Now that a newly-elected, thoroughly inexperienced Baltimore State\’s Attorney, who is deeply involved with the lawyer for Freddie Gray\’s family, has brought charges against 6 police officers that seem almost impossible to prove in a court of law, the rioters/looters/arsonists who trashed the city earlier this week have largely stopped doing so. Now we are seeing “victory celebrations” in the street, to commemorate this great triumph.
And what we are also seeing is the emergence of rationales/explanations of those behaviors, which are supposed to convince us that the rioting, smashing of property, looting and arson was somehow a good thing.
Are you buying?
Let\’s consider two articles which try to explain Baltimore away.
One is from Josh Kruger, writing for phillynow.com, and another is from Scott G. Brown, writing for the Washington Post.
We\’ll take them one at a time:
First we have Mr. Kruger, whose article reads like one of those movies that tells you it was “inspired by a true story” – which means that actual events have been molded into whatever the scriptwriters felt like putting together….thus, “inspired by a true story” or not, the movie is fictional.
A typical paragraph:
In other words, there is a serious problem in Baltimore, and it\’s an example of the problems endemic in American policing overall. Endemic is the right word, too. Based upon the evidence available to us, these aren\’t isolated incidents. Over the past year alone, we\’ve seen or read about: a man, who later died, being strangled by police on camera; a man being shot to death in the back by a police officer; a teenager being shot to death by a police officer; and, now, Freddie Gray, a man who suffered a fatal spinal cord injury while in police custody.
Interesting. Factually mangled, but interesting.
The man who was “strangled by police on camera” was Eric Garner, a serial miscreant who was resisting arrest – a little something not mentioned by Mr. Kruger. Garner, a mountain of a man at 6\’ 4 ” and 350 or so pounds, was taken down by grabbing his neck and pulling – which, it seems to me, is the only way a normal-sized officer could have done it. Yes, his arm was around Garner\’s neck for maybe 5-6 seconds. But, afterwards, the “strangled” man was able to, famously, say “I can\’t breathe, I can\’t breathe” in what sounded like a normal tone of voice, not the constricted one you would expect from someone whose throat was severely compromised.
The truth is, Garner was a very sick man. He had diabetes and a cardiac condition. That, coupled with the physical confrontation he brought on himself, is what did him in. If Garner had only gone along with the police – a routine he certainly was familiar with, having been arrested over 30 other times – he would still be alive. He didn\’t die of strangulation, he died of cardiac arrest. And the “racial” component of this incident is inherently debunked by the fact that the ranking officer, standing right there and apparently just fine with what happened, was, herself, Black.
The “teenager being shot to death by a police officer” was Michael Brown. Evidently Mr. Kruger likes the original narrative, that he was an innocent young “gentle giant” (over 6 feet tall, almost 300 pounds) who Officer Wilson needlessly shot in cold blood. No mention of the fact that Brown was high on marijuana, had just robbed a convenience store and physically attacked the owner who tried to stop him, and was confronted by officer Wilson while walking with his friend dorian johnson in the middle of the street so cars had to dodge them, rather than on the sidewalk (johnson was the one who lied about the “hands up don\’t shoot” line….and also about when he met up with Brown, until the convenience store surveillance tape showed he was lying).
Based in no small part on the autopsy results – which told a very different story than some of the witnesses (a number of whom then recanted and admitted they were either lying or relating what they had heard, not what they had seen), neither the grand jury, nor the eric holder-led Department of Justice could find a thing to charge Wilson with.
Ok, enough about Kruger\’s article. Let\’s move on to Scott G. Brown.
Mr. Brown, unlike Kruger, makes valid points about how rioting has led to social change. It is what he leaves out that is the problem.
Here are the last two paragraphs of his article:
At several points in our nation’s history, riots and uprisings have driven attention to injustice and resulted in long overdue social change. The Boston Tea Party and Stamp Act Riots precipitated the American Revolution. U.S. slave revolts galvanized the abolitionist movement. And while the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. is remembered as a nonviolent activist, it was the violence on the streets of Selma, Ala. – when the marchers King led were attacked by police with dogs and sprayed with water hoses – that ultimately focused the nation\’s attention on civil rights efforts in the South. The brutality that people endured that day was horrific, but those images on television screens across America led to the passage of the 1964 Voting Rights Act. In fact, it was King who said, “A riot is the language of the unheard.“
The violence seen in the Baltimore this week stemmed from many years of police brutality, poverty and caged unrest. The majority of the brave protesters in Baltimore were, indeed, peaceful. But it wasn\’t until violence broke out that many news outlets focused on the city and the public started really paying attention. We don\’t yet know what good, if any, will come from the uprising in Baltimore. But it\’s clear that people there are similar to New York\’s LGBT community in the 1960s: An oppressed community whose voice has been unheard for generations, and for whom unrest is the last option.
No, Mr. Brown, it is not clear that there is a parallel between the two events.
I have read a great deal about the Stonwall Inn riots in Manhattan\’s Greenwich Village – which, earlier in the article, Brown tells us he witnessed first-hand as a patron there. (To tell you the truth, I didn\’t pay a lot of attention on the night it happened, I was a little occupied…my wife and I were getting married at the time.)
Knowing what I do about what happened then, and knowing about the Boston Tea Party and Stamp Act riots, I agree with Mr. Brown that rioting by people who are ignored and have no other recourse, over-the-top though it might be, can wind up as an important catalyst for much-needed social change.
But the problem with his comparison of those events with this week\’s rioting in Baltimore is that it leaves out an important – maybe the most important – element. Black citizens of Baltimore have not been ignored. They have been listened to. By the Democrat Party. The one party which they have exclusively elected to represent them for a half century.
The Stonewall Inn riot took place on June 28, 1969. That was two years after the last Republican Mayor of Baltimore left office. Since then, there have been nothing but Democrat Mayors. Baltimore\’s City Council is exclusively Democrat as well. Today, the Mayor and about half the City Council is Black. And the federal government has pumped untold millions into Baltimore (education-wise, over $15,000 per student per year).
No, Mr. Brown, it is not that no one is listening. It is that the people who have been listening all the time have failed. It is their policies which have caused Baltimore to become what it is today. And the people they have failed keep electing them right back into office time after time after time. The parallel is not there.
These are only two of the articles/news reports/features that will attempt to explain Baltimore away…i.e. ignore who has run the city and how disastrously their policies have failed…just as they did in Detroit, and just as they will when the next major-city disaster comes. Get ready to see plenty more, because they\’re coming.
They will be just as wrong as these are.
