Baltimore City’s State’s Attorney Ivan Bates touted the growing citation docket during a Thursday city budget hearing before the council’s Ways and Means Committee.
The citation docket refers to the program, which Bates campaigned on in his bid for City’s State’s Attorney in 2022, wherein police write citations for low-level nonviolent offenses such as loitering, open containers, or disorderly conduct. Rather than face incarceration, defendants who complete community service and can have their charges dropped.
Bates said his team has been working with officers from police divisions around the city to train them on how to issue enforceable citations. That training has ramped up this spring, he described. There’s even a phone app through Axon, a non-lethal police weapons manufacturing brand, that officers can use to read the law out in the field so that officers don’t “leave out an element” that would invalidate the citation, said Bates.
The program has been off to a slow start. During a February hearing earlier this year, council members learned that only 37 citations that were issued in the first seven months of the program made it to court. According to James Bentley, communications director for the Baltimore City SAO, there were 279 citations issued in 2023 and as of April, there were 116 citations issued in 2024.
The council was given three pie charts with information on the citation docket based on outcome, race, and age: all three of those charts had different numbers, a fact that Councilmember Kristerfer Burnett pushed back on.
“I think if we’re going to be putting this information out publicly, it should add up,” said Burnett.
“We will sit down and we will look at every single citation based on the information in the citation… we wanted to give you a glimpse of everything we have. We have to get this right and the only way to do that is to look at the data,” said Bates, in response. “I would not say it's inaccurate, I would say it’s incomplete.”
Assistant State’s Attorney Patricia Deros, who oversees the citation docket, explained that the docket database was completed in January 2024 and that there may be some citations where that information wasn’t filled out.
Bates defended the program’s pacing on Thursday, saying that the slow start was partially a result of his predecessor’s Marilyn Mosby’s refusal to prosecute low-level nonviolent offenses and a culture at the police department of therefore not policing those crimes.
“BPD had specific policies based on the previous administration that they’ve now realized were in conflict… and then under the consent decree– what can we legally talk and train them on? So it's been one thing after another thing, after another,” said Bates, describing the process as a “heavy lift.”
But, council members expressed concerns about incomplete data and wanted more breakdown as to whom and where citations were issued. Councilmember Odette Ramos inquired as to whether the council could have a breakdown of where citations were issued via policing precinct and Councilmember Burnett questioned some of the breakdowns in racial data, particularly as to how the Latino community is categorized.
“We don’t know how many of these people are Latino, which is a huge part of this city,” said Burnett.
That typically isn’t a separate category, explained Deros.
“Every citation I've seen when I know it's a Spanish-speaking or Hispanic individual, that person is listed as a ‘white’ person on a citation and that goes across all law enforcement agencies,” said Deros.
Some of that concerned Burnett who described some of that recordkeeping as a “rush to roll this out.”
Bates expects citations to ramp up for the summer and said a comprehensive report could be available to the council by December.
Despite the docket taking a large part of Thursday’s conversation, it was not the primary issue at hand.
Bates came to the council with an ask to restore money to his office’s budget to hire at least 10, but potentially up to 20, additional prosecutors. That request comes in to the tune of $2 million at an estimated cost of around $100,000 per attorney; the request is on top of Bates’ $55.6 million budget proposal for fiscal year 2025.
