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8

The Riot Show!

What if they held a race riot and the news media stayed away? At the very least, we would be spared the nauseating spectacle of sycophantic reporters fawning on opportunistic thieves, as happened yet again during the outbreak of antipolice violence in Baltimore in April 2015. We wouldn’t see talking heads blaming the mayhem on “desperate poverty” or on “disparity,” or characterizing it as an “uprising” born of understandable anger. More important, the vandals would lose a bounty as valuable as their purloined booty: notoriety and legitimacy.

The riots held in the name of Freddie Gray, the drug dealer who died of a spinal injury in police custody, followed a drearily familiar script. Upon the first outbreak of violence, a crush of reporters flock to the scene with barely suppressed cries of glee. Surrounded by sound trucks and camera crews, outfitted with cell phones and microphones, they breathlessly narrate each skirmish between police and looters for the viewing public, thrusting their microphones into the faces of spectators and thugs alike to get a “street” interpretation of the mayhem. The studio anchors melodramatically caution the reporters to “stay safe,” even though the press at times may outnumber looters as well as the police. Meanwhile, the thieves get to indulge in the pleasures of anarchic annihilation while enjoying the desideratum of every reality-TV cast: a wide and devoted audience.

The performative quality of the live, televised race riot has created a new genre: riot porn, in which every act of thuggery is lasciviously filmed and parsed in real time for the benefit of at-home viewers. “Did you see that?” CNN reporter Miguel Marquez asked studio anchor Wolf Blitzer when vandals slashed a fire hose as businesses burned on April 27. “Wolf, if you just saw that, they just, while we were talking there, they just cut the hose with a knife . . . there are others who are thwarting the authorities at every turn.” (Marquez is given to philosophizing on social justice as he walks alongside protesters during antipolice demonstrations.)

Wolf confirmed that he had, in fact, seen the close-up footage: “I just saw that guy, yeah, I just saw that guy cut the hose as well, [a guy] with a gas mask.” Naturally, the TV audience also got to see the vicious sabotage. The street scene at these televised riots can be eerily static. People mill around listlessly like extras on a movie set. Within that sea of idleness, more energetic thugs, perched on the roofs of police cruisers, stomp out the cars’ windshields or throw garbage cans through the rear windows. The smartphone camera has only magnified the specular nature of the anarchy, as passersby memorialize their own presence at the festival of lawlessness.

As in the race riots in Ferguson, Missouri, CNN topped all other television channels for relentless oversaturation, keeping a phalanx of reporters in West Baltimore around the clock to meditate portentously on the meaning of the riots long after the looting was finally suppressed. Among national print outlets, the New York Times had the most frenzied output, with four or five stories a day on policing and racism, topics that the Times had already been obsessively pursuing for the last nine months. Both organizations diminished their coverage of Baltimore only marginally in the days and weeks after the fires were extinguished.

Thanks in large measure to the media deluge, the ideological yield from this urban tantrum was considerable. Inevitably, academics and pundits conferred political legitimacy on the riots, deeming them, in the words of the online publication Vox, “a serious attempt at forcing change.” Baltimore’s mayor, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, apologized for calling the rioters “thugs.” President Obama and Hillary Clinton both affirmed the dangerous myth that the criminal-justice system is racist. Speaking at Lehman College in the Bronx a week after the Baltimore riots, President Obama opined that young black men experience “being treated differently by law enforcement—in stops and in arrests, and in charges and incarcerations. The statistics are clear, up and down the criminal-justice system. There’s no dispute.” Hillary Clinton played the same theme at Columbia University several days after the riots: “We have to come to terms with some hard truths about race and justice in America. There is something profoundly wrong when African-American men are still far more likely to be stopped and searched by police, charged with crimes, and sentenced to longer prison terms than are meted out to their white counterparts.”

