BALTIMORE, Maryland April 28, 2015 - 'Credible and Incisive' is written almost every day in Baltimore, Maryland. This writer was born in Baltimore and has lived his entire life in Baltimore. It is with the most immense sadness that I have endured the events of the past days. In the Daily Mail in London there are candid and sickening pictures of what passes for "protest." Now, military soldiers from the National Guard ring a huge portion of the City deemed the most volatile, the most dangerous. Evil, pure feckless evil, drips everywhere.
Monday, on the so-called social media, word spread for high school students to converge on a large regional shopping mall smack dab in the middle of west Baltimore. Large national chains like Target have opened stores at the Mondawmin Mall, which is surrounded by urban residential neighborhoods. Mondawmin Mall arrived at its current guise after decades of pleading from city officials determined to overcome sceptics who said urban areas were not viable venues for popular retail chains. Riots in the immediate wake of the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King in 1968 had laid to waste a proud city founded decades prior to the founding on these United States. Those riots were followed immediately by years of urban decay and spreading urban blight. After viewing those riots on national television, virtually no one was willing to come downtown. People living in the city moved out. Businesses located in the city failed.
Into this abyss came an average-looking man by the name of William Donald Schaefer. Born and raised in West Baltimore, Schaefer got himself elected to the City Council as a young man, and, after some shrewd political moves, came to be elected President of the Baltimore City Council. After the 1968 riots, and at the City's most desperate hour, he ran for and was elected Mayor. Through the shear force of his will, he began what looked for all the world like a hopeless task: rebuilding and revitalizing Baltimore. He pushed through an ambitious plan to clean up the city's inner harbor and build a festival-type shopping area that celebrated the City's maritime history. Opponents forced the plan to referendum. Working tirelessly, he and his nascent revitalization plan prevailed. There were other successes. At the same time he was attracting outside money to the City, he was knitting together the neighborhoods, emphasizing their uniqueness and making their residents - the City's residents - seem important, valuable, and involved in the City's progress. Blacks and Whites all united around Schaefer, who was as shrewd politically as he was smart as an urban planner.
Schaefer went on to become governor after many terms as Mayor. The City continued to rebound after the riots of 1968, and at length those terrible riots became a thing of the past. Before this past few weeks, the City had been regarded as a true success story in the annals of urban revitalization.
Roll forward now to April, 2015. Since 1968, and without exception, the City has had a Democratic Mayor and a City Council that is 100% Democratic. Most of the Police Commissioners have been black and the police force itself is now predominantly minority in nature (the last official statistics date to the administration of Martin O'Malley as Mayor. Nearly 20 years ago those stats revealed that the force was 43% black). With only two brief exceptions, the Governor of Maryland has been a Democrat and the Maryland Legislature has always been controlled by Democrats. Every judge in Maryland, with only a few exceptions, was appointed by a Democratic Governor. One of the problems for Obama and company in Maryland is that there is no passing the buck. Not that Obama and Hilary haven't tried.
The incident that was the catalyst for the current civil unrest is still under investigation. A 25-year-old man with 39 prior arrests, Freddie Gray, died about one week after being arrested for carrying a concealed weapon and fleeing from police. Before 9 am on the morning in question police on bicycles arrived at an intersection in a high crime area of the City. One or more of the officers made eye contact with Gray and he immediately tried to flee. According to police reports, one or more officers gave chase. Here, information becomes sparse. Gray was apprehended, handcuffed and placed into a police wagon. Some reports say his legs were not normal when he went into the van. Some reports say he acted violently during at least part of his trip in the van. A second prisoner in a separate compartment of the van said he heard Gray throwing himself about and hollaring in the van as if he was trying to hurt himself. There are persistent rumors that Gray was treated recently after leaping from a third-floor window while fleeing police prior to one of the other arrests. When the police wagon arrived at the station, Gray was checked on and found to be unresponsive. At some point medics were called. Some reports say he was actually clinically dead but was revived. What is certainly true is that he died one week later without regaining consciousness at the University of Maryland Hospital's Shock-Trauma Unit. Various reports say that 80% of Mr. Gray's spine was severed at a point in his cervical area.
Saturday's Riot
Violence grew on Saturday after a march said to be intended as a peaceful protest was permitted to spin out of control and into, in short order, full riot mode. Evidence that this descent into riot was being coordinated by Democratic activists being paid, in part, by the infamous and despicable George Soros have emerged. Fox reported that a study of social media posts by a firm specializing in such things revealed a striking similarity between social media posts at the outset of unrest in Ferguson and at the outset of unrest in Baltimore..
