City senators will revisit Hopkins police force
Sen. Carter pushes for repeal; hearing to be held on widely contested issue
An effort to revoke the permission Johns Hopkins University won to create an armed police force will get a hearing from Baltimore City’s state Senate delegation, although it remains unclear how many lawmakers are willing to revisit the hotly contested issue two years later.
The Johns Hopkins proposal won overwhelming support in 2019 from the General Assembly, but only after intense lobbying from the university, bitter debates between Baltimore lawmakers and loud protests from students.
Johns Hopkins has yet to create the proposed department, which university leaders argued at the time was an urgent safety priority to patrol its three Baltimore campuses and protect students in a city marked by high rates of violent crime.
Instead, Johns Hopkins announced in June that it was putting those plans on pause for at least two years amid massive nationwide protests over police brutality.
Now, several lawmakers who oppose a Johns Hopkins police force are pushing to abolish the agency before its founding, pointing to continued protests against the plan from Johns Hopkins students, faculty and community activists, including a monthlong sit-in at the university’s main administration building in 2019 that ended with seven arrests.
Johns Hopkins opposes repealing the authorization, even as its plans to launch a police agency remain on indefinite hold.
Connor Scott, interim vice president for security at Johns Hopkins, sought to reassure lawmakers last month that an eventual department would be a model agency.
Many public universities in Maryland run their own police departments. But Hopkins, as a privately run nonprofit institution, needed legislative approval to turn its security force into a full-fledged police department.
“Blocking the department before it has begun would abandon years of hard work by community members and legislators and would continue to burden the Baltimore Police Department, while leaving Johns Hopkins without a viable solution for addressing the very serious threat of violent crime that we face in the city,” Scott told the Senate Judiciary Proceedings Committee in February.
Students and faculty have said a campus police force would reinforce perceptions of the university as separate from the city. They also worry the department’s officers could create further disparities for people of color, who statistics show are more likely to be victims of police brutality. And opponents have said that a private department would be less accountable than government-operated agency like the Baltimore Police Department.
“It is a privately held, multibillion-dollar operation that now has the authority to establish a police force and that is a precedent that was very dangerous,” said state Sen. Mary Washington, a Baltimore Democrat.
TheBaltimoreCitySenatedelegationagreed Friday to pleas from Sen. Jill P. Carter to at least hold a hearing on repealing the Johns Hopkins policeauthorization.Carter,aBaltimoreDemocrat, is sponsoring the bill and contended that the proposal has stalled in the legislature as a whole because Baltimore lawmakers haven’t formally weighed in.
Some of Carter’s Baltimore colleagues were keen to steer clear of the potentially hot-button political issue — and perhaps a bitterly divisive vote — given how it split local lawmakers twoyearsago.Baltimore’ssenatorsbackedthe proposal in 2019 by a vote of 3-2, with Carter and Washington opposed. They were also the onlysenatorstovoteagainstthebillonthefloor.
“I have no interest in having this piece of legislation serve as a wedge between me and my colleagues,” said Democratic Sen. Antonio Hayes, who backed the authorizing bill two years ago and described the political battle over it as a “brutal” experience.
Hayes also suggested there’s little chance for repeal to pass and that reopening a politically painful debate could be a pointless exercise.
Among the open questions is whether revoking the authorization for a Johns Hopkins police department counts as a so-called “delegation bill.” That’s the term for narrow legislation that usually effects only a single county or city. Such bills traditionally move forward in the General Assembly if they have the blessing of local lawmakers.
Ferguson contended that the broader policy implications of the bill — whether a private institution should be allowed to run a police department — make it an issue of statewide interest that shouldn’t be left to Baltimore lawmakers to decide.
But Carter is concerned that key committee leaders in both chambers haven’t scheduled votes on the bills. She noted that Montgomery Country Democrat Gabriel Acevero — who’s sponsoring the Johns Hopkins authorization repeal bill in the House of Delegates — was grilled by lawmakers in the House Judiciary Committee about local support.
“Did you run this past the city delegation?” Del. Vanessa Atterbeary, a Howard County Democrat, pointedly asked Acevero last month at a House Judiciary Committee meeting. “I remember the late Congressman [Elijah] Cummings testifying in front of the delegation, requesting this legislation. So, does the city support repealing this legislation?”
Aceverorepliedthathecouldn’tspeakforthe city delegation, but he said he had talked with community members and was bringing the bill on behalf of “impacted communities.”
SARASOTA, FLA. — For rookie pitchers Dean Kremer, Keegan Akin and Bruce Zimmermann, making their big-league debuts with the Orioles in the pandemic-shortened 2020 season puts them somewhere between prospect and known commodity this spring.
Each one is trying to build on what he was able to achieve last season without taking too much from the highs or lows that came
with his brief time in the big leagues.
“You don’t want to put too much stock into it because in the grand scheme of things, what’s [seven] innings in an entire career?” said Zimmermann, a Towson University and Loyola Blakefield product who has the least experience of the three. “It’s nothing. But at the same time, that tiny, tiny sample size is everything to me, and as far as I got there, I was meant to be there.”
As each begins pitching in spring training games, they all bring different approaches to solidify themselves as major league starters for the Orioles.
