The Daily - “Charm City,” Part 1: Baltimore After Freddie Gray

Episode Date: June 4, 2018

“The Daily” presents a five-part series about the life and death of a Baltimore teenager known as Nook, who was fatally shot by a police officer a year after the killing of Freddie Gray. Nook’s family is searching for truth from the streets where he died, the police who took his life and the city that won’t give them answers. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.This episode includes disturbing language and scenes of graphic violence.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today. It's been two years since the wave of police killings that divided the country over questions of race and policing in America. For the next week on The Daily, a five-part portrait of one city where reforms were promised and one family where grief has replaced trust.

It's Monday, June 4th. Hello. Hi, Devetta. It's Sabrina. Hi, Sabrina. I just walked back into my office. How you doing? I can't complain. I'm still here, holding on as usual. The very first time I ever spoke to Devetta Parker, she had this really deep, rich, warm voice.

She talked to me as if I was like her most intimate friend. So Devetta, I had a question to ask you. Go ahead. Do you remember the first time I called you? Yeah. I said you was a blessing. God must have sent you because you was a blessing. God must have sent you because you was a blessing. She said, you know, I think God sent you to me.

Why did you say that, Davetta? Because at the time, I was like, I really need to find somebody that can help me get his story out there. I want the truth to come out. And then she said, we have so many unanswered questions about LeVar, her grandson, who everybody called Nook. I have a whole lot of questions, Sabrina. And they said, be careful what you ask for. You might get it.

It can't be no worse than what we already got. It can't get no worse than that. Yeah. Yeah, I have a lot of questions, Sabrina. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. For the past few months, national reporter Sabrina Tavernisi

and daily producer Lindsay Garrison have been reporting this story. So you have to understand the context in which I first spoke to Devetta Parker. I think the last time the country had paid attention to Baltimore was right after the killing of Freddie Gray. And he was a 25-year-old man who was arrested in early April of 2015. April of 2015, and police in Baltimore chased him down and put him in handcuffs. Don't worry, shorty, we recording this shit. We recording it. Dragged him to a police van. Shorty, that was after they tased the fuck out of him like that.

He was screaming in pain. Man, I've been recording this shit. I've been recording it. His body appeared to be limp at the time. Someone took a cell phone video of him. They didn't taste yo like that. You wonder why he can't use his legs. Police put him in the van and shackled

his hands and feet and drove him to the jail without a seatbelt on in what prosecutors later described as a rough ride. So they blew through a stop sign, made turns really suddenly. And a week later, Freddie Gray died of severe injuries, including a severed spinal cord. And that, of course, came after a string of high-profile police killings. Shut up, you son of a bitch! Shut up, you son of a bitch!

Shut up, you son of a bitch! Shut up, you son of a bitch! That's what you do. Tell me to shut up, you son of a bitch! Michael Brown, in the summer of 2014 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri. He's shot by a white police officer. Basically, his body is left in the street for hours and hours. Jeff, let me get back to that video.

We just showed a little bit of it to our viewers. The body is there. The uncle comes running out. The body is uncovered for a long time you don't do a dog like that you didn't have to show him a time if he was doing something to you and you was trying to stop him whether the police shoot you in the leg you just shot off to my baby by look 10 minutes of an exposed, dead 18-year-old with no one covering the body. I mean, they treat deer who get hit by cars better than that. Everybody want me to be calm. Do you know how them bullets hit my son?

What they did to his body as they hit his body. Like mayhem out here. They keep telling these guys be quiet, don't curse, pull your pants up, this, that, and the other. This is their everyday life, and they mad. They're mad. I'm mad. We should all be mad, man.

We should all be angry because of what's going on right now. There's Eric Garner on Staten Island. He was accused of selling single cigarettes taken out of cigarette packets and was wrestled to the ground and put in a chokehold by a white police officer and died of asphyxiation later. Eric Garner, say his name! Eric Garner, say his name! Eric Garner, won't you say his name? Then there was Walter Scott. He was shot five times when he was running away from a white officer who had stopped him in Charleston, South Carolina, for a broken taillight. Black lives matter! Black lives matter! Black lives matter! And all of us dropped to our knees when my brother, Walter Scott, was shot in the back eight times. All of us turned up and looked at the sky and said, my God, my God, my God.

Walter Scott, say his name. Walter Scott, say his name. Walter Scott, say his name. Walter Scott, won't you say his name? And Freddie Gray, he was the latest of those. And so it wasn't just his death Baltimore was reacting to. To the glory of God, amazing grace. Amazing grace, how sweet that save. You know, most of us are not here because we knew Freddie Gray. But we're all here because we know lots of Freddie Gray. And you're not here because you grieve for Baltimore, although you do.

