In the wake of an unprecented murder spike, the Baltimore police announced Sunday that ten federal agents from a variety of agencies plus another twenty agents from the ATF will he embedded with the homicide unit “effective tomorrow.”
As Breitbart News has reported, Baltimore has had an “historic high” 191 murders in 2015, with half of them coming in the three months following April’s riots over the death of Freddie Gray and calls for an “uprising” by radical anti-police activist group Black Lives Matter.
The move to put federal agents into place in Baltimore also comes on the heels of a March President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing report touted by President Obama. That report called for more federal involvement with police agencies, with the president saying, “The moment is now for us to make these changes.”
The Baltimore Sun reports on the specifics of the federal embeds:
Interim Police Commissioner Kevin Davis said the addition of the special agents from the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the U.S. Marshals Service and the U.S. Secret Service represent a “flipping of the script of sorts.”
“That’s a bit unusual because local police departments — and Baltimore is no different — historically send detectives to federal law enforcement agencies to embed with their long-term investigations,” he said.
The long hot summer of violence in Baltimore comes after the April riots, arson, and looting sparked by the anti-police Black Lives Matter movement over the death in police custody of Freddie Gray. Black Lives Matter declared the chaos was the start of an “uprising” they termed Black Spring.
As Black Lives Matter founder Patrisse Cullors told Huffington Post on May 1st:
Black people are not a monolithic group, but what we are facing is something that’s extreme — and that’s poverty, that’s homelessness, that’s higher rates of joblessness, that’s law enforcement invading our communities day in and day out — and we are uprising. And so this Black Spring is about really talking about a national uprising. And we should shoud be honored to talk about this moment.
Following the Black Lives Matter call for uprising against the police, the murder rate spiked in Baltimore: 42 people were killed in May, 29 in June, and 45 in July.