‘Giving an intoxicated person the keys to a car is contrary to the safety of all those in their path, and to themselves. This is analogous to allowing the Johns Hopkins institutions to have police powers.’
The Johns Hopkins institutions in the city of Baltimore wants to have its own police force. It proposed legislation for police powers to the Maryland legislation last year 2018, with no success. It spent the time since and leading up to the 2019 legislative season ‘working’ on its game plan. The president, staff, and supporters such as BUILD (Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development) held community meetings to ‘invite’ in neighborhood voices. In the meantime, it has again demonized the communities surrounding its institutions and offered itself as a police power as the solution, the savior. But as one East Baltimore resident said of the meeting convened by the university president Ron Daniels: ‘this is not about us, about this community…this is about the new community they built, the Hopkins staff, and students, their people’.
Hopkins Power
First, the Johns Hopkins University and Hospital System (called the Johns Hopkins Conglomerate in this essay, JHC) has immeasureable power in the state of Maryland. The Conglomerate’s power existed since the 1890s when its philanthropic namesake bought his first piece of land in East Baltimore for the purpose of erecting a hospital, Johns Hopkins Hospital. This land, owned by the city of Baltimore was sold to Johns Hopkins at below-market rate price. In the 1980’s sale of another city-owned hospital to the Johns Hopkins Conglomerate, again at below market-rate price, resulted in another capital expansion of this academic industrial complex- Johns Hopkins Bayview Hospital. These two hospitals along with its recently acquired Howard County Hospital ranked 3rd highest of the 17 Maryland hospital in 2013 in profit margin. The JHC is powerful and profitable, through private wealth and public partnerships. While its tax exempt status dictates that it provides charitable care in return, its growth in profit over the years coincides with a decrease in charitable care. Researchers within its walls challenge this trend: ‘The system is broken when nonprofit hospitals are raking in such high profits,..The most profitable hospitals should either lower their prices or put those profits into other services within the community.’
Hopkins exploitation
The Johns Hopkins Conglomerate’s reputation as an oligarchy-like institution that exploits its neighbor to make itself rich in power and fame, while throwing crumbs to them is well known in Baltimore and beyond. Its history around urban renewal and displacement of families is renown. Over the years it has continuously expanded into its neighbors’ homes in East Baltimore, displacing families one row house at a time, building power through landbanking. Or it expands through large land takings like the 1950s and current urban renewal project, hundreds of rowhouses at a time, occupied or not occupied. In 2015 The Johns Hopkins Conglomerate earned the reputation of “the best example of what gentrification looks like’ due to its current expansion in East Baltimore in building a biotech park. Unfortunately 750 low income black families were displaced to make room for this expansion while the university continued to build its power and prestige. In an attempt to appease residents, the university signed a community agreement to provide funding for community groups then later walked away without paying anything.
The university’s process of accumulating power does not begin or end with exploitative and uneven economic and community development. In 2016 it boasted the highest funding from the federal government for research (more than 2 million US dollars), almost 90% of its research dollars. With such power comes responsibility. Over the years, its responsibility to the human rights of its research subjects has been consistently lacking. Its history of doing exploitative research on its low income Black neighbors in East Baltimore became national news with the story of Henrietta Lacks. In the 1950s Ms. Lacks, who lived in East Baltimore, was a patient at the hospital where her cells were used for research by the institution without her permission. Her cells went on to be a critical tool for life-saving research across the globe, with no recognition or compensation to her or her family, until now.
JHC’s more recent history in the 1990s continued these types of exploitative research with lead paint poisoning studies that exposed children to this toxic material resulting in a law suit and investigation by the US Department of Health and Human Services.
1199 SEIU JH Hospitals workers strike for a living wage. 5/ 2014
Its power to exploit does not limit itself to the local geography.
In 2013 the Johns Hopkins Hospital consistently inhibited coal mining workers from receiving disability benefit for black lung disease resulting in a federal government investigation. Currently a $1 billion lawsuit against the university, Bristol Myers, and the Rockefeller Foundation, for their roles in a 1940s U.S. government experiment that infected hundreds of Guatemalans with syphilis, is being brought by 444 victims and relatives of the victims. The experiment was aimed at testing the then-new drug penicillin to determine its effect on stopping the spread of sexually-transmitted diseases.
1199 SEIU JH Hospitals workers strike for a living wage. 5/ 2014
Exploitation by the Johns Hopkins Conglomerate does not remain outside its walls. Over recent years, the hospital workers have striked for a living wage- one that would allow them to live in neighborhoods that are healthy. Sub-contractors of the University have protested the Conglomerates’ hiring practices, and low wages. Currently the nursing staff at the East Baltimore hospital are unionizing to collectively demand safer practices for patient care and more equitable treatment of its community neighbors. Their research shows that the Hospital hires private companies to collect medical debt as little as $200 even while it receives tax credits and government subsidies.
With power comes responsibility. While the Johns Hopkins Conglomerate has grown in power and prestige it has consistently exploited its neighbors, research subjects, and the general public. The outcome of this systematic exploitation is poverty and the process that sometimes becomes normalized in securing food, clothing, and shelter-crime. Poverty exists around its campuses BECAUSE it has neglected its neighbors, discriminated, against them, and displaced them. Instead of using its massive power to help solve the problems of the people, it has consistently chosen to displace the people and socially reconstruct places with people of a different race and class-out of sight, out of mind. In effect, it has participated in creating the ‘security threat’ it wants to police away. As more and more data confirms this history, JHC has offered small compromises by beginning to invest in local businesses and offering young residents opportunity to study at its institutions. It’s a good start. A police force is not a good continuation.
Arming the Johns Hopkins Conglomerate with police powers is unethical
JHC is considered a ‘plantation’ presence by many in a majority Black city where police abuse and corruption is rampant and the city is under a consent degree. These institutions have shown themselves to be intoxicated with power and shown themselves to use power to exploit. Why would we give this intoxicated driver yet another opportunity to continue to traumatize our citizens, through police powers? We, collectively, have the power to hold power accountable. Call your congress person and tell them to vote ‘no’ for Johns Hopkins police powers. Tell them to not just vote ‘no’. Tell your congress representatives to send the JHC back to the drawing board, to join its fellow citizens in a collective process, to come up with an alternative plan to assure that everyone in Baltimore is safe, healthy, and able to afford food, shelter, medicine, and clothing. Why should the Johns Hopkins Conglomerate be the only citizens of Baltimore who are afforded these basic human rights? That is structural violence.
‘The ability to corrupt and cause harm is greatest in the hands of those with greatest power.’