You're here because you grieve for a nation. Although you do, you're here because you grieve for a nation. Baltimore was reacting to years of questionable tactics by the police, to what had started as a zero-tolerance approach to policing, but had gotten out of control. Racial profiling, unlawful stops and searches, excessive force, reports of institutional corruption. Freddie Gray stood for the experiences of so many Black men in Baltimore,

and people were fed up. Whether our police department will be reformed so that that blue wall of justice, that blue wall of the police gets torn down. You know the blue wall I'm talking about, the one that says, right or wrong, we're going to cover for you. It's got to be torn down.

This is our moment to show who we really, really are. So after his funeral, that's when things started to go awry. There were kids at the mall, and they started to throw rocks at the police. We are in some close juvenile scatter. At the location, hospital is a disturbance. Yeah, I hear it. We're right now. Cars are still coming up, and they're throwing rocks at cars.

Yeah, they're throwing rocks at the process. Eternal the Glint Ball 2. The Glint Ball side of the London Mall. Alright, operations we need to link PG County up with our officers. Let's get them on the line and let's start extracting and making arrests. 10-4. Fox, you have more shields coming up here. You got units you could use, but we don't have any shield on.

Shed for their route right now. Right if I want to hurt. He's down here looking free. We've got to hear a good fall. 3421 was a monster down in front of the window and there's a super body with him. We've got that medic on the air, have him come back and get that officer. Come on, we're under heavy attack. I need that barrel. Let's go! Let's go! I need to touch! I need to take it! We're gripping Westbrook!

Westbury and Woodbrook. We are under significant assault. Suddenly, the city just erupted into chaos. There were protests. We will fight for Freddie Gray! All right! All right! There were burning of police cars. They were burning of buildings. People broke in and looted in stores.

Famously in a CVS, there was all of this stuff taken, including drugs, and people couldn't get their medicines for a while. We report from Baltimore, where the governor of Maryland has declared a state of emergency, and the mayor of Baltimore has announced a week-long curfew beginning tomorrow night, a curfew that cannot come soon enough. There were all these years of pent-up rage against the police, and Freddie Gray's death, like, punched a hole into that, and everything just started spilling out. We all know that Baltimore continues to have a fractured relationship between the police and the community. And recent events continue to demonstrate the need to press forward with these reforms. So the city started making promises. It said it would prosecute the police involved in

Freddie Gray's death. It said it would change the police department. We have to get it right. Failure is not an option. The mayor even asked the federal government to come in and investigate the Baltimore police and its practices. This investigation will begin immediately and will focus on allegations that Baltimore police department officers use excessive force, including deadly force, conduct unlawful searches, seizures and arrests, and engage in discriminatory policing. And around that same time, the city's top prosecutor, Marilyn Mosby, announces that she's charging the six officers involved in Freddie Gray's death. While each of these officers are presumed innocent until proven guilty, we have brought the following charges.

Officer Cesar Goodson is being charged with second-degree depraved heart murder. Officer William Porter is being charged with involuntary manslaughter. Officer Edward Nero is being charged with assault in the second degree. Lieutenant Brian Rice is being charged with involuntary

manslaughter. Sergeant Alicia White, involuntary manslaughter. Officer Garrett Miller, intentional assault in the second degree. So all of this together was highly unusual. For the first time in a very long time, there was this real expectation that policing in Baltimore might actually change. That something was actually going to happen this time. Last but certainly not least, to the youth of this city, I will seek justice on your behalf.

This is a moment. This is your moment. Let's ensure that we have peaceful and productive rallies that will develop structural and systemic changes for generations to come. You're at the forefront of this cause. And as young people, our time is now. Yes! But after all these promises

and this mountain of expectations, after the police and the city respond, the protesters go home. Where we want justice! Where we want peace! Everything kind of goes quiet. But then there's this whole new problem that starts to emerge. The homicide rate spikes practically overnight. And Baltimore's murder rate's the highest in the city's history. That's the real narrative.

These streets are dangerous. I don't want to be down here. That's the truth. The real narrative is that people are scared to death. They're scared to go outside their houses. They want to be in at a certain time. They don't want to go in certain neighborhoods. They don't want to move in certain neighborhoods. They don't want to be in certain locations because it's dangerous.

