The root causes of Baltimore
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AS Baltimore burns and images of violence and mayhem fill our screens, many people are asking why? Why does the death of one young man cause a city to go up in flames?
Any event has multiple causes, but there are at least three background factors that we should bear in mind.
The first is the recent momentum of the police brutality narrative: since Ferguson in 2014 we have become witness to mounting evidence of police brutality. A US Department of Justice report on the Ferguson police department revealed routine rights violations and racial bias.
It is not unique. In April in South Carolina, a white police officer shot an unarmed black man eight times in the back, killing him for a minor traffic violation. The images of police violence and community perceptions of cover-up have become increasingly common, with each case reinforcing the sense of injustice.
The second is the lack of trust between police and minority black populations. Despite more black officers and more blacks in senior positions, there is still a gulf between blacks and police departments that community policing measures have failed to bridge. This turns into a chasm between poor blacks and the police because of the active policing of low-income areas.
The legacy of policies of the tough on crime approach, the war on drugs and the militarisation of police constitutes a police insurgency against low-income black communities. Young black men are stopped more frequently and jailed more often and longer than white counterparts for similar activities. In Baltimore, one in three males can expect to spend some time in jail during their lifetime.
The third element is the stifled economic opportunities and limited social mobility of many inner-city residents. Rising inequality in the US has meant a small minority has done well, the middle class is squeezed and those of lower income are trapped in funnels of failure. For young people caught in a web of multiple deprivations, street violence is commonplace.
One of the sites of the rioting in Baltimore is in the blighted neighbourhood of SandtownWinchester, which was also the scene of rioting in 1968. Over 37 years later little progress has been made in a community that is 96% black and where 47% of children live below the poverty level, more than double the national average. Some have moved out and some have moved on, but for those left, Martin Luther King s Dream is still just a dream.
A law-and-order debate should focus on reducing violence against low-income minority residents who are the primary victims of violent crime in Baltimore and across the nation. The US needs to address structural issues of poverty and economic opportunity as well as how to make the streets safer for all citizens.
The news media will look over the aftermath of the uprising in Baltimore and take stock of the burned remains of cars and storefronts. Reporters will also see the shells of 46 000 empty lots and vacant homes lining the neighbourhoods that were riven by unrest. However, the media and its audience must be careful not to think that the burned-out look of so much of the city is the result of this recent unrest, or even of the uprisings of 1968, which followed the assassination of Reverend King.
Baltimore s blight is the result of decades of disinvestment, from the blockbusting and white flight of the 1950s, the urban renewal policies of the 1960s, and the evacuation of the largely poor and black neighbourhoods of East Baltimore to make way for the expansion of Johns Hopkins University taking place today.
What we are seeing today could only have occurred against this backdrop of planned uneven development.
One of the dangers of seeing the riot as an event is precisely this danger of losing historical perspective about the ways the neighbourhoods burning on television are the very ones that have been cut off from the growth of the city s downtown core.
The cost of the Freddie Gray riots cannot be measured in dollars and lives alone. For communities and police alike, the death of Freddie Gray and the violence that swept through the streets of Baltimore cut deeper than burned businesses or hurled cinder blocks.
For minority residents, the death of Freddie Gray is proof par excellence that the protests after the deaths of Mike Brown, Eric Gardner, Tamir Rice, and too many more have been futile. It s proof that the battles of the Baltimore riots of 1968 are still being waged, and that police and the powers that be still see and treat protests and protestors as problems to be controlled.
For police, Monday s violence is angering. They see people willfully destroying their communities and attacking police officers. What they do not see is powerless, unheard victims of centuries of racism, segregation, and inequality.
The road to reconciliation must begin in the same streets now marred by violent unrest. Just as distrust and fear have been born out of decades of interactions between police and citizens, it is through one interaction at a time that we can
begin to heal the wounds that scar the public and police.
John Rennie Short and Kate Drabinski are professors at the University of Maryland, Baltimore while Michael SierraArevalo is at Yale University. This article first appeared in www.theconversation.com