Fixing America’s inner cities

AS BALTIMOREANS sweep up broken glass and haggle with insurers over fire-gutted shops, many are wondering why the city exploded into riots last month, and how to stop it happening again. The proximate cause of the mayhem is clear: it erupted after Freddie Gray, an African-American man, died in police custody. Young black men in Baltimore, as in many other American cities, are fed up with being manhandled by cops. Most demonstrated peacefully, but some seized the opportunity to steal, smash and burn.

Such destruction solves nothing—cities like Detroit and Newark have never truly recovered from the riots of the 1960s. But people in the poorest parts of Baltimore have good cause to be upset. In Sandtown-Winchester, the centre of the riots, less than half of adults have jobs and the murder rate, at 129 per 100,000, is worse than that of Honduras, the most homicidal nation on Earth. If Sandtown were a country, the State Department would advise you not to go there.