In Baltimore, race politics are life, death issues
BALTIMORE— The police cruiser slows down. Hard stare from the cop at the wheel. Curt nod, the vehicle speeds off.
“Just three African-American men standing on the corner. Had you not been here, a white lady, I guarantee they would have jumped out to check the n-----s — ‘What you doin’ here?’ The three of us ain’t doin’ nothin’, just having a conversation. But Black people get stereotyped all the time. In their eyes, we’re all up to no good.”
Solo Stylez is 54 years old, self-employed in home improvement construction. He’s lived here all his life. Here being the blighted northwest neighbourhood of Sandtown-Winchester, with its block after block of low income housing — the projects — and street after street of boarded up derelict rowhouses. In a city of rampant poverty, head-spinning corruption, off-the-charts drug abuse, dysfunctional public schools, a multitude of homeless huddling in doorways and the increasing carnage of violent crime, Sandtown-Winchester is the byword for everything that ails Baltimore — a majority-Black metropolis that belies its sobriquet as “Charm City.”
Nothing charming about it, not in this neck of the urban woods and not much elsewhere, to be frank, except the touristy harbour area and the ritzy suburban refuges, home to residents who would never step foot in Sandtown-Winchester. But all of Baltimore has been plagued by a barrage of crises, from inner city decay to a Democrat mayor serving a three-year sentence for fraud and conspiracy. They really did LOCK HER UP.
Little wonder there’s sour skepticism about politicians, of every party stripe, hereabouts, although Maryland is solidly blue, went more than 60 per cent for Hillary Clinton four years ago, and Joe Biden is handily leading President Donald Trump, 58 per cent to 33 in the most recent polls.
Baltimore, where Mary Pickersgill stitched together the original Stars and Stripes (now in the Smithsonian) that inspired Francis Scott Key to write “The Star-Spangled Banner” and where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by 2-1.
There’s no shortage of societal ills festering in bleak Sandtown-Winchester — which had a starring role in the critically acclaimed TV series “The Wire” — amidst a sense of overwhelming impotence, powerlessness, spirit-sucking enervation.
This trio of men, idling on the notorious Fulton Street, have ample time to speak with a reporter about Baltimore going to hell in a handbasket. Already there, actually.
“Misappropriation of funds down at city hall,” says Eddie Pilot, a 51-year-old retired truck driver, when asked to list the most urgent issues Baltimore is facing. “Always a scandal about money. Money that’s supposed to come to communities like this one gets diverted, who know where to? Probably somebody’s pocket.”
Pilot is not exaggerating about the skulduggery at city hall. Catherine Pugh, the disgraced former mayor, pleaded guilty to fraud and tax evasion after a federal investigation found bulk sales of her selfpublished children’s book — “Healthy Holly” — were actually a cover disguising hundreds of thousands of dollars in kickbacks from her 2016 mayoralty campaign. Another ex-mayor, Sheila Dixon, went down in 2010 for embezzling scores of gift cards intended for poor families. And Dixon is considered a front-runner in the mayor’s race being run concurrent with the presidential election. Honestly, Baltimore — most populous city in Maryland, unravelling from north to south, has outscourged Chicago from the 1920s.
But Stylez is bored with that subject. Of most direct impact to him is the over-criminalization, over-scrutinizing, of Black men in his seedy pocket of the city. Because Black lives do matter, but not much here, at least as viewed from the outside, as viewed by the Baltimore PD, which earned its reputation as the most corrupt police department in America. (Although, to be fair, there are countless others that could stake that claim.)
Before Black Lives Matter, before protesters took to the streets this year by the tens of thousands demanding racial equality in the wake of George Floyd’s death with a cop’s knee on his neck, before a country was stirred to outrage and calls for defunding the police, there was Baltimore and there was the “Freddie Riots.”
Freddie Gray, who died in April 2015, never emerging from the coma into which he had fallen while being transported in a police van from the Gilmor Homes projects, arrested for making suspicious eye contact with an officer who’d clocked him early that morning and then attempting to run away. He wasn’t secured by leg irons in the van, as per regulations, which meant the 25-year-old African-American bounced around during an erratic 11-minute ride to the station, suffering what proved to be fatal injuries to his neck and spinal column. His death triggered three days of rioting.
“I knew Freddie personally,” Stylez says. “I’m not going to say he was a saint, but he didn’t deserve to die like that. That’s what started the uproar.”
