Wednesday, April 29, 2015

Baltimore Meltdown The Result Of Police Brutality--Not A Silly Comment By The Mayor

Baltimore Meltdown The Result Of Police Brutality--Not A Silly Comment By The Mayor


I write from the left on politics and policy.
Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

Watching the coverage of the Baltimore riots, I was stunned by how much time was being given by the media to the effort to blame someone for the unfolding violence.
Local and national reporters busily tossed around questions aimed at assigning blame to Mayor Rawlings-Blake for her foolish comment the other day where she appeared to be endorsing those who wanted the ‘space’ to express their displeasure over the death of Freddie Gray by acting out in violence. Reporters also focused on finding blame for the time it took to send the National Guard onto the streets of Baltimore because it makes for better copy to blame government reaction or inaction than to imagine the considerations a Mayor and a Governor face when trying to find a balance between the danger of inflaming a situation versus controlling that situation.
Yes, the Mayor most certainly made an errant and unforced error in her remarks when the rioting first broke out Saturday night—an error that she, like any other human being realizing a mistake, attempted to walk back.
And, maybe the state was too slow to send in the Guard or maybe it was not.
But if you imagine that the Mayor’s silly comment—or the timing of the arrival of National Guard troops—are the reason that the city of Baltimore is in total distress, you are either not paying attention or are simply unwilling to dig into the history of the city to understand what is really at work here.
Poverty is always going to be a fast track to exasperation and from exasperation it is a short hop to violence—and there is plenty of poverty in the City of Baltimore.

Police and demonstrators gather in the aftermath of rioting following Monday’s funeral for Freddie Gray, who died in police custody, on Tuesday, April 28, 2015, in Baltimore. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
Reasonable people can argue about who is responsible for a community experiencing abject poverty. Some will say that government has enabled the poverty by providing too much help by way of welfare while others will suggest that government has done too little to help impoverished communities break the cycle. Still others will place the blame on the members of the community themselves.
We can leave that discussion to another day because, in the case of Baltimore, there is a more immediate explanation for why the death of Freddie Gray would set off the explosion first ignited on Saturday night with the full eruption occurring yesterday as Mr. Gray was being laid to rest.
Between the years 2011 to 2014, the City of Baltimore was forced to pay out almost six million dollars in compensation to those who had been adjudged the victims of police brutality. Even more stunning, given that Baltimore is a city of only 622,000 people, there were more than 100 court judgments or settlements awarded to victims of police brutality and civil rights violations.
I think we can all agree that only a tiny percentage of those who may have suffered similar abuse ever manage to bring their cases before a court. Thus, the one-hundred plus who sought to redress their grievances likely represents only the tip of the iceberg.
No doubt, these are all cases of bad guys who smarted off to the cops during an arrest and earned the response they received, yes?
Sadly, no.
In fact, virtually all of the victims who brought court cases were either never charged with a crime or had the charges dropped by the court.
These were not, in the vernacular, righteous busts.
Who were these victims?
A 26 year old pregnant accountant who had witnessed the police berating the victims of an attack and tried to set them straight by explaining to the officers what she had seen so that the police would go after the attackers instead of focusing on the victims. The police responded by pushing the woman to the ground, scraping the skin off her face in the process and cuffing her.
Court transcripts show that the police in question attempted to severely minimize the events in court. However, there had been two, uninvolved witnesses who corroborated the pregnant accountant’s story, leading to the woman receiving $125,000 in compensation from the city.

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