United States | Baltimore’s riots

Why rioting makes things worse

Angry youths burn their own neighbourhood

Where will you buy your groceries tomorrow?
|BALTIMORE

OUTSIDE a gutted pharmacy in West Baltimore, William Tyler, a 41-year-old youth worker, illustrates the dilemma of policing in his city. Speaking about Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old who died on April 19th after being arrested by Baltimore’s police, he complains that: “None of these polices ever go to jail, they don’t get fired. Police is nothing but gangs too.” Yet looking at the building behind him, burnt out by riots that followed Mr Gray’s funeral, he adds, “and look at this store! This is where my mom gets her medicine. The police just stood right there and watched it happen. This weren’t the time for protocol. This were the time to go, go, go!”

Baltimore exploded into violence on the evening of April 27th after several days of largely peaceful protests against Mr Gray’s treatment. Soon after the funeral, angry teenagers, some apparently stranded by a shutdown of the city’s transport network, began attacking a mall in the north-west of the city.

By sunset, large areas of West Baltimore had descended into lawlessness. Groups of young men and women looted bars and corner shops, set fire to buildings and joyrode through the streets. By the following morning, the National Guard, state police and cops from neighbouring counties had flooded the city to enforce a citywide overnight curfew.

The riots were the most dramatic unrest in a large American city since 2001. Some see them as an outpouring of understandable rage at police brutality. Others wonder how torching the local pharmacy could possibly be the answer to anything. Barack Obama condemned the rioters as “criminals and thugs”.

In the neighbourhood where much of the violence took place, a third of homes were already vacant and more than half of working-age residents do not have jobs. The median household income is $25,000, less than half the national average. Chain stores are rare: residents rely on expensive little shops that sell groceries through hatches in bulletproof screens. Prices are high because competition is weak: few shopkeepers want to work in such a dangerous neighbourhood.

The riots will surely make all this worse. More businesses will flee, making jobs even harder to find and groceries even more costly. In Wonderland Liquors, a local store that was looted, volunteers sweep up the broken glass. “Everything is gone; it’s surreal”, says Daniel Kim, a relative of the owner. At least $100,000 of inventory was stolen, he reckons. The store is insured but it will take time to reopen and premiums will probably soar.

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Baltimore’s tragedy has intensified the national soul-searching about the relationship between African-Americans and the police that began with similar disturbances in Ferguson, Missouri last August. Hillary Clinton called for an end to mass incarceration, for police officers to be equipped with body cameras and for reforms intended to rebuild trust in policing.

Yet the problems in Baltimore are different from those in Ferguson. There, a newly arrived and more middle-class black population faced a mostly white police department and white city leaders who essentially treated them as a source of revenue by constantly fining them for minor infractions. In Baltimore, by contrast, blacks have been a majority for decades. The mayor, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, is a black Democrat; her police chief is black, and most police officers are non-white. Baltimore’s problems are deeper: in many ways, the city has simply failed.

Crime is rife. In 2013, 233 people were murdered in Baltimore, giving the city a higher murder rate than South Africa. Even as thousands of cops in riot gear enforced a curfew on April 28th, police scanners reported carjackings, robberies and one murder—none of them connected to the protests. Gangs are common and visible. In the aftermath of the riots, young men in the uniforms of the Bloods and Crips gave interviews claiming to have done a better job than the police of preventing looting.

This failure has its roots in a previous era. As in many north-eastern and mid-western American cities, black migrants seeking industrial jobs in the 1950s and 1960s faced violence and racist housing policies which concentrated them into ghettos. Middle-class whites fled, particularly after the riots that followed the murder of Martin Luther King in 1968. In the 1970s deindustrialisation sucked away jobs; in the 1980s, heroin and crack cocaine filled their place. As police adopted tough tactics to try to stop the drugs trade, violent crime instead flourished.

The legacy of state failure is difficult to fix. An investigation by the Baltimore Sun in September revealed that between 2011 and 2014 alone, the city paid out $5.7m to settle lawsuits over allegations of brutality. One case was of an 87-year-old woman who was pushed over by a police officer after calling because her grandson had been shot. In 2012 the FBI found 51 of the city’s cops involved in a corruption racket.

Some attempts to lower crime seem to have worsened things. Under the orders of the then mayor Martin O’Malley (who now seems likely to run for president), the police adopted a “zero tolerance” strategy. In 2005 there were 100,000 arrests among a population of just 635,000. Few African-Americans trust cops to enforce the law fairly, so many crimes are not reported, and police struggle to get witnesses to testify. Barely half of the city’s murders are solved.

Some things were improving before the riots. Graduation rates in the city’s public schools have climbed in recent years; a 60-year population decline has finally been stemmed. Alas, a few days of delirious mayhem could set the city back for a decade or more.

This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the headline "Why rioting makes things worse"

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