People get killed in this city. People get robbed in this city. That's real life. Why does the murder rate go up? So we talked to a lot of people in Baltimore about that. Police officers, former and current, residents, adults and kids, even drug dealers. Everybody had a theory. In my opinion, everybody's carrying a gun.

Everybody's angry. Everybody's mad. You know, remember, you don't have any places for young people to go. When you don't provide proper relief for these kids, and the only thing they're doing is drinking or smoking reefer, getting high, bad things are going to happen. One theory was this kind of socioeconomic explanation, that this was really about generational poverty and drug addiction. But those things hadn't changed. Baltimore wasn't any

poorer after Freddie Gray than had been before. The cops definitely pulled back. Nobody wanted to be the next cop that makes an arrest and the arrest goes wrong. Come on, the cops pulled back. Other people thought it was because the police had pulled back, that maybe they were just sort of reticent to make arrests with a federal investigation going on. All I really remember around that time, there really was no police out there. That's all I swear to God.

I give it like a good two months to three months. And finally, there was this idea that people were taking advantage of this moment when the police were really distracted. The criminals, they exploited the hell out of Freddie Gray. They made a lot of money selling dope on these streets because they were allowed to do it. The killers, the hitmen, they made a lot of money killing people. A lot of money been made killing people. Guess why?

Because you ain't going to jail for it. You can get away with it. And you're more likely, if you get away with it once, get away with it twice, you're more than likely to kill again. Criminals got more emboldened. That's the story we got from a lot of police officers.

Like Daryl D'Souza, who was police commissioner when we sat down with him. Why did they get emboldened? who was police commissioner when we sat down with him. Why did they get emboldened? I think they were trying to take advantage of the unrest and the protests. I can say that the police officers, although they had anxiety about everything that was going on, the officers were doing their job faithfully. But I just think that those

folks that were the trigger pullers and those that were creating harm in the community, they just tried to take advantage of a storm that was going on. So what he's saying is the police were trying their best, but the criminals were just out of control. But that's not exactly what the numbers show. The numbers show that the police were arresting way fewer people. Arrests were down by nearly a third in 2015, and it looked like it was taking a knee, when in reality, the DOJ was in here monitoring the police department. They were doing research. They were doing a study.

So policing was really probably moving towards being done in the right way. Remember, this was a moment when the Baltimore Police Department was under intense scrutiny. There are these federal investigators there poring over everything, looking for examples of unconstitutional policing.

And the department realizes it has to change. It has to stop this practice of aggressive policing. But it's done it for years. And suddenly, the crime rate is spiking. Homicides are going through the roof. And the problem is, they don't know how to solve it without those old tactics, without the aggressive policing. So what they discover is, what Baltimore discovers is, they actually don't know how to police in the right way. It's not that they don't care or that they weren't trying.

It's just they didn't know how. or that they weren't trying. It's just they didn't know how. To the criminal element and also to the normal eye, it looked like taking a knee because they had been at 100 miles an hour. Now they were going at 50, which is where they should have been anyway. The fact of the matter is that they were heading towards this retaliatory cycle of gang hitting gang, a shooting on the west side, ended up in a shooting on the east

side. We're heading towards that trend anyway. And what exacerbated that is that police who had never known how to police the right way didn't know what to do with that situation. Didn't know how to police adequately. And then the spike continued. It sounds like what you're saying is that somewhere along the way, the spike continue. It sounds like what you're saying is that somewhere along the way, the police department in Baltimore forgot how to actually police. That's exactly what happened. Right. That's exactly right. You have police saying that we could stop this spike if you let us police essentially in an unconstitutional manner because they didn't know how to police anymore because they had been doing it wrong for so long. So the only way they knew how to correct this is

to go back to the dragnet method, which was unconstitutional, which led to Freddie Gray. So you got this mix of chaos going on. The DOJ was saying, no, you can stop the spike, but do it constitutionally. So you had that mixed up. Post-Freddie Gray, you have this explosion, and the police don't know how to control it, and it's right because they want to control it and admit that the DOJ and everyone else, that you can't do that. That's unconstitutional.

And that's exactly what the DOJ found. The result of its investigation in August 2016, a little more than a year after the death of Freddie Gray, was that the Baltimore Police Department had routinely violated civil rights, that it had been policing unconstitutionally. And in doing so, the DOJ found, it had, quote, exacerbated community distrust of the police, particularly in the African-American community. What every black in Baltimore City knows is that the Baltimore City Police Department is the most racist and corrupt organization out here. Citizens know it. Kids know it. Older people know it. Everybody knows it. You don't get that way overnight.

