Baltimore City Council members call for quarterly reports on issued citations
BALTIMORE -- Several members of the Baltimore City Council are calling for oversight of the city's Citation Docket by introducing a bill that would require city agencies to give quarterly reports on the citations issued.
The bill, introduced at Monday night's Baltimore City Council meeting, calls for accountability and oversight of the citation docket that was launched last year by Baltimore City State's Attorney Ivan Bates.
"When we're talking about implementing programs, they should be data-driven, they should have metrics that show that this is an effective strategy to reach the goal that we're setting out to do," Baltimore City Councilman Kristerfer Burnett said.
The docket seeks to crack down on quality of life offenses, like dirt bike riding, loitering and drinking in public, by issuing citations instead of making arrests and giving the offenders a chance to complete community service to have their charge dismissed.
Burnett, who introduced the bill Monday night, said he and other councilmembers have concerns about how it is implemented.
"The concern was how are we implementing this, particularly when we're under a consent decree for a pattern and practice of inequitable policing?" Burnett said.
He says that there needs to be more oversight on how the offenses are recorded.
"A lot of issues have arisen around things like incomplete and missing citations," Burnett said. "We learned in the last hearing that Latino residents are being labeled as White because the document literally doesn't have a space for Latino or any other races."
WJZ reached out to Baltimore State's Attorney Ivan Bates' Office to see how he feels about the bill that was introduced.
We received a statement from a spokesperson that said:
"There is no legitimate reason to drag prosecutors into a hearing when they aren't the ones engaging residents or issuing citations, which is where all of his issues are. Our prosecutors are overworked and underpaid, and this would simply be wrong and a waste of their precious time. His proposed legislation seems more like a backdoor to ensure the police do not enforce the laws when he could just repeal them."
Also on Monday night, the City Council introduced another bill that would give the city the power to pursue legal action against the owner of the Dali cargo ship.
The Council President tells us the bill is just an administrative step in the long process of rebuilding the Key Bridge.
