Pubdate: Fri, 01 May 2015
Source: Sun-Sentinel (Fort Lauderdale, FL)
Copyright: 2015 Sun-Sentinel Company
Website: http://www.sun-sentinel.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/159
Author: Joe Mozingo and Timothy M. Phelps
Page: 10A

UNREST ISN'T A BLACK AND WHITE ISSUE THIS TIME

[David Simon: "If I had to guess and put a name on it, I'd say that at
some point, the drug war was as much a function of class and social
control as it was of racism. I think the two agendas are inextricably
linked, and where one picks up and the other ends is hard to say."]

BALTIMORE -- The mayor is black. The council is almost two-thirds
black. The school superintendent is black. The police chief is black,
and a majority of his officers are black.

Race riots inevitably end in contention over what social woes led to
the trigger point, with one overarching element: a white power
structure ruling a black populace.

Baltimore left behind that vestige of segregation long ago, yet the
city nonetheless has been perched on the edge of chaos for much of
this week, as African-American protesters took to the streets to
express grievances over police abuse and urban neglect.

"We ain't talking about color," said John Baptist Watkins III, 53,
sitting on the steps of a boarded-up brick row house on North Avenue,
as men nearby peddled drugs -- one of the few ways to earn money in
this part of town.

Even the city's African-American elected officials, Watkins said,
"have no clue what is going on in the city."

Five days of protests, at least one of them wracked by violence and
looting, have created a historic moment in which the black leaders of
a large American city convened to put down an eruption of racial unrest.

As police and National Guard troops were lining up to maintain order,
Rep. Elijah E. Cummings was walking among the protesters trying calm
their anger. "Please go home to your families," the Baltimore Democrat
entreated them through a bullhorn. "I'm not asking you. I'm begging
you."

Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, a former deputy public defender who has been
mayor since 2010, kept a toned-down approach during the early hours of
the unrest but came out with a scathing rebuke of the demonstrators
who had looted shops, set buildings afire and clashed with police.

"It is idiotic to think that by destroying your city, you're going to
make life better for anybody," Rawlings-Blake said at a news
conference during the skirmishing Monday night. "Too many people have
spent generations building up this city for it to be destroyed by
thugs who, in a very senseless way, are trying to tear down what so
many have fought for."

President Barack Obama, in the White House, 43 miles down the road,
praised the police for showing "extraordinary restraint."

Speaking to radio host Steve Harvey in Los Angeles, he said the city's
underlying afflictions would require a sustained effort to alleviate.

"The communities in Baltimore that are having these problems now are
no different than the communities in Chicago where I first started
working when I moved there as a community organizer," the president
said. "So I've seen this movie too many times before."

It was the death earlier this month of Freddie Gray, 25, whose spine
was partially severed while in police custody, that triggered the
latest unrest against police.

But the poverty and alienation of West Baltimore had already pushed
many people to the breaking point.

Parts of Baltimore never recovered from the devastating riots of 1968
that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Black
leaders coming power in the 1970s and 1980s inherited wasted
neighborhoods with low employment, poor education, rampant drug use
and high incarceration. City leaders have made little progress in
turning around large, impoverished sections of a city in which
African-Americans make up 64 percent of the population.

That nicer parts of the city have rebounded -- the touristy Inner
Harbor -- has only heightened a sense among many residents that the
civic establishment has abandoned neighborhoods like those around
North Avenue.

"Race has nothing to do with it," said Aziza Minor, a 37-year-old
black cosmetologist on North Avenue.

She said the violence came "from people who feel they haven't been
heard" by leaders of any color.

Rawlings-Blake, a rising figure in the Democratic Party, was initially
derided for her response to rising tensions leading up to Gray's
funeral over the weekend, when she said Sunday that officials "gave
those who wished to destroy space to do that."

Angry crowds overwhelmed police the next day, throwing rocks and
bricks and injuring 20 police officers.

The mayor, an attorney with degrees from Oberlin College and the
University of Maryland, said later that the statement was not meant as
a license to riot.

