’s not surprising that when people protest police violence, as in the cases of Freddie Gray in 2015 and George Floyd in 2020, they will attack empty police cars as symbols of that violence. And, around the country, police officers have used their cars as weapons during protests, including in Los Angeles in October.
Baltimore police officers are certainly aware of the danger of moving vehicles. When officer Connor Murray shot and killed 18-year-old Donnell Rochester in February 2022, it was justified by the department because Rochester’s car was slowly moving forward and Murray stood directly in front of it. In the aftermath of the shooting, BPD claimed in a warrant to search Rochester’s car that the car had hit Murray, and cited attempted murder as probable cause.
Parks, involved in the most recent incident in Park Heights, has not been charged with attempted murder.
According to testimony in the GTTF case, in 2009, when GTTF’s Jemell Rayam shot and killed a man who was sitting in his own car, future Deputy Commissioner Dean Palmere came to the scene and told everyone to say that the man was going to run over Rayam’s partner, so they had to shoot him.
That command echoed through various other cases for years. Palmere, who allegedly gave the excuse to Rayam, worked in the department along with current commissioner Worley. (They were two of the 5 defendants in a recent sex discrimination and retaliation lawsuit brought by a female officer.)
But unlike the other cases, Parks’ weaponization of his departmental vehicle was caught on film. It’s important “to catch it on camera, because normally, I mean, they don’t do nothing about it,” Simon, who was run over by Wayne Jenkins, told the Beat. Despite all the publicity surrounding the case, “I didn’t get no compensation or nothing.” Simon is still fighting for justice in his case.
“It’s going to damage our relationship with the community, which is the thing that we’re trying to build up the most,” Worley said of the video.
Indeed, especially when placed beside the June in-custody death of Dontae Melton, who had approached a police car looking for help. Melton was in the middle of a mental health crisis and approached the car of Officer Gerard Pettiford, whose first response was “Get off of my car.” Then, when a panicked Melton said he needed an ambulance, Pettiford responded “I’m not driving you off nowhere.” In the body camera video, Pettiford appeared to be more concerned with his car than with Melton’s well-being, and later told his sergeant, “at least my doors were locked.” Melton died while 10 officers stood around him waiting for a medic.
Don’t walk away from a police car or it might try to run you over. And don’t approach one asking for help, either.
“It’s like he was just trying to kill my man out the rip,” Slick Brown told WBAL of Parks’ vehicular attack on his friend. “Like he ain’t care about his life or nothing.”
Sign in by entering the code we sent to , or clicking the magic link in the email.
By signing up, you agree to our Terms and Conditions. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