Freddie Gray was just a flashpoint, you see. And the problem is no one trusts us now. You know, how can you do your job if you don't have the community's trust, you know? Four months after that report, police in Baltimore killed Devetta Parker's grandson.

We'll be right back. Hi, it's Michael Barbaro. Daily listeners often ask how they can support this show. The answer is through a subscription to The Times. It's the journalistic engine that powers The Daily. Times reporting is what makes The Daily, The Daily. For those who already subscribe, thank you. For Daily listeners who don't yet subscribe,

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After I talked to DeVetta on the phone that first time, she invited us to the public library in Baltimore, where she's worked for the past 44 years. Hi. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. Good morning. Okay.

And she's very nicely dressed. She has a sweater turtleneck on. She's got glasses. She has her library badge around her neck. And she walks us in. And then she stops and she says, this is LaShonda, my daughter. Sabrina.

I'm LaShonda. LaShonda, nice to meet you. Nook's mother. So LaShonda goes by Toby. And you can see immediately that she's really, really different from her mother. It almost seemed like they weren't related at all. My mother said, you just cut it. different from her mother. It almost seemed like they weren't related at all. She's real thin and she has really short hair and it's cold outside, but she's wearing a dress with no stockings or tights. She's clearly dressed up, dressed up for the occasion. She has a lot of bangly bracelets on her arm. And she's pretty nervous.

And it's pretty clear she's come prepared. This is my making room. This is very valuable. No, we're not. No, we can't do that. No. What is that? She is overwhelmed with wanting to show us all of these pictures of her son.

And a bunch of even kind of a poster-sized photograph and lots of kind of colored Xerox copies of pieces of paper that had to do with his life. And some of them are kind of mushed and mashed. Clearly, they've been looked at a lot and handled a lot. And she sort of plops that down in front of us in this whole kind of messy array and starts sort of arranging the photographs of him so we can look.

We can put it here. No, do it like this. One right there. And one right here. Okay. Oh, you could put this one here. This baby pictures. This is LaVar. Yes, that's LaVar. Look.

My oldest. We found out it was a boy. Girl, I don't know you. You were my baby. And they start telling us the story of his life. I knew he was a boy. Yeah. Uh-huh.

I remember. As soon as I found out I was pregnant, I just knew I was having a boy. I sure did. When he was born, I was like, oh, look at my little boy. Because he was my first. He was my first grandchild. He was the oldest. He was a little person.

He was short. He always hated that. He was the oldest. He was a little person. He was short. He always hated that he had small feet. So, I mean, even at, like, two, he was, like, feisty. He was like a leader to the rest of the kids. He was always in charge. Very protective. Like, he was very protective, overprotective over other people, like, people he cared about. He always smiled. He made a lot of friends everywhere.

He had a lot of friends. Because he talked all the time. Just like me. Mm-hmm. He was voracious with information. He loved history. He was kind and thoughtful to people in the neighborhood. I don't know, Nick was special.

And I know, of course, I'm going to say that because I'm his mom. But he really liked old people and he loved children. And, you know, most of the time, older people always got a story to tell. When he listened to people talk, he'd do a lot of research on it. So when he discussed something, he knew exactly what he was talking about. He was really into getting down to the bottom of everything. He liked to hear about history. I think he was interested in history because he, I think he had feeling that he wasn't going to be here long.

And he was trying to learn as much as he could while he was here. It was like he knew that he only had a certain amount of time here on Earth. You understand what I'm saying? Like, he knew, but we didn't know. Thank you. My colleague is always going to flex on looking at Ike and say, how good is this going to be? Oh, man, it's going to be good, man. This is the number two. On the night of December 13th, 2016, there had been a basketball game near a place in Baltimore called Coppin State University in the west part of Baltimore. Nook and his friends were said to have been at the

basketball game. He really liked basketball. He used to play when he was little. But about an hour into the game, Nook was somewhere else. And here's where things start to get complicated. Nook had somewhere else. And here's where things start to get complicated. Nook had a gun. And around 6.20pm, he was riding with a friend in a black car that was moving away from the game. And there's surveillance video

that shows what happens next. The car he's riding in takes a right at an intersection and stops. And a white car that's driving behind them also takes a right and stops. And then Nook jumps out of the black car, runs toward the intersection, fires what looks like one shot at a car driving past, and then turns around and runs back in the other direction. So Nook gets out of this car with a gun and shoots at another oncoming car.

