[WASHINGTONPOST] SOON AFTER the rioting in Baltimore ended in late April, the world’s media turned their gaze elsewhere. Then, as a petulant police force retreated to its station houses, the real carnage began.It's the cops' fault, y'see.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't, Baltimore version...
May was the most lethal month in the city in more than 40 years; in per capita terms, it may have been the bloodiest month since recordkeeping began. There were 43 victims of homicide in the city last month, the most since August 1972, when Baltimore’s population, now 600,000, was about 900,000.
Any idea why a third of the city's former population now lives in the 'Burbs?
In addition, there were 108 nonfatal shootings in May, nearly triple the number recorded the same month last year. Over the three-day Memorial Day weekend alone, the city recorded 32 shootings and nine homicides.
That could be why everybody who could moved away.
As Baltimore’s streets succumb to the wave of carnage, the police have simply withdrawn, by many accounts. Harassed, hooted at and openly hated in the wake of the arrest of Freddie Gray, whose death in custody triggered the rioting in April, uniformed officers seem to have decided not to do their jobs.
Since they're harassed, hooted at, and openly hated they're leaving the harassers, hooters, and haters to take care of the non-essentials, like the termination of black lives, which, it would appear, don't matter.
Arrests, already down from 2014 levels before the rioting, have plummeted by more than 50 percent since then. Community leaders in Sandtown — the area where Mr. Gray was arrested — say there is a deliberate effort on the police department’s part to vacate the streets and see how the community likes it.
Unfeeling brutes that they are, they're letting the locals have what they say they want.
Notice that the community leaders in Sandtown haven't done anything to police their own community. They haven't done anything at all other than complain. That must be because they're "community organizers" as opposed to "community leaders"...
On Fox News, one officer, his face and voice obscured, explained the cops’ “reasoning.” “After the protests, it seems like the citizens would appreciate a lack of police presence, and that’s exactly what they’re getting,” he said. He went on to blame the city’s leadership for not having officers’ backs and prosecutors for indicting the six police officers in whose custody Mr. Gray was fatally injured.
You don't get lynched for staying in the station house eating donuts. You do get lynched for apprehending known and unknown violent felons and occasionally having to thump them. Which option produces optimal results?
If the police are determined to degrade their already poisonous relations with the city’s mainly African American communities, they have hit upon an effective strategy. Peevishness seems to have supplanted all sense of duty.
It's the cops' fault, obviously. It couldn't be the fault of the city's more feral inhabitants.
Even Police Commissioner Anthony W. Batts has acknowledged his officers have felt confused and unsupported following the charges filed against the six officers.
That's because six cops have been indicted for jugging a known felon who managed to kill himself in the paddy wagon. The charges are flimsy and they're going to be thrown out. If not, they'll have to disband the Baltimore City police department and start a new one from scratch. Maybe they can find the recruits for the new one in Sandtown. Defending themselves against the flimsy charges in court is going to impoverish the six officers (and their branch of the FOP) and they're not going to be able to resume their careers. The thugs win either way.
Implicitly acknowledging the slowdown underway, he said he has asked officers to maintain a “visible and consistent presence” in the city’s neighborhoods.
Which means riding around in their patrol cars and concentrating on traffic violations.
At the same time, there is no sign that city or state officials are devising any sort of strategy to lift Baltimore from its spiraling sense of despair.
The state officials have no responsibility to devise such strategy. Baltimore city is not the entire state. The city government would be the one to concern itself. And by Gum, they're on the job. Saturday's Baltimore Sun carried an announcement that property taxes were to be raised (again), which will contribute yet again to a flood of departures from the city. There was an opinion piece in the same paper pushing the idea of settling po' blacks among the rich folks in Guilford and Roland Park. If they're living among the rich folks, y'see, they'll conduct themselves like rich folks and thereby get rich.
Gov. Larry Hogan (R), having spent a week in Baltimore following the riots, has had little to say about the city since then beyond his insistence on the restoration of public order.
There's not an awful lot you can do in a city without public order, but the Post has to blame Hogan for something because he's a Publican.
Hogan administration officials say that Keiffer J. Mitchell Jr., an African American and a Democrat from Baltimore who is an aide to the governor, will offer recommendations to promote jobs and opportunity in the city. So far there is no indication of how and when that may happen.
Mitchell is another political dynast, grandson of Clarence M. Mitchell, Jr., and grandnephew of the late U.S. Congressman Parren Mitchell. His father's older brother, Clarence M. Mitchell, III was a Maryland State Senator, and his father's younger brother, Michael B. Mitchell, Sr. was a Baltimore City Councilman and later Maryland State Senator. At the age of 3, Mitchell took part in his first political campaign, handing out flyers for the State Senate bid of his uncle, Clarence M. Mitchell, III. At twelve, while attending Baltimore's Boys' Latin School of Maryland, he organized a "Kids-for-Carter" campaign to support then Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter in his bid for the presidency. As an undergraduate at Emory University, he volunteered at the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta. As you can see, he's got all sorts of qualifications to alleviate poverty in a city whose institutions have collapsed under years of mismanagement by his relatives.
Baltimore must not be allowed to spiral into further despair and violence.
Why not?
Just as the city deserves responsible, proactive policing, it deserves strategic, forward-thinking governance from city and state leaders. Failing that, Baltimore’s failure will become their own.
That would be Mayor Rawlings-Blake, an Oberlin College graduate. She was born in Baltimore and grew up in the city's Ashburton neighborhood, where the creamiest de la creme of Baltimore blacks live untroubled by shootouts and heavy drug use. She is the daughter of Nina Rawlings, M.D. (pediatrician), and Howard "Pete" Rawlings, former member of the Maryland House of Delegates. State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby is married to Nick Mosby, a Baltimore city councilman. It's all very incestuous and a few generations from now everyone in government will probably have hemophilia and that sort of thing.