Читать книгу The War on Cops - Heather Mac Donald - Страница 15

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Baltimore in Flames

The false narrative about race and policing was well rehearsed and ready to be deployed in April 2015 when Baltimore erupted in riots after a black man died of injuries sustained in police custody. The apologetics began almost as soon as the fires were lit on April 27, heralding a night of violence and looting that would leave dozens of police officers injured and 19 buildings torched, including a $16 million senior center providing affordable housing and drugstores providing crucial medications for elderly customers. Society “refuses to help [young blacks] in a serious fashion. . . . We’re only there when they riot,” Michael Eric Dyson declared on MSNBC. Mika Brzezinski observed on Morning Joe: “This was an extremely, desperately poor city. This was bound to happen.” We were seeing an “uprising of young people against the police,” the result of a “combination of anger and disparity,” said Wes Moore, a professional talking head. Neill Franklin, a former Baltimore police officer and member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, blamed the drug laws.

In other words, the looters and arsonists were pushed to the breaking point by racism, poverty, and police brutality, the last exemplified by the death of Freddie Gray. A 25-year-old drug dealer with a lengthy arrest record, Gray had taken off running after making eye contact with an officer on bike patrol in a high-crime area on April 12; police reportedly claimed that he was involved in illegal activity. After a chase, he surrendered and was cuffed, searched, and arrested for possession of an illegal knife. According to the Baltimore prosecutor, he asked for an asthma inhaler but was not given one; he was not secured by a seatbelt while being transported in the police van, and though the officer driving the van repeatedly checked up on Gray, the officer did not provide requested medical assistance. It was during this time, according to the prosecutor, that he suffered his ultimately fatal spine injury.

Protests began on April 18, the day before Gray died in the hospital, turning violent a week later and especially on April 27. As the media narrative framed it, the rioters’ means may have been regrettable but they were engaged in a profound cri de coeur against the social injustice in which we all play a part.

Bunk. What happened in Baltimore was simply a larger and better-covered version of the flash mobs that have beset American cities in recent years, with black youths gathering via social media to steal from stores and assault whites. In May 2012, for example, students from Mervo High School in Northeast Baltimore crammed into a 7-Eleven store that was offering free Slurpees as a promotion. The teens grabbed all the merchandise they could get their hands on—$6,000 worth in total—and fled from the store. The manager tried to close the door to prevent the thieves from escaping and was viciously beaten. On St. Patrick’s Day that same year, a flash mob converged on Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. The Baltimore Sun reported that by the time the rampage ended, “one youth had been stabbed, a tourist had been robbed, beaten and stripped of his clothes, and others had been forced to take refuge inside a hotel lobby to escape an angry mob.” In April 2014, a bicyclist in Baltimore was attacked by a group of black teens who knocked him off his bike and pummeled him.

Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and Washington, D.C., among other cities, have all grappled with similar violence. None of it deserves a righteous political gloss. Nor does the violence in Baltimore, which began with an invitation sent out over social media to convene at a local mall and “purge” it.

Perhaps if the media had not shrunk from reporting on the flash-mob phenomenon and the related “knockout game”—in which black teenagers try to knock out unsuspecting bystanders with a single sucker punch—we might have made a modicum of progress in addressing, or at least acknowledging, the real cause of black violence: the breakdown of the family. A widely circulated video from the mayhem shows a furious mother whacking her hoodie-encased son to prevent him from joining the mob. This tiger mom may well have the capacity to rein in her would-be vandal son. But the odds are against her. Try as they might, single mothers are generally overmatched in raising males. Boys need their fathers. But over 72 percent of black children are born to single-mother households today, three times the black illegitimacy rate when Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote his prescient analysis of black family breakdown in 1965.

Baltimore councilman Brandon Scott came closest to the truth in a city news conference when he angrily called on adults to “get out there and stand up for your neighborhood” as the mayhem was unfolding. “Adults have to step up and be adults and control our future,” Scott declared. True enough. But primary responsibility lies with children’s own two parents. Pace Michael Eric Dyson, “we” have spent trillions of dollars since the 1960s trying to help black youth. A social worker and a government check are no substitute for a father and a mother, however.

The same day that the teenage mob looted the 7-Eleven in 2012, eight people were shot in Baltimore in just 24 hours, a toll typical of Baltimore’s astronomical crime rate. Magnitudes more black men are killed by other black men in Baltimore and other American cities than by the police, yet those killings are ignored because they don’t fit into the favored narrative of a white, racist America lethally oppressing blacks. Police misconduct is deplorable and must be eradicated wherever it exists. But until the black crime rate comes down, police presence is going to be higher in black neighborhoods, increasing the chances that when police tactics go awry, they will have a black victim.

Baltimore’s response to the rioting was shamefully hesitant. The police stood by during the start of the arson, even as looters severed a fire hose brought in to try to save a burning CVS store. Apparently, the ludicrous meme that the press promulgated after the August 2014 riots in Ferguson, Missouri—that the violence was provoked by a military-style police presence, rather than by the rioters themselves—had taken hold and inhibited police agencies from fulfilling their core duty to protect life and property. It is not clear whether the police diffidence was ordered by Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake or by Police Commissioner Anthony Batts.* But any future outbreak of mob violence should be greeted with the force that it deserves.

* A Police Executive Research Forum report issued in November 2015 confirmed that officers had been told both before and during the violence to take a “soft approach,” including not making arrests and not wearing helmets, but the report does not clarify the ultimate source of the order.