That's right. And when he runs back in the other direction, someone in the white car shoots him. It's right next to this college campus, right there. It's right next to this college campus, right there. And the students who were on campus at the time, watching from the student resident hall across the street, or just heard the shots, Shot him like three times. I don't know how long he's going to be out. The guy, I guess, is laying on the ground. I don't know how long he's going to be good on the ground. It's cold.

My phone rang and it was his best friend. His female best friend. My, it just came through group text that nook got shot. I said, let me call you back. I hung up. I called his phone. Somebody picked it up and didn't say anything. I hung up.

I called his girlfriend's phone. She didn't answer. So I sat there for a minute. Are you near that person now, ma'am? Am I near the person? I'm not getting too close. He's laying across the street. She opened up the door and stood on her porch. And I got to the top step, my whole body went numb. She knew something. Yeah. My whole body went numb, like, and I just screamed.

I knew nothing was going on. I knew my son was gone. The next day, it was like a dream. Okay, so then, um, the detective tells you. I just sit there, trying to figure out what could I have done

for this not to happen. Did I do something wrong? Because I just felt like it was something that I could do to save him. What did I do? What could I have done? I mean, I don't understand. He was just an 18-year-old kid. If anything, he was set up.

He was set up. Oh, I'm not supposed to say that? You don't know that. I don't know. I'm not supposed to say it, but go ahead. You tell the story then. I don't know that guy. I know. Him jumping out of a car just shooting eight at school.

More like my son was trying to get to safety. I can see a guy. He's laying on the ground. We heard the gunshot. You said you could see the injured person? I'm not sure. I really can't see. I'm not getting too close. Okay. I understand that you don't want to get too close, okay? From where you are, do it look like he's awake? They're not answering.

Hold on a second. Hold on. Oh, wait, there's a gun there. No, I'm backing up. Okay, that guy has a gun. Okay, one moment, one moment. He said the patient actually has a gun? No, whoever is with him.

It looks like he's pointing the gun at him. He's pointing the gun at him. Somebody's with him. Somebody's with him. Who's that? Welcome to St. Catharines. That was the police officer who shot Nook. A campus police officer in an unmarked car. The white car.

Detective Talley came and said, well, yeah, you know, I've always married officers, and, you know, I don't know who the guys he was with. He was in the car with some guys, and, yeah, they left him. So Toby was visited the morning after her son was shot by a police officer. His name was Police Officer Talley. And she said he was remarkably cold. He didn't say, I'm sorry for your loss. He didn't explain what had happened to her son.

He just had a lot of kind of gruff questions for her. Y'all probably won't go to court because it's really clear on the tape. We have the footage that LeVar was clearly trying to kill anybody in sight. An officer pulled up in the midst of it and shot him while he was trying to kill somebody.

This is exactly how he's talking. Not from the city. I'm so sorry under the circumstances, you know. Your son was murdered by an officer. He had a gun. Because see, I get that. Well, this is where I don't get. It took me five months to find out how many times my son was shot. That's number one. And this is why DeVetta and Toby so badly wanted to talk to us. What happened to Nook and how the police handled it, it just didn't

seem right. Because no one would talk to me after. It was just like, if you're not calling to tell us who he was in the car with, then what are you calling for? She didn't find out until five months later. And when she got the autopsy report, she saw that her son had in fact been shot seven times, four times in the back. You know, when I'm about bullets going, they rip up everything. His pancreas, liver, kidneys, everything. It's explained everything in the autopsy.

Like, I had to read it because it's my child, but that's something you don't want to read because every little thing from them saying that he had nemesis, which is dry vomit, in his hair, on his left shoulder, on his neck. Like, you got to know all that, like how far the bullet went in, which direction it went, all of that. That's an overkill.

That's an overkill. And then the next thing that happens is that from the very beginning, Toby wants to see what happened to her son. Because she finds out that there's surveillance video of the whole thing. So this is video of the incident. It will play approximately three times, and it's probably about a minute or so long. And she said that the police promised to tell her before they were going to release it to the public. But then they release it to the public.

But then they release it. OK, this is my son shooting, right? At that car that's going that way. Police don't know the car. She found it by Googling around online. I showed you the geography. The white vehicle is the police car. And the police is out the car.

