Pubdate: Sun, 03 May 2015 Source: San Diego Union Tribune (CA) Copyright: 2015 Union-Tribune Publishing Co. Contact: http://www.utsandiego.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/386 Note: Seldom prints LTEs from outside it's circulation area. WHAT DESTROYED BALTIMORE POLICE'S RELATIONSHIP WITH BLACK COMMUNITY The riots in Baltimore in the aftermath of the death of an African-American man in police custody have produced anguished and thoughtful reactions. Here's a sampling. David Simon, former Baltimore Sun police reporter and creator of "The Wire" TV show, in an interview with the Marshall Project: [The] drug war which Baltimore waged as aggressively as any American city was transforming in terms of police/community relations, in terms of trust, particularly between the black community and the Police Department. Probable cause was destroyed by the drug war. ... [It] made everybody in these poor communities vulnerable to the most arbitrary behavior on the part of the police officers, it taught police officers how not to distinguish in ways that they once did. Probable cause from a Baltimore police officer has always been a tenuous thing. ... Then at some point when cocaine hit and the city lost control of a lot of corners and the violence was ratcheted up, there was a real panic on the part of the government. And they basically decided that even that loose idea of what the Fourth Amendment was supposed to mean on a street level, even that was too much. Now all bets were off. Now you didn't even need probable cause. The City Council actually passed an ordinance that declared a certain amount of real estate to be drug-free zones. They literally declared maybe a quarter to a third of inner-city Baltimore off-limits to its residents, and said that if you were loitering in those areas you were subject to arrest and search. Think about that for a moment: It was a permission for the police to become truly random and arbitrary and to clear streets any way they damn well wanted. John McWhorter, The Daily Beast: America must de-escalate the persistent tensions between cops and young black men. The easiest and most sensible way to do that is to interrupt the foolish war on drugs. The gradual easing of laws against marijuana sale and purchase are a start. The tenor of black America's response to cops murdering black men should be a spur to going further. If one generation of black men grew up without thinking of the cops as the enemy, black America would be a new place making the best of a bad hand, and we would finally start getting past the current tiresome and troubling situation. Yet with the camera pulled back further, so to speak, I suspect that something constructive could still come of this mess. This is how things happen history is always messy. Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic: We live in a country where the incarceration rate is 750 per 100,000. ... China has roughly a billion more people than America; America incarcerates 800,000 more people than China. And as bad as that national incarceration rate is, the incarceration rate for black men is somewhere around 4,000 per 100,000. So if you think the incarceration rate for America is bad, for black America it's somewhere where there is no real historical parallel. Cathy Young, Real Clear Politics: The riots in Baltimore following the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray in police custody have reignited the debate about law enforcement and race relations. It should be a no-brainer that one can deplore police abuse (as more and more conservatives are doing, thanks partly to libertarian influence) and also condemn rioting and looting (as the vast majority of liberals have done, including President Obama). But along with the voices of reason and compassion, there are those living down to the worst political stereotypes: right-wingers who stoop to race-baiting and shrug off police brutality; leftists who pander to racial grievance and condone mob violence in the name of social justice. The divisions are sharpened by the fact that the underlying issues are genuinely complex. Unjustified police violence and police impunity are very real problems. At the same time, special treatment of police defendants is not simply (sorry, libertarians!) blind deference to state authority; it is part of a social contract in which we citizens deputize the cops to stand between us and the bad guys. The same communities that chafe at police mistreatment also clamor for protection from crime, from which they usually suffer the most. Ramesh Ponnuru, Bloomberg: So [President Obama says] we know how to solve the problems of urban America, but we "we," that is, in the sense of "you people who don't agree with my agenda" just don't care enough about children in need to do so. The problem with these remarks isn't that they're partisan. It's that they're absurd. They don't even fit with Obama's diagnosis of the problems at hand. Do we know how to make fathers present in their kids' lives, or how to make up for their absence? No. Are we sure how we should respond to the decline in manufacturing employment? Or how to stop people from getting involved in drugs? No and no. Some people are confident that more funding for early education will yield benefits for poor kids. Others look at the same evidence and think that the few examples of success can't easily be replicated. Even if the first group is correct, there's no reason to think that early education will, even in tandem with other reforms, "solve" the problems of Baltimore. And federal efforts at job training don't have a sterling track record. If I were president and thought I knew an obvious way to bring peace and prosperity to troubled cities and felt pretty strongly about it I'd maybe mention it before my seventh year in office. Drop it into a State of the Union address, for example. But it just isn't the case that we're a new federal program away from fixing the problems Obama identified. It isn't the case that conservatives are standing in the way of what everyone knows would work because we just don't share Obama's compassion. - --- MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom