2015-04-28 USA: Mellakat syttyivät Baltimoressa

[Skeptikko]

Black Lives Matter -riehunnan lopputulos - kaupunki on entistä kurjemmassa jamassa, kun poliisi ei uskalla enää puuttua kunnolla:

The Tragedy of Baltimore - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/magazine/baltimore-tragedy-crime.html

Since Freddie Gray's death in 2015, violent crime has spiked to levels unseen for a quarter century. Inside the crackup of an American city.
...
In Baltimore, you can tell a lot about the politics of the person you're talking with by the word he or she uses to describe the events of April 27, 2015. Some people, and most media outlets, call them the "riots"; some the "unrest." Guy was among those who always referred to them as the "uprising," a word that connoted something justifiable and positive: the first step, however tumultuous, toward a freer and fairer city. Policing in Baltimore, Guy and many other residents believed, was broken, with officers serving as an occupying army in enemy territory — harassing African-American residents without cause, breeding distrust and hostility.

In 2016, the United States Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division concurred, releasing a report accusing the city's Police Department of racial discrimination and excessive force. The city agreed to a "consent decree" with the federal government, a set of policing reforms that would be enforced by a federal judge. When an independent monitoring team was selected to oversee the decree, Guy was hired as its community liaison. This was where she wanted to be: at the forefront of the effort to make her city a better place.

But in the years that followed, Baltimore, by most standards, became a worse place. In 2017, it recorded 342 murders — its highest per-capita rate ever, more than double Chicago's, far higher than any other city of 500,000 or more residents and, astonishingly, a larger absolute number of killings than in New York, a city 14 times as populous. Other elected officials, from the governor to the mayor to the state's attorney, struggled to respond to the rise in disorder, leaving residents with the unsettling feeling that there was no one in charge. With every passing year, it was getting harder to see what gains, exactly, were delivered by the uprising.

One night last October, after Guy and her husband, Da'mon, had gone to bed, Da'mon's brother banged on the bedroom door. "Yo, yo, get up!" he shouted.

It was around 11:30 p.m. Da'mon's 21-year-old son, Da'mon Jr., whom Shantay had helped raise, would ordinarily have been home by then, after his bus ride across town from his evening shift working as a supply coordinator at Johns Hopkins Hospital. But he was nowhere to be seen. Da'mon Sr. rushed to the door and asked what was going on.

"Dame's been shot," his brother said.
...
Da'mon told me he had no idea who was behind the shooting, which he surmised was either an attempted robbery or a gang initiation. It was unnerving, he said, knowing the shooter was still out there somewhere. "I don't like it when cars slow down to me or people are staring at me too long at stop signs," he said. "Any one of y'all could be that person. You never know."
...
Until 2015, Baltimore seemed to be enjoying its own, more modest version of this upswing. Though it is often lumped in with Rust Belt economic casualties like Cleveland, St. Louis and Detroit, Baltimore in fact fared better than these postindustrial peers. Because of the Johns Hopkins biomedical empire, the city's busy port and its proximity to Washington, metro Baltimore enjoyed higher levels of wealth and income — including among its black population — than many former manufacturing hubs.
...
The violence and disorder have fed broader setbacks. Gov. Larry Hogan canceled a $2.9 billion rail transit line for West Baltimore, defending the disinvestment in the troubled neighborhood partly by noting that the state had spent $14 million responding to the riots. Target closed its store in West Baltimore, a blow to a part of town short of retail options. The civic compact has so frayed that one acquaintance admitted to me recently that he had stopped waiting at red lights when driving late at night. Why should he, he argued, when he saw young men on dirt bikes flying through intersections while police officers sat in cruisers doing nothing?
...
It's also because the national political discourse lacks a vocabulary for the city's ills. On right-wing talk radio, one of the few sectors of the media to take much interest in Baltimore's crime surge, there are old tropes of urban mayhem — Trump's "American carnage." Typically lacking from these schadenfreude-laced discussions is any sense of the historical forces and societal abandonment that the city has for decades struggled to overcome.