This claim of disparate treatment is simply untrue. For decades, liberal criminologists have tried to corroborate the Left’s cherished belief that the criminal-justice system responds to similarly situated whites and blacks unequally. The effort always comes up short. “Racial differences in patterns of offending, not racial bias by police and other officials, are the principal reason that such greater proportions of blacks than whites are arrested, prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned,” concluded Michael Tonry, a criminologist, in his book Malign Neglect (1995). A Justice Department survey of felony cases from the country’s 75 largest urban areas, conducted in 1994, found that blacks had a lower chance of prosecution following a felony than whites, and were less likely to be found guilty at trial. Blacks were more likely to be sentenced to prison following a conviction, but that result reflected their past crimes and the gravity of their current offense (a subject examined in Chapter 19).

The rioting in Baltimore also gave fresh impetus to the liberal narrative about cities: that their viability depends on government spending. “There are consequences to indifference,” Obama said at Lehman College. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman opined that the riots “have served at least one useful purpose: drawing attention to the grotesque inequalities that poison the lives of too many Americans.” Krugman blamed stingy federal outlays for the “grotesque inequalities.”

The idea that the federal and local governments have been “indifferent” to urban decay is ludicrous. Taxpayers have coughed up $22 trillion on more than 80 means-tested welfare programs (not including Social Security, Medicare, or grants for economic development) since the War on Poverty was launched in 1964, according to the Heritage Foundation. In the 1990s, Baltimore “invested” $130 million in public and nonprofit dollars to transform the West Baltimore neighborhood where Freddie Gray lived, to no effect, as National Review’s Ian Tuttle has documented.

This lack of effect is not surprising. Baltimore’s crime rate has been among the nation’s highest for decades. In 2013, the only cities with higher murder rates were Detroit, New Orleans, Newark, and St. Louis. Baltimore’s violent-crime rate is over twice that of New York. That violence would have doomed any hope for economic revival in high-crime areas even without the destruction of 350 businesses by arson and looting. West Baltimore residents complained to the tenacious post-riot crowd of reporters that Baltimore’s Inner Harbor area was spiffy and thriving, while their neighborhood was not. But potential business owners, if they have any other options, are not going to locate in a neighborhood where they fear for the safety of their employees and customers. Lowered crime is a precondition to economic revival, not its consequence. New York’s economic renaissance began only when crime started plummeting in 1994, thanks to a policing revolution there.

The post-riot media narrative virtually ignored Baltimore’s sky-high crime in favor of an all-consuming focus on allegedly racist policing practices. To its credit, the Baltimore Sun noted the shooting rampage that began after Freddie Gray was arrested on April 12 and escalated following the riots, as officers backed off from proactive enforcement. From April 28, the day after the most destructive riot, to May 7, there were 40 shootings, including ten on May 7. Fifteen people were murdered during that period, more than one a day. The total of 82 homicides from the beginning of 2015 through May 7 was 20 more than the number at the same point in 2014. All these deaths did nothing to dislodge the “Black Lives Matter” conceit that the biggest threat facing young black men today is the police, rather than other young black men. None of Baltimore’s post-riot killings has triggered protests.

Baltimore police officers now face a street environment that is even more dangerous and hostile than usual. A total of 155 officers were injured, 43 seriously, during the riots. Every arrest now brings a crowd of bystanders pressing in, jeering, and spreading lies about the encounter. On May 4, 2015, officers received a call about a man with a gun at the corner of a torched CVS store. His movements, captured on a police camera, also suggested that he had a gun. The suspect, 23-year-old Robert Edward “Meech” Tucker, had previously been convicted on gun and drug charges. When the officers approached him, he took off running (just as Freddie Gray did when he saw officers watching him). Tucker’s gun fired. Tucker then dropped to the ground and began screaming and rolling around as if he had been shot. Bystanders claimed that they had seen the police shoot him. The crowd threw bricks, Clorox bottles, and water bottles at the officers; one man lunged at them but was held back by other pedestrians. In fact, no officer had discharged his gun or even taken aim at Tucker. Even though Tucker had not been shot, not even by his own gun, word in the street continued to maintain that the cops had shot him.