The fury was directed at law enforcement but Black-on-Black crime spiked in subsequent months as police were fearful of entering Sandtown-Winchester. Killings across the city skyrocketed, topping 30 to 40 a month, violence surged by more than 75 per cent, upwards of 900 people shot — more than 90 per cent of them Black, nearly two dozen were children, collateral damage — by the time 2015 staggered off the calendar.
Six officers were charged, including the cop-driver of the van, arraigned for the almost poetic-sounding second-degree “depraved heart’’ murder — meaning extreme or wanton indifference to a person’s life. Nobody was ever convicted. But everyone remembers Freddie here — several murals of the young man are painted on higgledy-piggledy buildings in the neighbourhood.
So, Baltimore had quickened to racist-infused killings by police officers long before the world had heard of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.
“Just like any other city, you’ve got cops that do right and cops that do wrong,” Stylez says. “But in this community, you’ve got a whole lot more that don’t do right. They’re corrupt and they target Black people. Once they get that badge and that gun, they can hide behind it.
“I don’t see that changing, no matter who gets voted mayor and who gets into the White House.”
Maryland has one of the most all-encompassing pieces of cop-friendly legislation, the Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights, which protects police officers from being held accountable for bad acts and had been described as a “blueprint to protect corrupt and racist cops.” For example, cops under the gun, accused of misconduct, are allowed a five-day window before they must speak to investigators.
Meanwhile, Baltimore, with a population of under 600,000, has racked up more than 300 homicides each of the last five years, peaking at 348 in 2019.
It should be noted that Biden, as a U.S. senator and chair of the Senate judiciary committee, was a prime architect of a heavy-handed 1994 crime bill that many have blamed for mass incarceration, particularly of Black people. In their last debate, Trump — who has never shown any empathy for Black people and has bullhorn-whistled white supremacists — threw that in his opponent’s face. Biden has repeatedly acknowledged that the legislation was ill-advised, should have placed more emphasis on crime prevention and treatment of drug-addiction as an illness.
“At least he admitted that he made a mistake,” says Alfred Hill, who counsels youth at a Sandtown-Winchester treatment facility that really isn’t much more than a flophouse. “Anyone that’s man enough to admit that he made a mistake and is willing to correct it, make amends, is all right with me.”
Hill, 49, lived through the Freddie riots as well.
“It was horrible. It was like the beginning of the end. You get tired of being looked at a certain way by police, you get tired of being judged by the colour of your skin. It’s got to stop. At some point, if you keep pushing, eventually somebody’s going to push back. That’s what happened here in 2015 and what’s happening now in America.”
As happened in Philadelphia this past week, police officers shooting dead a mentally ill man who was wielding a knife as his mother howled in anguish. The city writhed for three nights of looting and rioting, despite a curfew imposed and the National Guard summoned. Fifty-two officers were injured, 212 people arrested.
“I absolutely agree that police should be defunded,” continues Hill. The money should go to retraining and helping the communities. So many Black men are getting shot by police. They have stun guns, they have batons, they have bean bags. They even have dogs. You don’t have to kill a man and only after find out if he had a knife or not. This man had a knife. His mama was screaming that he had mental-health issues. So train the cops better in how to deal with mental issues.
“It’s sad to see another one die, a life discarded as nothing, like George Floyd and Breonna. And then you have a president who don’t even want to say their names.”
Hill was himself a victim of crime last year. “I was struck in the head with a baseball bat going at a bank machine. I have no sight in my left eye and no hearing in my left ear.” The culprit was never arrested.
“So I’m aware of crime and being targeted.”
On Friday, Hill had just come from the ballot station, having cast his vote for Biden.
“Look at this place. The roads are messed up, the corner stores are so tiny you can hardly step inside, even the projects are falling down. There’s been no improvement in our lives in the last four years. But I’m hoping that Joe Biden will bring about the changes that are much needed. I’m hoping that he will really see us, you know?’’
It might be too late for beleaguered Baltimore to be rescued from its death spiral.
Since 2014, a year before Freddie Gray’s death, the city has lost 30,000 residents. They’ve simply fled. In that same time spread, more than 2,000 have been lost to homicides.
As one of the mayoralty candidates put it, with lamentable truthfulness: “We are a city of perpetual mourning.”