The battle for Baltimore

When people think of Baltimore, they mostly think of drugs, corruption and violence. The city’s reputation, largely made by the television series The Wire, has been sadly confirmed by the events of this spring.

I arrived in Baltimore with a friend the morning after Marilyn Mosby, state attorney for the city, had announced she would be prosecuting the six police officers involved in the arrest of a young African-American man, Freddie Gray, on a total of 28 charges. Gray was arrested on 12th April after he “caught the eye” of an officer, and was found to be in possession of a knife. He was handcuffed, shackled, placed in the back of a van and then allegedly subjected to a practice known locally as “rough riding.”

Rough riding involves officers using “erratic driving” to subdue a passenger. When Gray arrived at the West Baltimore police station, his spine was 80 per cent severed at the neck. He died from his injuries on 19th April, a week after his arrest. Protests, at first peaceful, turned violent on 25th April. Three days later, the governor of Maryland, Larry Hogan, declared a state of emergency and called in the National Guard.

Within an hour of hitting town, we’d acquired an unofficial tour guide. A local calling himself “The Hatman” gave us a potted history of Baltimore’s troubles as we walked to City Hall, the focal point of the week’s protests. According to him, a combination of drugs, corruption and institutional racism had plagued the city for decades. Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, the city’s Mayor, who is herself African-American, was already unpopular before the recent unrest, during which she praised the police for their restraint. “Nobody died during the riots,” she said. Her predecessor, Sheila Dixon, had been convicted of embezzlement after stealing gift cards meant for the poor just two years into her first term.

For decades, Baltimore held the title of America’s “heroin capital.” After a recent upsurge in heroin use, following a relative lull half a decade ago, government agencies estimate that one in 10 of the city’s residents are now addicted to the drug. The Hatman said drugs were Baltimore’s biggest problem. He told me that historic Lexington Market, about half a mile west of City Hall, was the “prescription drugs capital of America,” where addicts flocked to pick up some of big pharma’s most famous products from numerous street dealers.

On reaching City Hall, we found around 200 people gathered on the grass. The crowd was excited. The Hatman told us the buzz was most likely in anticipation of Jamal Bryant, who was about to take the podium. Bryant, a prominent preacher, is pastor of the Empowerment Temple, a popular Baptist mega-church in Baltimore. He has become the figurehead for the peaceful demonstrations during the recent crisis.

Bryant didn’t disappoint the crowd. He said it was ridiculous that a city with a black majority had no black millionaires; that a city with 16,000 boarded-up houses had a severe homelessness problem; that a city which is home to America’s most prestigious teaching hospital, Johns Hopkins, is in the midst of a healthcare crisis; and that the state of Maryland spent more money on prisons last year than schools. He also told the crowd to look for the positive things that had come out of Baltimore in the past week: the inter-faith cooperation; the school teachers who had kept their pupils in the classroom; and the guardians of the peace who’d been out all night trying to calm looters and rioters. Bryant ended by pointing out that the federal government had felt inclined to intervene only when corporate America came under threat from looting. He boomed, “We can replace glass, we can’t replace black lives.” After he had finished I turned to the Hatman. He snorted when he saw the emotion in my moist eyes, the cynicism of a man who’d been let down by leaders time and again.

I ventured into the crowd to see if this suspicion was shared by his fellow Baltimoreans. I spoke to Akisha Townsend-Eaton, a community activist, who told me that things were already beginning to change in the city. She said that only yesterday she had signed up hundreds of potential volunteers for Baltimore’s beleaguered foster care system.

I headed next to Sandtown-Winchester, Baltimore’s most deprived neighbourhood, where Gray had been arrested on 12th April. Baltimore is an amphitheatre of a city, its terraces flowing up from the harbour to the west. As you ascend the streets, the famous row houses become gradually less elegant, dilapidated shanties overlooking the glassy towers of the downtown area. Though there were 5,000 National Guardsmen, and many more police, just a few blocks away, there was open prostitution, drug dealing and drinking on the streets. This isn’t a community that hides its deprivation. Sandtown is one of 15 Baltimore neighbourhoods recently said by the Washington Post—on the basis of statistics provided by the Justice Policy Institute, a thinktank, and the CIA—to have a lower life expectancy than North Korea.

The people here were less ready to talk, but those I did to speak to were at pains to stress that the looting of the previous week had been the work of a small minority. Many were also keen to voice their anger at the way the media has demonised the residents of Sandtown. The previous day, a local TV station in Memphis affiliated to Fox News had tweeted a photo, which turned out to be a fake, of Baltimore in flames. (The station later apologised.)

When I asked Monica Jones, a school teacher, what she thought would happen if the policemen involved in Gray’s arrest escaped the charges, she said, “If we don’t see accountability and justice, I fear that there will be a further corrosion of trust between the public and the police, and perhaps more unrest.” When I put this same question to a boisterous man who answered to the name “Sticks,” he replied: “If they go free, we gon’ burn this city to the ground.” I was reminded of something else that Akisha Townsend-Eaton had said to me earlier outside City Hall. “The prospect of having and raising a son in these times is often frightening to me and many other women of colour I know.” Barack Obama, who appeared to promise the US a “post-racial” future when he was first elected president in 2008, has presided over the worst period of racial violence in America for a generation—in Baltimore and in other cities across the United States. Not only that, but the rate at which African-American men are being incarcerated shows no signs of abating. Today, African-Americans make up nearly one million of the total prison population of 2.3m. And as of 2001, one in six black males had been incarcerated.