No question, the death of Freddie Gray, a young African-American from Baltimore, was tragic. The cause of death was injuries to his neck and spine, apparently incurred when he was in a police van, but the cause of those injuries — purposeful, due to neglect on the part of the police officers (currently the most likely explanation), or something else — remains unclear.
But equally tragic was the city-wide rioting and looting in the aftermath of his death.
First, as is always the case in inner-city rioting and looting, the people hurt the most are those whose businesses are destroyed, and whose jobs are ended because of the destruction. And many of the small business owners, and most of the workers affected, are African-Americans who can least afford to lose their livelihoods.
But equally tragic — a phenomenon we are increasingly seeing — is the backlash against the police forces that patrol the inner cities, most of which include as many black officers as white. In fact, of the six officers charged in the death of Freddie Gray, three are black.
Which is not to say the officers in this case, or in the other cases in which police brutality and misconduct have been claimed, aren’t deserving of punishment. But it is to say that such punishment should only come after following the law’s due-process procedures, which include a trial and then a verdict by a jury or judge.
Instead, according to the verdict of the street, all officers are to blame, and in Baltimore and other cities, police departments are being besieged and attacked by hostile crowds. Police cars have been destroyed, rocks and bottles have been hurled at police, punches have been thrown, and there have been calls for the police to stay out of the inner-city neighborhoods they have been charged with patrolling.
Which leads to the final tragedy. In Baltimore and elsewhere, besieged police forces have been reducing their presence in the inner cities, for fear of more confrontations and violent backlashes. And the unsurprising result is that the number of crimes — almost all black-on-black crimes — have skyrocketed. Over the Memorial Day weekend in Baltimore, just a month after the riots and looting ended, there were 32 shootings, nine homicides, and a huge spike in vandalism and theft.
Interestingly, much of the media, which has howled for retribution against the police, are also blaming the police for this aftermath spike in crime. “As the petulant police retreated to its station houses,” The Washington Post thundered at the police force in Baltimore, “the real carnage began.”
If I am a Baltimore police officer, black or white, I may have felt many things in the rioting’s wake, but “petulant” was probably not one of them.
