Baltimore Boiling

Civil "unrest" in Baltimore in the wake of Freddie Gray's suspicious injury in the custody of Baltimore's police continues. Prosecutors prepared to file charges against the 6 officers involved:

In a news conference, the state’s attorney in Baltimore, Marilyn J. Mosby, described repeated mistreatment of Mr. Gray. Time and again, she said, officers abused him, arresting him without grounds and violating police procedure by putting him in handcuffs and leg restraints in the van without putting a seatbelt on him.

Ms. Mosby also said the officers had repeatedly failed to seek medical attention for Mr. Gray after he was injured. By the time he was removed from the van, she said, “Mr. Gray was no longer breathing at all.”

“We have probable cause to file criminal charges,” Ms. Mosby said.

And it turns out the "switchblade knife" that Freddie was taken into custody for possession of was legal:

Ms. Mosby also said that the knife the police say Mr. Gray was carrying had not been a legitimate basis for his arrest. “The knife was not a switchblade, and it is lawful,” she said. She said the officers had “failed to establish probable cause for an arrest.”

Al Sharpton is acting as a guard for Baltimore's black mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, straight arming and clipping Fox News reporters with the temerity to ask her about the widely rumored "stand down" order:

“I was sick to my stomach like everybody else. … This was urban warfare, no question about it. They were coming in absolutely beaten down. The [city officers] got out of their vehicles, thanked us profusely for being there, apologized to us for having to be there. They said we could have handled this, we were very capable of handling this, but we were told to stand down, repeatedly told to stand down,” he said. “I had never heard that order come from anyone — we went right out to our posts as soon as we got there, so I never heard the mayor say that. But repeatedly these guys, and there were many high-ranking officials from the Baltimore City Police Department … and these guys told me they were essentially neutered from the start . . .

Only time will tell if there really was a stand down order as such, but I believe her "space to destroy" comments imply that the she did order one. I just wonder if city authorities would be quite as willing to write off buildings and vehicles if they were the city hall and the administrative motor pool.

If you only read one thing about the long term problems in Baltimore that led up to this, let it be this article by David Simon, the creator the the HBO program "The Wire" which chonicled the drug war in Baltimore:

The drug war began it, certainly, but the stake through the heart of police procedure in Baltimore was Martin O’Malley. He destroyed police work in some real respects. Whatever was left of it when he took over the police department, if there were two bricks together that were the suggestion of an edifice that you could have called meaningful police work, he found a way to pull them apart.

 How?

. . . The initial crime reductions in Baltimore under O’Malley were legit and O’Malley deserved some credit.

But that wasn’t enough. O’Malley needed to show crime reduction stats that were not only improbable, but unsustainable without manipulation. And so there were people from City Hall who walked over Norris and made it clear to the district commanders that crime was going to fall by some astonishing rates. Eventually, Norris got fed up with the interference from City Hall and walked, and then more malleable police commissioners followed, until indeed, the crime rate fell dramatically. On paper.

. . . First, the department began sweeping the streets of the inner city, taking bodies on ridiculous humbles, mass arrests, sending thousands of people to city jail, hundreds every night, thousands in a month. They actually had police supervisors stationed with printed forms at the city jail – forms that said, essentially, you can go home now if you sign away any liability the city has for false arrest, or you can not sign the form and spend the weekend in jail until you see a court commissioner. And tens of thousands of people signed that form. . . Martin O’Malley’s logic was pretty basic: If we clear the streets, they’ll stop shooting at each other. We’ll lower the murder rate because there will be no one on the corners.

Mass arrests with no actual intention to file charges or prosecute, essentially intimidation of the populace.

. . . But it wasn’t enough to declare a Baltimore Miracle, by any means. What can you do? You can’t artificially lower the murder rate – how do you hide the bodies when it’s the state health department that controls the medical examiner’s office? But the other felony categories? Robbery, aggravated assault, rape? Christ, what they did with that stuff was jaw-dropping.

So they cooked the books.
. . .
They cooked their own books in remarkable ways. Guns disappeared from reports and armed robberies became larcenies. Deadly weapons were omitted from reports and aggravated assaults became common assaults. The Baltimore Sun did a fine job looking into the dramatic drop in rapes in the city. Turned out that regardless of how insistent the victims were that they had been raped, the incidents were being quietly unfounded. That tip of the iceberg was reported, but the rest of it, no. And yet there were many veteran commanders and supervisors who were disgusted, who would privately complain about what was happening. If you weren’t a journalist obliged to quote sources and instead, say, someone writing a fictional television drama, they’d share a beer and let you fill cocktail napkins with all the ways in which felonies disappeared in those years.

So there is a "rape culture" and Martin O'Malley encouraged it. But still, David Simon is a Hollywood liberal, so:

Everyone thinks I’ve got a hard-on for Marty because we battled over “The Wire,” whether it was bad for the city, whether we’d be filming it in Baltimore. But it’s been years, and I mean, that’s over. I shook hands with him on the train last year and we buried it. And, hey, if he's the Democratic nominee, I’m going to end up voting for him. It’s not personal and I admire some of his other stances on the death penalty and gay rights. But to be honest, what happened under his watch as Baltimore’s mayor was that he wanted to be governor.

Marty walked over the bodies of the Baltimorons to become governor, and get his shot at running for Preznit. But it's OK because, gay rights! Now, over to WeirdDave at Ace's for the proper expression of outrage over this:

. . . Anyhow, in the middle of all of this, what is a very damning recitation of all the despicable things Tommy Carcetti O'Malley did, actions that should by rights disqualify O'Mally for ANY elected position, including dog catcher, for any thinking person, Simon casually says this: "And, hey, if he's the Democratic nominee, I'm going to end up voting for him.". No pause to consider that the raw totalitarianism that Simon's been matter of factly recounting should horrify any American, no thought that the Republicans might nominate someone worth considering, just blind, reflexive, unthinking "Me vote Dem-o-crat". Modern Libs truly are mindless robots.

Bernie Sanders is at least probably not a criminal.