Democracy in America | Protests in Baltimore

It's chaos

A night of extreme lawlessness in an otherwise troubled city

By D.K. | BALTIMORE

WHAT is happening tonight in Baltimore is perhaps best described not as a riot but as anarchy. Though there are police lines, there are few protesters or people fighting the police or hurling stones. Indeed, where the police are lined up, the people standing around are mostly taking photos on their phones. Drive a few blocks in any direction, though, and suddenly it feels lawless. Groups of young men, boys really, wearing bandanas and hoodies, stand on street corners next to derelict buildings, staring at anyone passing, and occasionally throwing projectiles at cars. Young women hurry home carrying bags of stolen loot: food, clothes, and bottles of beer and liquor. On the occasional street here and there cars burn freely. Shops, of which there are not many in this abandoned corner of the inner city, are ravaged, their windows smashed, their shelves picked over. Cars hurtle through red lights at high speed, music blaring, boys leaning out of the windows. And everywhere the intense smell of smoke and the buzz of helicopters overhead.

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Tonight’s events began, as riots so often have in American history, as a protest. A week ago Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man, died in hospital, a week after he collapsed into a coma after being arrested and aggressively bundled into a police van in West Baltimore. Six police officers have been suspended. Today, at Mr Gray’s funeral, 2,000 people gathered in West Baltimore to hear eulogies to the young man. Hundreds of teenagers marched out of high school in protest at police brutality; within hours, a police cruiser had been set on fire. By late afternoon a branch of CVS, a drug store, had been looted and was alight and hundreds of riot cops were massing in West Baltimore. By 8pm, when darkness set, the fires and looting were spreading. Larry Hogan, Maryland’s new Republican governor, soon signed a state-of-emergency declaration. By 11pm the National Guard was being deployed and the city announced a curfew for all residents.

So far, however, the riots seem both enormous and minor. The scale of the destruction is tremendous. But while scores of people have been injured, and shots have been fired, so far, miraculously, nobody seems to have been killed. Baltimore will be damaged, and many of the businesses that have been burned will never reopen. The flow of people who have been moving back to this long-suffering city, gentrifying its more difficult corners, will surely grow thin. But as bleak as it all looks now, in a few years Baltimore, and this night of sudden lawlessness, will once again disappear from the national consciousness.

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The bigger problem for Baltimore is that lawnessness is not limited to nights like tonight. As one young woman standing taking photos said to me, West Baltimore is “always like this. Well not like this, but you know, shootings”. This is a city where a young black man is killed almost every day—not by police officers, but by other young black men. The failure of the police in this city is that they cannot enforce the law even at the best of times. At their worst, as the death of Mr Gray seems to suggest, Baltimore's police are simply another source of the lawlessness.

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