The War on Cops. Heather Mac Donald
where Freddie Gray lived, to no effect, as National Review’s Ian Tuttle has documented.
This lack of effect is not surprising. Baltimore’s crime rate has been among the nation’s highest for decades. In 2013, the only cities with higher murder rates were Detroit, New Orleans, Newark, and St. Louis. Baltimore’s violent-crime rate is over twice that of New York. That violence would have doomed any hope for economic revival in high-crime areas even without the destruction of 350 businesses by arson and looting. West Baltimore residents complained to the tenacious post-riot crowd of reporters that Baltimore’s Inner Harbor area was spiffy and thriving, while their neighborhood was not. But potential business owners, if they have any other options, are not going to locate in a neighborhood where they fear for the safety of their employees and customers. Lowered crime is a precondition to economic revival, not its consequence. New York’s economic renaissance began only when crime started plummeting in 1994, thanks to a policing revolution there.
The post-riot media narrative virtually ignored Baltimore’s sky-high crime in favor of an all-consuming focus on allegedly racist policing practices. To its credit, the Baltimore Sun noted the shooting rampage that began after Freddie Gray was arrested on April 12 and escalated following the riots, as officers backed off from proactive enforcement. From April 28, the day after the most destructive riot, to May 7, there were 40 shootings, including ten on May 7. Fifteen people were murdered during that period, more than one a day. The total of 82 homicides from the beginning of 2015 through May 7 was 20 more than the number at the same point in 2014. All these deaths did nothing to dislodge the “Black Lives Matter” conceit that the biggest threat facing young black men today is the police, rather than other young black men. None of Baltimore’s post-riot killings has triggered protests.
Baltimore police officers now face a street environment that is even more dangerous and hostile than usual. A total of 155 officers were injured, 43 seriously, during the riots. Every arrest now brings a crowd of bystanders pressing in, jeering, and spreading lies about the encounter. On May 4, 2015, officers received a call about a man with a gun at the corner of a torched CVS store. His movements, captured on a police camera, also suggested that he had a gun. The suspect, 23-year-old Robert Edward “Meech” Tucker, had previously been convicted on gun and drug charges. When the officers approached him, he took off running (just as Freddie Gray did when he saw officers watching him). Tucker’s gun fired. Tucker then dropped to the ground and began screaming and rolling around as if he had been shot. Bystanders claimed that they had seen the police shoot him. The crowd threw bricks, Clorox bottles, and water bottles at the officers; one man lunged at them but was held back by other pedestrians. In fact, no officer had discharged his gun or even taken aim at Tucker. Even though Tucker had not been shot, not even by his own gun, word in the street continued to maintain that the cops had shot him.
Such lying about interactions between officers and civilians is endemic in urban areas. But even after the country witnessed the evisceration of the Michael Brown “hands up” hoax by none other than the federal Department of Justice, the media and the authorities have continued to seek out allegations of officer misconduct and to treat them as the gospel truth. The New York Times quoted a drug dealer as an authority on the Baltimore police: “They trip you, choke you out, cuss you out, disrespect you.” Maybe so. (The antipolice bar won judgments or settlements against the Baltimore Police Department in more than a hundred civil rights and brutality cases from 2011 to 2015, a fact that could reflect a pattern of abuse or a pattern of aggressive litigation and a supine city law department.) But it is also possible that the drug dealer was lying through his teeth. It never occurs to elite opinion-makers that the pervasiveness of crime in the inner city creates a large block of residents—not just criminals but their friends and families as well—who view and treat the police as antagonists.
The riots also led to rushed and likely excessive criminal charges against the six officers involved in the arrest and transport of Freddie Gray. (Four officers face homicide counts ranging from involuntary manslaughter to second-degree murder.) Upon announcing the charges mere hours after receiving Gray’s autopsy and a day after receiving a police report on the arrest, Baltimore’s prosecutor, Marilyn Mosby, declared that she had heard the “call for ‘no justice, no peace.’” Positioning herself as the head of a crusade rather than as part of a legal system dedicated to prosecuting individual cases, not causes, Mosby continued in an Obama-esque vein: “Last but certainly not least, to the youth of the city: I will seek justice on your behalf. This is a moment. This is your moment. Let’s ensure we have peaceful and productive rallies that will develop structural and systemic changes for generations to come. You’re at the forefront of this cause, and as young people, our time is now.”
Mosby had already displayed her penchant for the crassest of racial rabble-rousing following the grand-jury decision not to indict Officer Darren Wilson for the shooting death of Michael Brown. Mosby, reported St. Louis Public Radio, questioned the “motives” of Robert McCulloch, the St. Louis County district attorney who presented the Wilson case to the grand jury. On Baltimore TV, Mosby said, “In Ferguson, over 68 percent of the population is black and less than 6 percent votes.” (She did not explain why that low turnout is the fault of anyone other than the nonvoters.) “So you have an individual who is in office and does not share your interests and values and is making decisions about your daily life. . . . We say bring in special prosecutions.”
Mosby reversed herself regarding special prosecutors when the Baltimore Fraternal Order of Police called for one in the Freddie Gray case, expressing concerns that Mosby had several financial and familial conflicts of interest. “I can tell you that the people of Baltimore City elected me,” Mosby said at a press conference after the six officers were indicted, “and there’s no accountability with a special prosecutor.” One could only hope that the criminal-justice system would backstop whatever accountability to the facts Mosby herself might feel.
While the second-degree-murder charge against the driver of the police van carries the direst individual consequences, Mosby’s charge of “false imprisonment” against the arresting officers raises a risk of shutting down policing across Baltimore. Mosby alleged that the switchblade knife possessed by Gray was not illegal under Maryland law. The Baltimore police responded that it was prohibited under a city code. Even if Mosby’s reading of the knife statutes is correct, her imposition of criminal liability for an officer’s good-faith interpretive error is preposterous. The remedy for an arrest not supported by probable cause is to throw the case out at the station house or prosecutor’s office, or in court.
If officers face prison terms for trying to keep the streets safe, they will stop making discretionary arrests. Baltimore’s spike in gun violence suggests that such de-policing has already begun. Meanwhile, shortly after the riots, Mayor Rawlings-Blake requested that the U.S. Justice Department investigate the Baltimore police for systemic civil rights violations, and Attorney General Loretta Lynch agreed the next day. The result may be more handcuffing of the police in their efforts to protect lives in poor neighborhoods—a result encouraged by the media spin on the Baltimore riots.
A riot’s unchecked destruction of livelihoods and property is certainly newsworthy, threatening, as it does, the very possibility of civilization. The breakdown of law and order is a policy concern of enormous note. But the 24-hour cable-news cycle, with its insatiable craving for live visual excitement, creates a codependency between reporters and rioters, while the politics of the mainstream media guarantees a “root causes” exculpation of the violence. Short of a filming blackout on the actual violence, riots should be covered in sorrow, shame, and dismay.
The most pressing question every morning in Baltimore is how many people were shot the previous night. By the end of May 2015, according to Baltimore police, the rate of gun violence for the year had climbed more than 60 percent over the same period in 2014, with 32 shootings over Memorial Day weekend alone. May 2015 was the most violent month the city had seen in 15 years.
Baltimore