This is one if the most recent examples of the Obama administration’s aggressive push for police reforms in cities where young African-American men have died at the hands of law enforcement.
The long-awaited report, coming more than a year after Baltimore erupted into riots over the police-involved death of a 25-year-old black man, Freddie Gray, is sharply critical of city policies that encourage officers to charge people with minor crimes to inflate police statistics.
The report, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, found that African-American residents were often stopped or arrested without legal justification.
To show how officers disproportionately stopped black pedestrians, the report cited the example of a black man in his mid-fifties who was stopped 30 times in less than four years. None of the stops led to a citation or criminal charge. Black residents, the report said, accounted for 95 percent of the 410 individuals stopped at least 10 times.
Eighty-two percent of the traffic stops were black drivers, the report said, who account for 60 percent of the driving-age population in the city.
Racial disparities were also apparent in criminal charges filed, the report said, particularly for discretionary offenses like trespassing, disorderly conduct or failure to obey.
Two weeks ago, Maryland prosecutors dropped charges against the last of six police officers charged in the April 2015 death of Mr. Gray, who sustained a fatal spinal cord injury while in custody.
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