'POWER KEG WAITING TO EXPLODE'

Baltimore was a city on edge Tuesday as hundreds of National Guardsmen patrolled the streets against unrest for the first time since 1968, hoping to prevent another night of rioting.

Maryland’s governor said 2,000 Guardsmen and 1,000 law officers would be in place overnight to try to prevent a repeat of the unrest that erupted Monday in some of the city’s poorest neighbourhoods.

“This combined f orce will not tolerate violence or looting,” Gov. Larry Hogan warned.

As the new 10 p.m.-to-5 a.m. curfew took effect, several hundred defiant protesters remained on the streets, near where a CVS pharmacy was looted Monday night. A pastor used a loudspeaker to urge people to go home, saying: “Let’s show the world, because the eyes of the world are on Baltimore right now.”

There were reports of several arrests after attacks on police officers. Glass and plastic bottles were thrown at officers as a police helicopter circled above and demanded that the area be cleared.

Rep. Elijah Cummings urged the demonstrators to “leave without any kind of problems with the police.”

“All right folks, we gotta get outta here,” he said, as he ended a CNN interview.

But as police banged their shields on the ground as a warning at about 10:10 p.m., a handful of demonstrators at Pennsylvania and North began throwing rocks, bottles and other missiles and yelling obscenities at the police, the Washington Times reported.

In a measure of how tense things were all day, public schools were closed and the Baltimore Orioles cancelled Tuesday night’s game at Camden Yards. And in what may be a first in baseball’s 145-year history the Orioles announced that Wednesday’s game will be closed to the public.

At t he Whi te House, President Barack Obama called the deaths of several black men around the country at the hands of police “a slow rolling crisis.” But he added that there was “no excuse” for the violence in Baltimore, and said the rioters should be treated as criminals.

“They aren’t protesting. They aren’t making a statement. They’re stealing,” he said.

Obama urged Americans to “do some soul-searching.”

“We have seen too many in- stances of what appears to be police officers interacting with individuals, primarily African-American, often poor, in ways that raise troubling questions. It comes up, it seems like, once a week now,” Obama said. He said although such cases aren’t unprecedented, there’s new awareness as a result of cameras and social media. “We shouldn’t pretend that it’s new.”

The streets of Baltimore were largely calm all morning and into the evening Tuesday. But police with riot shields lined up shoulder to shoulder and kept close watch over a growing, chanting crowd of about 1,000 people at the corner where some of the worst violence took place the night before.

The looting and rock- and bottle-throwing by mostly black rioters broke out on Monday just hours after the funeral of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man who suffered a fatal spinal cord injury while in police custody.

At least 20 officers were hurt, one person was critically injured in a fire, more than 200 adults and 34 juveniles were arrested, and nearly 150 cars were burned, police said.

Political leaders and residents called the violence a tragedy for the city and lamented the damage done by the rioters to their own neighbourhoods. The city of 622,000 is 63 per cent black. The mayor, state’s attorney, police chief and city council president are black, as is 48 per cent of the police force.

“The same community they say they care about, they’re destroying. You can’t have it both ways,” Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said.

But the rioting also brought out a sense of civic pride and responsibility among many Baltimore residents, with hundreds of volunteers turning out to sweep the streets of glass and other debris with brooms and trash bags donated by hardware stores.

CVS store manager Haywood McMorris said the destruction didn’t make sense: “We work here, man. This is where we stand, and this is where people actually make a living.”

Robert Stokes, 36, holding a broom and a dustpan on a corner where some of the looting and vandalism took place, said blacks in Baltimore face discrimination daily.

“You look around and see unemployment. Filling out job applications and being turned down because of where you live and your demographic. It’s so much bigger than the police department.

“This place is a powder keg waiting to explode.”

‘There is no doubt in my mind that behind Baltimore lies Ferguson.’ — Dr. Ken Eisold