Police, violence and the two Baltimores

SIX POLICE officers have been charged in the murder of Freddie Gray, a Black resident of the city of Baltimore, who was chased down, tackled and battered to death for the "crime" of making eye contact with a cop.

While these charges are a concession from the city of Baltimore, it's important that the fight for justice does not stop here. We know that the only reason these officers are facing criminal charges is because of the power of protest and the thousands of people who have taken to the streets to demand that systematic violence by racist police finally ends.

In a system where the cops regularly operate with impunity, neither convictions nor meaningful sentences are guaranteed in this case--as the city of Oakland knows well from the sentencing of Johannes Mehserle, the transit police officer who killed Oscar Grant III on a BART train station platform in Oakland, California. Mehserle received only a two-year jail sentence for the murder, and he only served a year behind bars.

It comes as no surprise that the six Baltimore cops are already being treated with privilege. All have been released on bail ranging from $250,000 to $350,000, including one who faces a potential jail sentence of 30 years.

At the same time, 18-year-old Allen Bullock, who turned himself in after he was photographed breaking the windows of a police car during the uprising in Baltimore, is facing eight criminal charges--one of which, rioting, carries a maximum penalty of life in prison. Bullock is still being held on $500,000 bond, an amount that his family cannot afford.

But this singular example barely scrapes the surface of the patterns of skewed justice, violence and excessive force, and economic oppression that Baltimore's Black working class faces daily.

THE BALTIMORE Uprising is happening in the context of increasing economic inequality, in a city still suffering from the foreclosure crisis that plundered Black wealth nationwide--leaving Black and Latino families twice as likely to suffer the loss of their homes. As of last year, Baltimore had the ninth-largest number of foreclosures in the country. Many of these foreclosed homes, disproportionately in Black neighborhoods, remain vacant.

Indeed, vacant row houses have become the infamous picture of Baltimore. In 2012, 11.6 percent of housing units in Baltimore City--one in every nine--were vacant, perpetuating a landscape of neglect overwhelmed by more than 30,000 abandoned lots and buildings. By Baltimore City's own estimate, 65 percent of the vacant and abandoned properties lie outside current or projected development plans.

Herein lies the picture of the two Baltimores: In the neighborhoods of privilege, surrounding the Inner Harbor, more than 5,300 new residential units have been built since 2010, with over 5,000 more currently under construction or approved. Meanwhile, predominately Black neighborhoods like Freddie Gray's Sandtown-Winchester have seen only continued disinvestment and disrepair. This situation is even more deplorable knowing that at least 3,000 people in Baltimore will experience homelessness every night, and more than 30,000 will during the course of a year.

The political and business elite have turned their backs on huge swaths of the city. By focusing development on attracting young professionals and tourists, the revitalized Baltimore has been built on leaving racial and class inequality intact. Case in point: there is a 20 percentage point gap in employment rates for Black males aged 16 to 64 and white males of the same age, and just 57.5 percent of Black men in the city are employed.

Major boulevards remain hard-and-fast dividing lines that isolate populations according to wealth, and simultaneously create neighborhoods that are 90 percent-plus populated with a single race. It was along these dividing lines that we saw most of the clashes with police over the past weeks, with cops standing firmly on the lines they were told to protect.

The well-rehearsed line from the mainstream media and political establishment suggests that a few bad officers are to blame for isolated incidents of police violence. But the dynamics at play in Baltimore clearly expose this rhetoric. The new status quo of U.S. cities includes large, professional police forces, asserting themselves as protectors of business interests and assets, as well as maintaining their own positions in society.

The underlying assumption that police have any responsibility to serve and protect the population as a whole is an unraveling myth, behind which are revealed police departments, now bristling with armored vehicles, stun grenades and other paramilitary gear and weaponry. The increasingly militarized police forces have become one of the most visible icons of urban wealth, primarily carrying out enforcement in neighborhoods in urgent need of tangible investment.

Sandtown is a clear example of one of these neighborhoods seemingly disconnected from the economy--one where, as the Baltimore Sun put it, "generations of crushing poverty and the war on drugs combine to rob countless young people like [Freddie Gray] of meaningful opportunities."

According to the federal government, Baltimore has the highest concentration of heroin addiction in the country. One consequence is that police gain the license to claim entire sections of the city as "areas of high crime." Under this circumstance, residents are repeatedly harassed without reason or provocation, and arrested for simply sitting on their own stoops or being outside in their own neighborhoods--all well before the city imposed its recent curfew.

In recent years, Sandtown has sent more people to prison than anywhere else in the state of Maryland. In 2003, the Justice Policy Institute found that half of all young Black men in Baltimore are incarcerated, on parole or otherwise under the control of the criminal justice system. Black men in Maryland are imprisoned at nearly eight times the rate of whites. Over three-quarters of Maryland's prisoners are Black, yet African Americans are only 28 percent of the state's population.

ONE MILE east of Sandtown, across the light rail tracks and the heavily policed border of Howard Street, is the historic district of Mount Vernon--the neighborhood where I lived while in Baltimore. Here, residents begin to call their city "Smalltimore," a reference to a charming small city where everyone knows everyone.

My neighborhood was easily accessed from the Interstate, just past the sports stadiums, all without having to enter a non-gentrified neighborhood. Bounded by the harbor to the south, a series of parks and hospitals to the north, and by Interstate 95 to the east, "Smalltimore" is home to an overwhelmingly white, young professional demographic. The few blocks within this zone that are not already gentrified are marked with flashing blue lights atop poles, and no one seems to mind the two or three helicopters patrolling the skies.

In my experience, this Baltimore is a world away from the pervasive police terrorism and long history of racism that plague the city's Black communities.

Within Smalltimore's geographic bubble of wealth and business opportunity is Baltimore's municipal district, from which Black elected officials command the city's political apparatus. Yet as Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor wrote in an article for In These Times:

Black elected officials have largely governed in the same way as their white counterparts, reflecting all of the racism, corruption and policies favoring the wealthy seen throughout mainstream politics...This is not just a product of contempt for the Black poor, but also the result of the pressures of governing big cities in an age of austerity. Cities have been thrust into competition with each other to attract capital, resulting in a race to the bottom to cut taxes and essentially shove out those in need of social services.

While the details cited here come from Baltimore, the general picture and dynamics are the same in every American city. The Baltimore Rebellion is a further step for a movement that is standing up around the country to say Black Lives Matter and the police are out of control--and it also reveals the scale of inequality that is bringing questions of class to the forefront around the U.S.