"Like being in a bad marriage"
by Tom Sullivan
Something was bound to give. It's not as if Baltimore didn't have a reputation for brutal policing, as Digby noted last night. The Baltimore Sun investigation, "Undue Force," was from just last fall. As Tavis Smiley asked Bill O'Reilly two weeks ago in the wake of recent deaths of black men at the hands of police, "How many isolated incidents equal a pattern?" After Freddie Gray died from mysterious injuries sustained under police custody in Baltimore days later, his funeral yesterday finally set fire to fuel that was tinder-dry:
After almost two weeks of tension over the death of Freddie Gray, Baltimore descended into chaos Monday.
Roaming gangs of mostly young men clashed with police in the streets, seriously injuring officers; tore open businesses; and looted their stocks. Gov. Larry Hogan declared a state of emergency and called in the National Guard, and state police requested as many as 5,000 reinforcements from neighboring states.
Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake instituted a weeklong citywide curfew from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. starting Tuesday.
Rawlings-Blake called the rioting and destruction "idiotic."
"This isn't a white-black issue," Gray family attorney William Murphy told a crowd last night. "This is an issue of how do we treat each other as human beings." He set the rioting against the backdrop of community oppression from the days of slavery to Sundown towns to the Civil Rights era to a war on drugs that left America with more of its citizens imprisoned than any other country in the world. Murphy concluded:
"Well, we've spoken tonight. We've spoken with our feet, with our words, and most of all, with our hearts. We live here. We love it here. It's not perfect. It's like being in a bad marriage. But we're not interested in a divorce. We're willing to go into counseling with anybody that wants to make it right. But we love this city, and we're here to work as hard as we can and as long as we can until this problem is solved."
In predictable fashion, the usual media suspects will focus on the looters, on the rocks and bottles, and ignore what sent angry citizens into the streets across the country — in Ferguson, in New York, in North Charleston, and now in Baltimore.
Less predictably, as protests broke out over the weekend, Baltimore Orioles COO John Angelos, son of team owner Peter Angelos, called for due process to be completed before judging the police involved. But he set the protests in a broader context:
That said, my greater source of personal concern, outrage and sympathy beyond this particular case is focused neither upon one night’s property damage nor upon the acts, but is focused rather upon the past four-decade period during which an American political elite have shipped middle class and working class jobs away from Baltimore and cities and towns around the U.S. to third-world dictatorships like China and others, plunged tens of millions of good, hard-working Americans into economic devastation, and then followed that action around the nation by diminishing every American’s civil rights protections in order to control an unfairly impoverished population living under an ever-declining standard of living and suffering at the butt end of an ever-more militarized and aggressive surveillance state.
In some more-affluent, more-privileged communities, the attitude seems to be "let them eat Freedom." But for those paying closer attention, it's beginning to feel like 1968 again: Baltimore, Washington, Chicago. That's not a good feeling.
UPDATE:: Don't miss Ta-Nehisi Coates' commentary on the situation in Baltimore.