The Baltimore riots were a precursor to mob action following Floyd's death

Washington Examiner:
The precursor to the recent demonstrations, in America and throughout the world, were the Baltimore riots, mostly by young black people, that the nation watched on television in 2015.

The immediate cause of the Baltimore disturbances was the hyping, by Baltimore’s monopoly newspaper, the Baltimore Sun, of the death of Freddy Gray, a small-time drug dealer with a long record, in police custody. This was described by the Baltimore Sun as a “killing.” It was represented that police had no basis to stop Gray in the first place, even though he had fled at their approach, which the Supreme Court had previously deemed a sufficient basis for an investigative stop.

It was popularly represented that Gray received a “rough ride” in a police vehicle at the hands of the arresting officers, most of whom were black. This version of events was not corroborated by Gray’s fellow passenger, nor did it survive four trials, two federal investigations by different administrations, and several administrative hearings.

The local and national press largely passed over in silence the disconcerting fact that this spontaneous supposed “uprising” was accompanied by the systematic looting of almost all of Baltimore’s inner-city pharmacies.

After five years, we have the distance and the hindsight to inspect the political fruits of those disturbances. One of them was almost certainly the election of Donald Trump. His narrow majorities in key Northern states owed much to the reawakening of the memories of 1968.

A second consequence was a consent decree, entered into by the lame-duck Obama presidential and Stephanie Rawlings-Blake mayoral administrations. It systematically nullified large swathes of the Maryland criminal code and blocked many investigative stops. It prevented the use of techniques that had dramatically reduced the homicide rate in New York and Los Angeles and which are increasingly being used in England.

Once again, a desired narrative was allowed to displace facts. The Justice Department report on which the decree was based was unsigned by its authors. It collected anecdotes about long-past practices that had been restricted by Baltimore's last two police commissioners. It so drastically limited proactive policing that Baltimore’s homicide tally rose from 200 in 2014 to 350 in each of the last five years ⁠— 750 mostly black lives that evidently don't matter to the apologists for Black Lives Matter.

Baltimore's consent decree was effectively a gift to the drug gangs, the role of which in convulsing our inner cities has played little part in discussions of recent developments. The overwhelming majority of Baltimore homicides involve the enforcement of contracts involving illegal drugs and the ensuing vigilantism and revenge killings.
...
It looks like Democrat politicians in the riot-torn cities they control are going to make the same mistake Baltimore did and dramatically increase their own murder rate.  It is already happening in New York City where shootings and gun deaths have gone up dramatically since policing was pulled back.  Chicago continues to be a basket case of black on black crime.  Pulling back policing will only make matters worse for the citizens of those cities and increase the exits.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Bin Laden's concern about Zarqawi's remains