At any rate, there was a march that started near Baltimore's venerable City Hall and snaked through the City. A surprisingly small group, numbering no more than 1,000 people, the march at length headed in the direction of Baltimore's Inner Harbor and Camden Yards. Suddenly, a group of the protestors broke from the main group of marchers and began to set cars on fire, break windows and beat on innocent bystanders. Police, outnumbered the protestors but did nothing on orders by the City's Mayor, Stephanie Rawlings Blake. A family in a stationwagon driving on Russell Street, adjacent to Oriole Park at Camden Yards, found itself stranded in a crowd of rioters. The rioters beat on the car with objects, broke the windows, pulled the people from the car and beat on them. Wonderful. Stores and shops were looted. Police watched because the Mayor believed it was better to let the rioters get the destruction out of their system than to have police and rioters engage in a confrontation on national TV.
There were other incidents. Rioters surrounded a number of the gates at Camden Yards while inside over 36,000 fans were watching a Major League Baseball game between the homestanding Orioles and the visiting Boston Red Sox. The Sox travel well and the 36,000-plus included well over one thousand fans from Boston. As the game headed for a conclusion the scoreboard flashed a sign that said that due to civil unreast outside of the stadium, fans must remain inside until receiving further instructions. Fortunately for all of the baseball fans, the game went into extra-innings, giving police time to clear the crowd enough to allow the baseball fans to exit using the south gates. Police then ordered departing fans to use Interstate 395 South, even if they were heading north.
Monday's Riot:
Sunday passed peacefully, but it was but a lull before the storm. As described above, the Monday riot started when high school students - fired up by announcements about a "purge" re-enactment at Mondawmin, descended on the Mall determined to engulf it in hell. Across the street from the mall, Frederick Douglas High School Students poured out of the school at around 3 pm when the dismissal bell rang. They grabbed rocks, bricks and cinder blocks as they approached the mall, and once there, they opened up on police, who again held back, using no weapons or sticks. Seven officers were hurt in the chilling barage, one of whom was said to be unresponsive as he was rushed to the Shock Trauma Unit. But things were only getting started. Crowds busted into a closed (for the night) CVS Drug store and looted it thoroughly before torching it. Firemen who responded were themselves attacked by rioters as well as having their firehoses cut. Adjacent stores and other buildings, including several liquor stores, were looted and torched. Other drug stores were also looted and torched. On Fulton Avenue, near the epicenter of the hostilities, a woman who sadly found herself and her car in the middle of the crowd, were accosted. The car was whacked around and the woman was pulled from the vehicle and beaten. Police tried to battle their way to the stricken woman, but it took them quite a while. She survived, however her condition was unknown.
Finally at about 8:30 pm the Mayor of Baltimore, Stephanie Rawlings Blake, was brow-beaten into calling the Governor and asking that he call out the National Guard. Maryland Governor Robert Hogan already had the Order prepared, and within 30 seconds of getting a call he hoped to get Saturday night, the Guard was activated. By Tuesday morning about 3,000 well-armed Guardsmen were in Baltimore.
Although Tuesday and Wednesday night were, on the whole, peaceful, each night saw over 100 arrests for violation of the curfew. Police revealed, according the the ABC News Outlet in Baltimore, that an activated IED (improvised explosive device) not unlike those used against the USA military in Iraq and Afghanistan, was found at the intersection - North and Pennsylvania Avenues in West Baltimore - that was the epicenter of the violence on Monday night. The device did not injure anyone only because it did not work as it was designed to do.
By Wednesday night, copycat demonstrations sprung up in New York, Boston, Minneapolis, San Diego and Los Angeles. There was evidence that these demonstrations were planned and coordinated by functionaries of the Democratic Party, now largely operated by an ultra far left anti-American element.
News also emerged on Wednesday and again on Thursday morning that none of the six police officers suspended after Mr. Gray's death were going to be charged with crimes associated with it. City officials were said to be tamping down expectations that such charges were imminent, while bracing for the worst. Despite relative calm on Tuesday and Wednesday, there is no word on when the National Guard would be withdrawn or the curfew ended.
The Baltimore situation is a poster case for the failures of ultra far left policies. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been poured into programs to benefit the poor in Baltimore, but despite this large investment, and despite a rapidly sinking population, the poverty rate in the City has continued to grow. Under Martin O'Malley's eight years as Governor of Maryland, the state became one of the most heavily taxed in all of these United States. And yet the plight of Baltimore did not improve. Barack Obama was elected with a virtual mandate to improve the life and living conditions for Black Americans, and yet the black unemployment rate has not improved and in some cases has actually worsened. Sadder still is the fact that none of Obama's initiatives was really intended to improve the rate of black employment. His absolute dedication to the ultra far left agenda is in spite of the situation faced by Black Americans, who need jobs and functional education, neither of which have been an agenda item for Obama.
It should not be like this and there is no excuse for it. None.
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