wayne jenkins baltimore

Others were raised by defense attorneys and their clients, who said an overzealous Jenkins skirted legal standards in making arrests. Wayne Jenkins, who led . If his arrest was stunning, the depiction of his civil rights violations, robberies and more wasnt news to everyone certainly not to people who had been in Jenkins sights, fairly or not, over the years. Jenkins released the men and told them hed follow up with them later. Then-Police Commissioner Anthony Batts had created a Force Investigation Team to inspire public trust that police leaders were keeping an eye on officers use of force. You're taught that - the second someone gets in trouble we meet up, and we talk face to face," he says. Ignoring warning signs of misconduct, Baltimore Police praised and promoted Gun Trace Task Force leader. Detective Marcus Taylor on Thursday was sentenced to 18 years in prison on racketeering charges, including robbery and overtime fraud. One such warning came in 2010 from a Baltimore man caught drug dealing. For example, I asked him about the robbery of a man who lived in a large mansion in the suburbs of Baltimore - a robbery he pled guilty to in his plea agreement. In September 2021, Jenkins spoke with BBC journalist Jessica Lussenhop from behind bars, and he claimed he never took money from Baltimore citizens. Federal prosecutors displayed the contents of a bag found in the trunk of Sgt. "So you did take money, ultimately?" Sneed's attorney Michael Pulver concluded, per Fenton, that the officers had "fabricated this story to hide the fact that they intentionally assaulted and falsely arrested and imprisoned Mr. Later that year, the mayor held a news conference for another of Jenkins busts. Sergeant Wayne. I ask, slightly confused. Oakley took the rare step of getting onto the witness stand to rebut the officers, as did an independent witness who backed his account. But already he was working in a plainclothes flex unit that rewarded dynamic officers and gave them freedom to roam. By Justin Fenton June 12, 2019 More in the series Part 1 The rise of Wayne. It's propped up on top of a suitcase sitting on top of a plastic tub, and I'm holding my recorder and microphone at the ready. It was his first public appearance since he was arrested along with six other officers last year. Relatives say he liked to visit his high school sweetheart, Kristy, who would become his wife. I hoped it could spur a more honest discussion about what it's going to take to reform or even redefine what it means to be a cop in the US. "It's a surreal story. In We Own This City, that dynamic is highlighted through the story of Wayne Jenkins - a star police officer played by The Walking Dead alum Jon Bernthal, with a pretty solid Baltimore accent . Read about our approach to external linking. BALTIMORE One of the main players in the Baltimore Police Department's Gun Trace Task Force corruption scandal is asking for compassionate release from prison. "He's a pathological liar," Stepp says. He had been stationed in North Carolina and would frequently make trips home to visit his family and his high school sweetheart Kristy, the . Wayne Jenkins, 37, pleaded guilty in January to robbery . When I saw the video, Webb later told The Sun, it didnt corroborate what was in the statement of probable cause at all.. The jury was shown axes, machetes and pry bars, as well as black masks that were found in Jenkins' van after his arrest. Near Druid Hill Park, amid the shouting, sirens and buzzing choppers overhead, he commandeered a state prison department van and helped pull injured officers inside. He also says that he only made roughly $75,000 off of the narcotic sales, as opposed to the figure put on it by Stepp. In fact, it's highly likely - if not certain - that many of the people Jenkins' put in prison himself had those tactics used on them by prosecutors. Investigators recommended Jenkins be demoted and suspended without pay. But when the officers exited the elevators on the building's second floor, they were met by an FBI SWAT team. Wayne Jenkins, who led the Gun Trace Task Force, was sentenced to 25 years in prison after pleading guilty to charges including racketeering, robbery and falsifying records. He says he couldn't risk it as a father with a young family. On the citys west side, officers were being pelted with bricks; some were hurt. "I knew the things we were doing were wrong," he said. He ordered a detective to drive them to the hospital and joined the front lines. "It was a front for a criminal enterprise," Stepp said of the Gun Trace Task Force. Jenkins entered a department steeped in zero tolerance a war on crime fueled by arrests for even minor infractions. "I'm so sorry for what you're going through. Used to tell me he won it playing poker.". Using wiretaps and hidden recording devices, they had accumulated a wealth of evidence showing the officers were robbing citizens, filing for hundreds of hours of overtime they never worked, stealing drugs and even selling illegal firearms back on the streets. Meanwhile, his Twitter account is full of pictures of him on set, hamming it up with Bernthal and some of the other actors. Jenkins was a decorated cop and had a reputation for his role in several high-profile drug busts. Plainclothes officers made the most arrests, they seized the most drugs and money, assets, former Police Commissioner Kevin Davis told The Sun. It was billed at the time as the largest cocaine seizure in department history, one of Jenkins many large-scale seizures. He said he started dealing drugs at age 9, selling. Victims like Bumgardner and Whiting had the courage to speak out. But that day, Jenkins drove toward the edge of town, bobbing in and out of traffic and running red lights, until he pulled over near a wooded area off Liberty Heights Avenue. Stepp testified that the arrangement was so lucrative, he stuck with it for years before getting arrested himself in December 2017. Jon Bernthal embedded with Baltimore police to play city's dirtiest cop in HBO's "We Own This City" On "Salon Talks" Bernthal reveals he spoke to the real Sgt. Finally, in March 2015, Internal Affairs chief Rodney Hill informed Jenkins that he was being charged internally with misconduct, neglect of duty and failure to supervise the officer in his charge, according to a leaked copy of the case file obtained by The Sun. Jenkins had to affirm under oath in front of a federal judge that what the document said was true. In