That was apparent Thursday against the Boston Red Sox in Sarasota. Both results-wise and stuffwise, Kremer and Zimmermann had wide gulfs in what they were able to do. Kremer was pulled from the first inning because of a high pitch count having walked two batters as he struggled to throw anything but his fastball for strikes. He was better in his second inning, but still allowed a two-out home run.
Zimmermann, on the other hand, had his fastball and curveball
working and struck out four in two innings, allowing just one hit.
“I thought Dean had good stuff,” manager Brandon Hyde said. “I just think he was searching for command today. But like I’ve said before, his first outing, I think that he was just off with his fastball command and searching for his off-speed stuff, also. But his stuff was sharp and it looked good. It just wasn’t in the strike zone enough.
“Zimmermann, really good two innings. Impressed with the fastball [velocity], had a lot of life to his fastball too. It gets on guys. And then a lot of really good breaking balls for strikes and for chase underneath.”
Neither’s outlook of making the Orioles as a starter, being bumped to the bullpen or having to begin the season at the alternate training site changed much with one outing. But their own thoughts on the outing and their spring in general show how just because they might be lumped together as rookies doesn’t mean they approach things the same way.
Kremer essentially added a new pitch during quarantine last year, such is his commitment to constantly improving himself. He said last month that having made his debut didn’t change how he prepared for this spring at all.
But Thursday, he acknowledged that he wasn’t as mentally locked in as he wanted to be and said that he was just trying to get acclimated to a game setting and competing again. He said it usually takes a few weeks for his breaking ball to get sharp, a span of time that he undoubtedly will be given before the Orioles want to see him at his best.
Zimmermann, however, hasn’t afforded himself such luxury. He wanted to start his spring from a strong foundation by being aggressive in the zone with all of his pitches, and he missed bats with both his fastball and curveball as a result.
“All my springs so far have always been coming in ready to go because I’m trying to make the team so I really don’t really play to the paradigm of easing into where I’m supposed to be at,” he said. “I kind of come in hoping my stuff is pretty close to where I need it to be.”
When Akin debuts on Friday behind Matt Harvey, he’ll likely fall somewhere on that spectrum. He said this week that he’s seeking consistency to even out the highs and lows of his rookie season, and is taking the long view on spring training.
“After having a few innings last year in the big leagues and a couple starts, you kind of get the idea of what you need to work on and you take that into the offseason, and then you just come into spring training and compete and hope at the end of the six weeks you’ve got a job and you’re heading north with the team,” Akin said.
None of the pitchers seems to be taking anything for granted despite having debuted last year. In the cases of Kremer and Akin, the means being front-runners for major league rotation spots.
At this early point in spring, any kind of success will be a bonus while struggles will be cast aside.
“I think it totally varies, guy-to-guy, year to year,” Hyde said when asked where a player projects affects how he prepares and performs in spring. “That’s why I don’t put a whole lot of stock into spring training, especially early in spring training, because I think guys are in different places in where they are.
“Some guys might be working on stuff, other guys might be trying to make a team, some guys just need to relax a little bit and let it happen and get more comfortable as spring training goes along.”
BRUSSELS — The European Union executive wants to force employers to be much more open about how much their staff earn to make it easier for women to challenge wage imbalances and close the gender pay gap.
Even though the gender pay gap across the 27-nation bloc has been reduced to 14% for people doing the same work, the European Commission wants to eliminate the disparity by imposing specific rules to make pay levels public.
“For equal pay, you need transparency. Women must know whether their employers treat them fairly,” said EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
Since its inception in 1957, the EU has sought to end such gender bias, but progress has been slow over the decades. When it comes to pension rights, reflecting working conditions of the past 30 to 40 years, the gender gap still stands at 30%.
Wage conditions and scales in Europe have long been shrouded in secrecy, which has helped extend inequality and proved to be a hurdle for those demanding pay justice.
And companies have fallen far short in helping bridge the gap, said EU Vice President Vera Jourova.
“We have sufficiently strong evidence that we need to have binding rules and not only to rely on social responsibility of the companies because we see that it doesn’t lead anywhere,” she said.
She said that over the past seven years, the gap had closed only by a little over 2 percentage points.
“You can imagine if we continue like that, we will achieve pay fairness some time in several decades. So we cannot continue like that,” she said.
Under the commission’s proposals, employers would have to give information about initial pay levels in the vacancy announcement and ahead of the job interview, during which employers will not be allowed to ask about applicants’ previous pay grades.
Employees will be allowed to ask employers the average pay levels by gender for people doing the same work.
And to put more pressure on big companies, the proposal forces firms with more than 250 employees to publish information about any gender pay gap.
If women remain underpaid, the commission wants them to be able to get back pay, and it wants the burden of proof to be on employers, not the women challenging them.
The European Trade Union Confederation lauded the intent but said the proposals lacked teeth to force companies into decisive action.
It complained that small- and medium-size companies, where such discrimination often happens, were excluded from key elements of the enforcement.
The proposal now goes to the European Parliament and EU countries for further discussion before it can be approved.
The EU announcement came ahead of International Women’s Day, which is Monday.