Such lying about interactions between officers and civilians is endemic in urban areas. But even after the country witnessed the evisceration of the Michael Brown “hands up” hoax by none other than the federal Department of Justice, the media and the authorities have continued to seek out allegations of officer misconduct and to treat them as the gospel truth. The New York Times quoted a drug dealer as an authority on the Baltimore police: “They trip you, choke you out, cuss you out, disrespect you.” Maybe so. (The antipolice bar won judgments or settlements against the Baltimore Police Department in more than a hundred civil rights and brutality cases from 2011 to 2015, a fact that could reflect a pattern of abuse or a pattern of aggressive litigation and a supine city law department.) But it is also possible that the drug dealer was lying through his teeth. It never occurs to elite opinion-makers that the pervasiveness of crime in the inner city creates a large block of residents—not just criminals but their friends and families as well—who view and treat the police as antagonists.

The riots also led to rushed and likely excessive criminal charges against the six officers involved in the arrest and transport of Freddie Gray. (Four officers face homicide counts ranging from involuntary manslaughter to second-degree murder.) Upon announcing the charges mere hours after receiving Gray’s autopsy and a day after receiving a police report on the arrest, Baltimore’s prosecutor, Marilyn Mosby, declared that she had heard the “call for ‘no justice, no peace.’” Positioning herself as the head of a crusade rather than as part of a legal system dedicated to prosecuting individual cases, not causes, Mosby continued in an Obama-esque vein: “Last but certainly not least, to the youth of the city: I will seek justice on your behalf. This is a moment. This is your moment. Let’s ensure we have peaceful and productive rallies that will develop structural and systemic changes for generations to come. You’re at the forefront of this cause, and as young people, our time is now.”

Mosby had already displayed her penchant for the crassest of racial rabble-rousing following the grand-jury decision not to indict Officer Darren Wilson for the shooting death of Michael Brown. Mosby, reported St. Louis Public Radio, questioned the “motives” of Robert McCulloch, the St. Louis County district attorney who presented the Wilson case to the grand jury. On Baltimore TV, Mosby said, “In Ferguson, over 68 percent of the population is black and less than 6 percent votes.” (She did not explain why that low turnout is the fault of anyone other than the nonvoters.) “So you have an individual who is in office and does not share your interests and values and is making decisions about your daily life. . . . We say bring in special prosecutions.”

Mosby reversed herself regarding special prosecutors when the Baltimore Fraternal Order of Police called for one in the Freddie Gray case, expressing concerns that Mosby had several financial and familial conflicts of interest. “I can tell you that the people of Baltimore City elected me,” Mosby said at a press conference after the six officers were indicted, “and there’s no accountability with a special prosecutor.” One could only hope that the criminal-justice system would backstop whatever accountability to the facts Mosby herself might feel.

While the second-degree-murder charge against the driver of the police van carries the direst individual consequences, Mosby’s charge of “false imprisonment” against the arresting officers raises a risk of shutting down policing across Baltimore. Mosby alleged that the switchblade knife possessed by Gray was not illegal under Maryland law. The Baltimore police responded that it was prohibited under a city code. Even if Mosby’s reading of the knife statutes is correct, her imposition of criminal liability for an officer’s good-faith interpretive error is preposterous. The remedy for an arrest not supported by probable cause is to throw the case out at the station house or prosecutor’s office, or in court.

If officers face prison terms for trying to keep the streets safe, they will stop making discretionary arrests. Baltimore’s spike in gun violence suggests that such de-policing has already begun. Meanwhile, shortly after the riots, Mayor Rawlings-Blake requested that the U.S. Justice Department investigate the Baltimore police for systemic civil rights violations, and Attorney General Loretta Lynch agreed the next day. The result may be more handcuffing of the police in their efforts to protect lives in poor neighborhoods—a result encouraged by the media spin on the Baltimore riots.

A riot’s unchecked destruction of livelihoods and property is certainly newsworthy, threatening, as it does, the very possibility of civilization. The breakdown of law and order is a policy concern of enormous note. But the 24-hour cable-news cycle, with its insatiable craving for live visual excitement, creates a codependency between reporters and rioters, while the politics of the mainstream media guarantees a “root causes” exculpation of the violence. Short of a filming blackout on the actual violence, riots should be covered in sorrow, shame, and dismay.