Commenters at the NYTimes.com refuse to follow the narrative:
* Residents, angry and frightened, accuse the police of standing down and ignoring crime.
OMG make up your minds! Do you want the police to arrest people or do you want them to stand down? I thought they were giving you exactly what you want and now you are crying that they have backed off? The police there are damned if the do and damned if they don’t.
* Any sane police officer would be a fool to try to intervene in a crime committed by a black person, especially in a black neighborhood. It is best that they stand by and only come on the scene well AFTER the crime has already been committed. Except in a few exceptional cases it doesn’t make sense to apprehend them, either. It’s not worth one’s career or even one’s life.
* problems in Baltimore will never be resolved until the residents take a good, long glare inward. for every young innocent man killed by a cop there’s over a 100 killed by their own neighbors. if you eliminated all racism and police violence towards citizens you wouldn’t even dent the amount of crime committed in the city. when are the decent citizens of the city going to riot over the gang culture ruining their city?
* Desperate times call for desperate measures.
1) City-wide, stop and frisk, building-to-building sweep for handguns.
2) Norplant for every girl age 12 and up.
3) Mandatory all-day preschool for children 2 and up.
4) Mandatory job-corp program, with job required for graduation from high school, government-pay-rolled if need be.
5) Year-round dusk to dawn curfew for anyone below 21.
* Oh give me a break. Baltimore has had four Republican Mayors since 1900, and none since 1967. Socialist Democrats have been stripping this city bare for the last fifty years, putting ‘their own’ at risk of felonies and real danger.
When will the locals wake up and understand that idiots like Rawlings-Blake are destroying their city and putting their people at grave risk? It’s not just black-on-black crime, folks, it’s Democrat perps destroying that town.
Thanks Democrats. You brought us to this point, just like you did with Detroit and Oakland and Newark and Camden and New Orleans and Bridgeport and Stockton and Philadelphia and St. Louis.
* Could it be that the police, no matter what happens, are accused of racism? Look at what happened to Darren WIlson, a police officer who acted responsibly. Look at his treatment in the press and in public opinion. Or the fact that he lost his job.
Also, what about the endogenous dynamics of the black community itself in Baltimore. over 70% of births are illegitimate. only 30% of its youth even graduate from high school. about 25% of black young men between the ages of 16 and 25 are incarcerated. there has been a wave of new “spice” drugs coming into the scene. There has been a release of many “non-violent” drug related felons from prison. Do only of these facts have anything to do with the spike in crime? Of course not. It is the racist police force that is to blame.
* It is the cycle of being a victim and never taking any responsibility for your actions. No fathers, teenage mothers, and you have the perfect recipe for hopelessness, poverty, crime and violence. Not one black leader has the courage to say this. It is just blame the white, “racist” society.
* Gripping article, and I guess Baltimore is as doomed as Detroit, nobody’s really going to do anything about the major problems.
As I see it, the major problem is these insular, low-income to no-income, black communities. That’s where the murders and shootings are going on, and the drug dealing and major addictions. There aren’t any jobs, riots are always a possibility, nobody feels safe, nobody will work with the police. The police fear such neighborhoods too, knowing that they’re a target for casual shooting, and they’ve got good reason to be treating it like a war. You don’t worry about taking precautions that your enemy won’t die in a war, and the police and criminals are enemies.
The problems in these neighborhoods are all self-perpetuating. The parents don’t have educations so they can’t get good jobs, and then they have too many children. They don’t value the educations they didn’t get, so they don’t push their kids to stay in school, and college is out of the question. So the kids too wind up poorly educated, can’t get good jobs, and have more children than they can support.
That grinding, hopeless poverty produces drug addiction and crime, every time, always has. I really don’t see an answer to it that wouldn’t involve fascist relocation and reeducation of everyone in impoverished communities.
So yeah, great article, but it shows me there is no hope for Baltimore. Sometime after Detroit bounces back, maybe this city will too.
* Healing? Baltimore has been sick for decades. Drug dealers and gangs of thugs are happy to kill each other over anything ranging from Tennis Shoes to disputes over dice games. Black lives matter? Given any chance the city will descent into chaos with a ” shopping spree” of looters – kids of welfare queens. So lets pretend everything is OK – but visit the morgue or walk through the welfare projects at night to get a feel for Baltimore and its inherent pathology.
* Black bureaucrats have proven to be every bit as corrupt and often more so than white government officials. Baltimore is a case in point. Until these same black leaders call their own people to account, crime and murders will continue to escalate as they have in this city. Black on black crime is out of control. Reason? Start with the fact that 75% of all black children are born out of wedlock, and most have no father in the home. Accountability and responsibility are sorely lacking in Baltimore and many predominately black cities. Meanwhile their own leaders are often corrupt as evidenced in the case of the mayor of New Orleans who blamed Bush for his own lack of preparation for Hurricane Katrina. Clean up your own act first, before blaming white America for your on going social and economic problems.
* So when are we going to have a national conversation about the fact that young black males kill other young black males – generally with illegal, unregistered firearms, than police do – *by orders of magnitude*.
Also police shot and killed *more whites* than blacks, and blacks shoot more whites than the reverse.
This is basic stuff that people should be aware of when intelligently discussing the problem of violence.
Yet the Left wing prefer to simply not cover incidents of blacks shooting whites, or cops shooting white people in ‘flyover’ states.
Why is that?
Stupidity or malice?
* This is about the generalized urban black community. They run Baltimore. I cannot tell you how much of a disgrace it is. The media will never tell you the truth. The black community will never tell you the truth. The Democrats will never tell you the truth. Any positive influence is swiftly stamped out. You want to talk about the massive problem of no fathers… you are a racist. You want to cut the MASSIVE amount of welfare and handouts and encourage work … you are a racist. You want to talk about crime and violence in the black comminuty … you are a racist. I mean they want to blame the police for locking up the murderers and drug dealers. Its insane lawlessness. News flash, it aint the NRA doing the killing in Baltimore. Also as a Baltimore area attorney I can tell you there is nothing more biased than a Baltimore City jury. They see everything in terms of race and it is very difficult to convict the OJs there. This rant hardly scratches the surface. Anyone with any sense has moved out.
* There is not a single leader in the African American community who is willing to address the root causes of hopelessness and violence in their communities. There is talk of institutional racism, lack of jobs, poor education, as if there is some conspiracy to continue the negative cycle.
The solution begins with addressing the 75% incidence of teen pregnancy in the city, the majority of those births are to African American women under the age of 16. What child has a chance when born to a teenager. What teenager is really ready to be a mother and a force for good in their infants life. This does not even address the lack of male role models. The term ” baby moma’ is damning and reflects the core problem in the community. Without mature parents ( mother and father), what chance is their to emphasize good education, law biding behavior and goals.
There are groups of young black makes riding around on scooters, blocking traffic and assaulting citizens… where are there parents.
If Black lives matter, where is the outrage at the killing of over 300 young blacks this year alone.
All the money in the world, all the new industries in the country will not provide educated, motivated young men and women. It is important, but without a fundamental change, the new schools will be filled with the same unmotivated children, and the cycle will continue.
Please find me a African American leader who will tell the truth.
* This whole sequence of events was entirely predictable. Civil rights leaders do not make good administrators. When elected politicians see the police as the enemy, there is going to be breakdown in policing. People have to make choices between rights of career criminals and safe streets. Police work is not the same as teaching Sunday school. Certain amount of brutality should be expected and tolerated in policing, this is the bottom line.