"There are always going to be armchair quarterbacks that have never
sat in my seat that see things different," Rawlings-Blake said. "But
this isn't the first emergency that I've had to deal with, and I know
you have to put in the work and manage the crisis on the ground."

Rawlings-Blake has tried to ease tensions between police and the black
community before. In 2013, she split with white Democratic Gov. Martin
O'Malley, her longtime ally, over his calls for a high-arrest,
zero-tolerance policy to drive down crime in Baltimore. She said she
would not go back to "kids feeling under siege."

But on Tuesday she faced criticism for not addressing the demands
coming from those same constituents.

"I think she should have showed her face here today," said Brandon
LaPrade, 25, a University of Baltimore student, at Tuesday's protest
on North Avenue. "She's called us thugs, but we're not ignorant. We
just want what's right for Baltimore. She could have at least come and
heard us."

A disembodied female voice came from a loudspeaker. Many assumed it
was the mayor's, but she never identified herself.

By Tuesday night, police and National Guard members lined the streets,
with military vehicles backing them up, but they avoided physically
engaging with the protesters.

They were aided by members of the community, several of whom stood in
front of the police and shouted at people to go home to protect
themselves and their community. One woman held up a bright yellow sign
reading, "Fight another day!" A young man approached Cummings at one
point, yelling about police brutality. "I hear you," Cummings said,
urging him to nonetheless go home for the night.

Tuesday night's demonstrations were peaceful, and a 10 p.m. curfew was
enforced with little confrontation. Whether Baltimore leaders had the
rapport with their communities to tamp down their anger, or whether
cities are simply learning how to deal more effectively with what have
become frequent protests against police, the response in Baltimore was
a study in contrasts to the initial police crackdown on rioting in
Ferguson, Mo.

There, where a national uproar was unleashed over the shooting death
of 18-year-old Michael Brown, the city's white-dominated municipal
government and police force drew criticism from civil rights
organizations and others for mounting a military-like siege response
to the unrest -- at least initially.

Baltimore Police Commissioner Anthony Batts, an African-American, has
generally had a reputation for measured policing in response to
potential racial flashpoints.

Before coming to Baltimore, he had served as police chief in Oakland
and Long Beach in California, and was praised for reaching out to
black residents in both cities. In Oakland, he was credited for the
way he handled unrest that stemmed from the shooting death of an
unarmed black man, Oscar Grant, by a transit officer.

"I think that we really saw the value of black leadership last night,"
said Michael Millemann, a University of Maryland law professor, on
Wednesday. "To have Elijah Cummings on the streets, to have much of
the African-American leadership on the streets, has made a very
significant difference in how this could have gone -- not on Monday,
but how they handled yesterday." But the mistrust of the police in
West Baltimore is as deeply rooted as the poverty.

On North Avenue, Watkins said black police officers, more than half
the force, are no better than the white cops. "In fact, they're the
worst ones," he said.

David Simon, the former Baltimore journalist and creator of the
acclaimed television series "The Wire," came to the same conclusion when
he was doing his research on the streets of West Baltimore for his book,
"The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood."

He told the news site the Marshall Project in an interview posted
Wednesday: "The guys who would really kick your ass without thinking
twice were black officers. If I had to guess and put a name on it, I'd
say that at some point, the drug war was as much a function of class and
social control as it was of racism. I think the two agendas are
inextricably linked, and where one picks up and the other ends is hard
to say."

For the law-abiding, Monday's destruction couldn't be undone by
success on Tuesday, nor by peace on Wednesday.

"The entire situation could have been handled better," said Earl
Johnson, 34, a sustainability commissioner. "The reinforcements should
have been sent a long time ago. They allowed those kids to run wild
for too long. By the time they got to them, it was too late. The
damage is done."

(Staff writers Joseph Tanfani, W.J. Hennigan and Noah Bierman in
Baltimore and Lee Romney in San Francisco contributed to this report.)
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