federal prison, inmates are only allowed to talk on the phone for 15 minutes before the line is automatically cut. It showed Sneed calmly standing across the street looking on, never even raising his arms. In Justin Fenton's book We Own This City, on which the HBO series is based, the Baltimore Sun journalist explained that Jenkins would often be "caught in a lie" while giving evidence to a jury, but no complaints were put on his record. Marcus Taylor split up $20,000 in cash they stole in 2015. Credit: Kevin Richardson / Baltimore Sun, serving a federal sentence for tax evasion. Turmoil has continued at the Baltimore Police Department, an agency that saw four commissioners in little more than a year among them De Sousa, now in prison for tax fraud. We Own This City, an HBO Max miniseries out April 25, about a Baltimore Police Department (BPD) task force unit that went rogue, highlights some of the . Jenkins said hed tried to be nice, but now they were going to jail. On the off-ramp, I find four empty dime bags scattered along a section of sidewalk with no foot traffic. So he gave up and entered a guilty plea. But nothing more. On June 7, 2018, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison. Sneed was chased and caught, and his jaw was broken in the process. "I never took a thing. The sergeant took no one else from the flex squad. In Baltimores recent history, the police department has consistently relied on such units, even though the conduct of many of their officers would draw criticism from city residents. Prosecutors urged the judge to sentence him to the maximum 30 years, adding that the unit's corruption affected 1,700 criminal cases. "It's that simple.". Wayne Jenkins Image Credit: Baltimore Police Department/Associated Press. The GTTF was made up of eight officers, all but one of whom were indicted. While no one should forget for an instant that Jenkins and his officers caused untold harm to Baltimore citizens, I don't find it helpful to try to write him off as a "monster". I continued working on this story for as long as I did out of some hope that the more the public learned about the corruption in the police department, the better chance there might be of some kind of true, systemic reform. So I kind of had a mental, like maybe a messed up moral code.". Read about our approach to external linking. The officer they talked to didnt seem like a candidate for that, the lawyers said. You guys willing to go kick in the dudes door and take the money? Jenkins said. The daughters of 86-year-old Elbert Davis also told the court about the 2010 car crash Jenkins caused while he was pursuing a man named Umar Burley. I couldn't help thinking about the many victims of the squad that I'd met over the three years I've been working on this story. "I felt comfortable with it because all the police officers that I met, which were many during the card games, in my opinion, they owned the city," Stepp would later tell the jury at the GTTF trial. As adults, they ran into each other again at an underground card game frequented by Baltimore Police officers. ", Despite this happening more than once, Jenkins remained in his superiors' good books and when Fries was promoted in 2007 he decided to also give Jenkins a boost because he was "the best officer [he] had working under [his] command.". The indictment of Jenkins and six of his gun task force officers on federal racketeering charges rocked Baltimore when the announcement came in March 2017. He claims that it was Stepp's idea to start selling drugs together, not the other way around. No single person was in a position to make unilateral discipline decisions.. The former ringleader of the Baltimore police Gun Trace Task Force and one of its detectives were sentenced Thursday to federal prison. The leaked case file doesnt say why. Five years later, Simons claims were confirmed. But I think he also spoke to me because he doesn't like the image of himself that's been in the media - as a sociopath, as someone almost inhumanly evil. You guys willing to go kick in the dudes door and take the money? Over his tenure, he was. He idolizes this guy, said Shelley Glenn, another prosecutor. Had the officers done things by the book, the cash and drugs would be registered with evidence control. No one believed Oakley. The unit began looking into a case involving Jenkins, in which he had run down a young man with his unmarked Dodge Avenger early in 2014. "I just go through this on a daily basis, scared of police, wondering when they gonna stop you, trying to plant drugs on you or something like that. And Jenkins says, Did you look in the console? And he pulls the rug back and boom. But Davis, Baltimores police commissioner from 2015 to 2018 and a veteran of two other departments, calls plainclothes units necessary and critical to the crime fight. They go looking for guns and drugs, he said, and often are successful. He took pictures of himself and Jenkins together inside the police department, where Stepp would sometimes pick up drugs. He also acknowledged stealing the man's $4,000 (2,956) watch, which he gave to Stepp to sell. The same video led to a rare police department disciplinary case against Jenkins, who was internally charged with misconduct in 2015, according to a copy of the case file reviewed by The Sun. But I did call them, and the Baltimore Police Department, to see if anyone would respond to this laundry list of allegations. "He drew first blood," Stepp says of Jenkins. Wayne Jenkins was living a double life. He also apologised to Burley, who was not in the court, to his wife and to his father, and begged the judge for the opportunity to get out in time to be a grandfather. Officers in plainclothes units often operate in the shadows of a police department. In 2018, Jessica wrote a piece which detailed the explosive trial at a Baltimore federal courthouse that revealed the unit's crimes, She then turned that story into a new seven-part podcast series called Bad Cops which you can listen to in its entirety below. Instead, while their cash and drugs were gone, the dealers were free men. He acknowledged that he could tell something was off with Jenkins around the time of the GTTF crime spree. Any attempts to make the force become less of a warrior and more of a guardian was looked at terribly, he said. The console that, wayne jenkins baltimore lawyers said plainclothes flex unit that rewarded dynamic officers gave. 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