My son running back that way, right? And you see the suspect running into the street, shooting at the vehicle. Again, we'll get another view of that. My son took probably two more steps because he died in between the white lines right there. Look at his position. I just want to show you something. But the other thing that happens is that when the video is actually released, the moment Nook actually gets shot is blacked out. We blacked out the portion where the police officer fired shots

and the suspect fell to the ground. So you can see Nook running toward the other car, but then when he wheels, turns around and runs back, as soon as he's within the range of the car where the police officer is, a black box pops up covering the shooting. So you don't actually get to see it. And I think we'll have one more view of this incident from an aerial camera. She asked. She asked to see it without the black box. She'd asked to see it several times over the course of the next couple of months and was never actually allowed to see it.

They wouldn't let me see the video. So with that, prior to us taking some questions, I'd like to turn it over to Commissioner Hamm for some remarks in reference to this incident. Thank you, TJ, and good afternoon to you. Before I start, let me say this. I said, well, will I ever see the officer that killed my son? Because this is an ongoing investigation, I'm not going to identify who that officer is. But what I will say is this, is that that officer has been with me for 14 months. The officer is a lateral transfer from a metropolitan police department here in the

state of Maryland. The police never named the officer. I don't know if I would have been able to have the presence of mind to stop somebody from doing what they were doing, call for an ambulance, call for assistance, and preserve that crime scene. And that's the amazing part of it. I'm an old-time cop, and I wonder if I would have done that or been able to do that. Toby knows her son isn't perfect. He was shooting at someone. But she's the mother of an 18-year-old

who was gunned down on the street by a police officer. She feels like she's owed an explanation, some information. Because they didn't tell me at the hospital, and then again, no one would talk to me. And then when I looked up again in February, two months later, the case was closed. The Coppinshead University officer involved in a deadly shooting last year is cleared of any potential criminal charges. Justifiable homicide. After reviewing the evidence, including this video and statements from witnesses, the officer fired his weapon based upon a reasonable belief

that 18-year-old LeVar Montre Douglas was a threat to the public. I'm scared of this city, I am. And no lawyer will take my case or nothing. And it's clearly, like, without even none of that. Here, it's like everybody in the city is scared to even touch it, you know. And I don't understand. If you're as good a lawyer as you say you are, then you shouldn't have no problem taking the case. It looked like somebody running for safety to me, if y'all watch the video.

When we first talked to DeVetta and went to Baltimore, it was to report on a story about yet another young Black man who'd been killed by the police. It's a story of police misconduct in the era after Freddie Gray. But as the months have gone on, and after weeks and weeks of talking to people in Baltimore, to Nook's friends, his family, to the police, to people in the neighborhoods,

trying to figure out what happened to him. The story has kind of twisted and grown, and it's become about a lot of other things, too. It's about a mother and a grandmother so convinced that if the police had been involved in the death of their son, they must be hiding something. They must have done something terribly wrong. They still won't give me no officer name.

Everybody else in the city know who killed my son. My only child, except me. That just doesn't make sense to me. He ain't no hero. He ain't no hero at all. Because if he was a hero, they would tell who he is and wouldn't be scared. So why are you scared? If he's such a hero, why are you scared? Because if he was a big hero, you would tell who he is. Most heroes, you know their names. And then underneath it, as a hero, you write down

his accomplishment. He didn't accomplish nothing, except for he's in hiding. And it's also about a city where three years after the death of Freddie Gray, the homicide rate is higher and the trust in the police is worse. They cover up everything that they want to cover up because they think we poor Blacks. That's all it is. They think because we Black and we are poor that we ain't going to do nothing about it.

I'm not stupid. I'm not nothing about it. I'm not stupid. I'm not 100% stupid. I'm not 200%. I'm not stupid at all. I know. I worked for the city over 40 years. So I know what the deal is. I'm just angry.

I'm just so damn angry. It's possible that what happened to Nook was not police misconduct. But what we've realized is that with a lack of information, people are going to assume the worst. If there's a black box, people in Baltimore are going to assume the very worst about what's behind it. And once you learn what's been happening in Baltimore, it's easy to understand why they'd think that.

I'm just so mad. Tomorrow, in part two of our series, how did the relationship between the police and the community in Baltimore reach this point? We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. The Times reports that in a letter sent to Special Counsel Robert Mueller in January, President Trump's lawyers declared that he could not have committed obstruction of justice in the Russia investigation because he has complete authority over all federal investigations. The letter makes a sweeping assertion of executive authority, claiming that Trump cannot illegally obstruct the investigation

because, if he wished, he could, quote, terminate the inquiry or even exercise his power to pardon. Do you and the president's attorneys believe the president has the power to pardon himself? On Sunday, in an interview with ABC's This Week, one of the president's lawyers, Rudy Giuliani, said that Trump's power to pardon extended to himself. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.