On the left, in contrast, Baltimore's recent woes have been largely overlooked, partly because they present a challenge to those who start from the assumption that policing is inherently suspect. The national progressive story of Baltimore during this era of criminal-justice reform has been the story of the police excesses that led to Gray's death and the uprising, not the surge of violence that has overtaken the city ever since. As a result, Baltimore has been left mostly on its own to contend with what has been happening, which has amounted to nothing less than a failure of order and governance the likes of which few American cities have seen in years.
...
Her announcement of charges — based on an investigation her own office conducted, not trusting the department's — helped stanch further unrest, but it delivered a profound blow to morale among rank-and-file officers, who were already aggrieved over their leadership's handling of the riot, in which 130 officers were injured. Officers bridled at the ringing, declamatory tone of her announcement. "It was the way she did it — the grandstanding," the veteran officer told me.

"Cops don't necessarily stop in their tracks because another cop is charged in a crime," Kevin Davis, one of Batts's deputies at the time, told me. "Typically it's a bad cop, a crook, a drug dealer or a drunk or someone who abuses his wife. But when these cops got charged criminally and the probable cause was not easily understood by the rank and file — that gave them a sense of dread."

The department's officers responded swiftly, by doing nothing. In Baltimore it came to be known as "the pullback": a monthslong retreat from policing, a protest that was at once undeclared and unmistakably deliberate — encouraged, some top officials in the department at the time believe, by the local police union. Many officers responded to calls for service but refused to undertake any "officer-initiated" action. Cruisers rolled by trouble spots without stopping or didn't roll by at all. Compounding the situation, some of the officers hospitalized in the riot remained out on medical leave. Arrests plunged by more than half from the same month a year before. The head of the police union, Lt. Gene Ryan, called the pullback justifiable: "Officers may be second-guessing themselves," he told The Sun. "Questioning, if I make this stop or this arrest, will I be prosecuted?"
...
By July's end, 45 people had been killed during the month, and Rawlings-Blake had replaced Batts with Davis. The department was hemorrhaging officers now, at all ranks.
...
Across Baltimore, there was by then a mounting sense that whatever path there was to be found out of the city's chaos, its residents were going to have to find it themselves — that the authorities were no longer up to the task. The lawlessness that followed the police pullback had persisted, and the city ended 2015 with 342 homicides, a 62 percent increase over the year before, within a dozen deaths of the worst year of the 1990s. Ninety-three percent of the victims were black. The rate at which detectives were able to close homicide cases fell from 50 percent in 2013 to 30 percent, as residents grew even warier of calling in tips or testifying.
...
The Justice Department's report, meanwhile, had led to the federal "consent decree" that the city negotiated with the department — a sweeping set of reforms of the Police Department that set out new rules governing stops and searches, internal discipline and much more. Gene Ryan, the leader of the police union, complained that his organization had been shut out of the process of drafting it. Tony Barksdale, who had been retired for three years and now spent his days trading stocks online, attacked it incessantly on Twitter, accusing city leaders of "handcuffing your own cops while turning the city over to criminals."
...
An hour into the forum, a neighborhood resident named Renee McCray stepped up to the microphone. She described how bewildering it had been to accompany a friend downtown, near the tourist-friendly Inner Harbor, one night a few months earlier. "The lighting was so bright. People had scooters. They had bikes. They had babies in strollers. And I said: 'What city is this? This is not Baltimore City.' Because if you go up to Martin Luther King Boulevard" — the demarcation between downtown and the west side — "we're all bolted in our homes, we're locked down." She paused for a moment to deliver her point. "All any of us want is equal protection," she said.

It was a striking echo of the language in the Department of Justice report and the activists' condemnations of the police following Gray's death. Back then, the claims were of overly aggressive policing; now residents were pleading for police officers to get out of their cars, to earn their pay — to protect them.