An interview with David Simon.
Bill Keller: What do people outside the city need to understand about what’s going on there—the death of Freddie Gray and the response to it?
David Simon: I guess there’s an awful lot to understand and I’m not sure I understand all of it. The part that seems systemic and connected is that the drug war—which Baltimore waged as aggressively as any American city—was transforming in terms of police/community relations, in terms of trust, particularly between the black community and the police department. Probable cause was destroyed by the drug war. It happened in stages, but even in the time that I was a police reporter, which would have been the early 80s to the early 90s, the need for police officers to address the basic rights of the people they were policing in Baltimore was minimized. It was done almost as a plan by the local government, by police commissioners and mayors, and it not only made everybody in these poor communities vulnerable to the most arbitrary behavior on the part of the police officers, it taught police officers how not to distinguish in ways that they once did.
Probable cause from a Baltimore police officer has always been a tenuous thing. It’s a tenuous thing anywhere, but in Baltimore, in these high crime, heavily policed areas, it was even worse. When I came on, there were jokes about, “You know what probable cause is on Edmondson Avenue? You roll by in your radio car and the guy looks at you for two seconds too long.” Probable cause was whatever you thought you could safely lie about when you got into district court.
Let me pause here. David Simon mentions “probable cause” several times in this lengthy and insightful article. However, he doesn’t seem to know that a police stop only needs “reasonable suspicion” not “probable cause.” These are even called Terry stops.
As for Gray’s arrest, that would need probable cause and it appears that Prosecutor Mosby is either being lazy or disingenuous about calling the arrest “unlawful”.
Getting back to the Simon interview, it becomes clear that all the posture of Democrat politicians, from Mosby back to Martin O’Malley may be operating from less than pure motives.
How does race figure into this? It’s a city with a black majority and now a black mayor and black police chief, a substantially black police force.
What did Tom Wolfe write about cops? They all become Irish? That’s a line in Bonfire of the Vanities. When Ed and I reported The Corner, it became clear that the most brutal cops in our sector of the Western District were black. The guys who would really kick your ass without thinking twice were black officers. If I had to guess and put a name on it, I’d say that at some point, the drug war was as much a function of class and social control as it was of racism. I think the two agendas are inextricably linked, and where one picks up and the other ends is hard to say. But when you have African American officers beating the dog-piss out of people they’re supposed to be policing, and there isn’t a white guy in the equation on a street level, it’s pretty remarkable.
But in some ways they were empowered. Back then, even before the advent of cell phones and digital cameras—which have been transforming in terms of documenting police violence—back then, you were much more vulnerable if you were white and you wanted to wail on somebody. You take out your nightstick and you’re white and you start hitting somebody, it has a completely different dynamic than if you were a black officer. It was simply safer to be brutal if you were black, and I didn’t know quite what to do with that fact other than report it. It was as disturbing a dynamic as I could imagine. Something had been removed from the equation that gave white officers—however brutal they wanted to be, or however brutal they thought the moment required—it gave them pause before pulling out a nightstick and going at it. Some African American officers seemed to feel no such pause. […]
The drug war began it, certainly, but the stake through the heart of police procedure in Baltimore was [former Mayor and Maryland Governor] 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. 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. And at a certain point, with the crime rate high and with his promises of a reduced crime rate on the line, he put no faith in real policing.
Simon goes on to lambast O’Malley’s use and misuse of BPD — not to help citizens but to generate stats as a resume entry on his way to higher political office — making his “I’ll vote for him as President” statement incomprehensible.
Everything Simon has seen in a city run by the Left since 1966 and he will still vote for them?
I guess when the personal is the political, you stick with your “church” no matter what.
And we get the government we deserve, every time.
Do read the whole thing.
The guys who would really kick your ass without thinking twice were black officers.
Immunity from charges of racism, doy. But we all knew that.
I guess when the personal is the political, you stick with your “church” no matter what.
I’d prefer “tribe” to “church” in that context because we don’t have tribes outside of identity politics but we sure have churches independent of that garbage.
Also, our company took us to see Avengers yesterday. I haven’t seen most of the franchise, only the first Avengers movie, which, truth be told, I don’t remember a single frame of it.
I liked this second one well enough. Had a great time watching it. I usually don’t like a lot of random, chaotic action, but the sequences were coherent enough to not bug me. David Thompson has the full-on fan-level review.
But see, for the previews, they showed Batman vs. Superman (or vice-versa; your argument is invalid), and Batman had a deeply British accent.
That’s just sick. Sick and wrong.
Mosby has her Clintonian wordsmithing down.
I bet she gives a mean “is, is” too.
BTW this was first brought up 5 days ago in a “Village Voice” piece that was originally titled “Freddie Gray Arrest Exposes an Antiquated Knife Law Similar to New York’s” but now does their “Mosby-style”-misleading bit with their new title “Prosecutor Says Freddie Gray’s Knife Was Legal Under Maryland State Law.”
The piece still talks about the Baltimore City law,
Last paragraph should not be a quote.
City laws can be MORE restrictive than State laws, but not less restrictive.
Except for the so-called “Sanctuary Cities”, where local ordinances trump Federal Law.
Greetings:
Cursed as I was with a bit of Jesuit education, the thing that I have noticed amid all the punditry’s breast-beatings and genuflections is the near total disinterest in what young Negroes (aka “thugs” in some half-circles) bring to these interactions. After 30 or so years of the at least hype if not glorification of Negro thug culture in music and film (and probably poetry, not that I read any) is the recognition of semi-feral parents rearing feral children so far beyond the intellectual pale as to garner almost no mention at all.
And that mention of a “nightstick” brought up my PTSD memories of growing up in the Bronx of the ’50s and ’60s when those devices were in fact made of wood and whose corner it was and who should be moving along was a subject for the shortest of discussions and a clear and present father would tell his 6-foot something man-child, “If you get yourself in trouble with the police, don’t waste your dime calling me.”.
And try not to get me started on the economics of it all.
Savages With Cell Phones
LOL! CNN reporter cuts interview short when Baltimore teen says he ‘earns’ stuff by STEALING IT
The Baltimore Plan – The Big Part of The Bigger Picture: Win By Losing….
As a rule, yes — but state laws can be written to allow municipal preemption in either direction. Since cities and counties are creatures of their respective states, anything goes.
As a public service:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QR465HoCWFQ
“Where the Baltimore Police Went Wrong”
Voting Democrat, cause see, they do it too. They fucked up: they trusted them.
i’m a listen to my 70’s anthem baltimore song now
poor lil seagull
commies converge news
‘Hacktivists’ from around the world take to social media to stir Baltimore unrest
The DA’s office and the media. Just making the narrative up as they go along. Put out enough lies and whatever the truth is will just be another story among all the others.
My momma got et by lesbian seagulls.
Thanks for the remembo, hateyfeet.
Plus: **** SO WHO IS HE? Original reports in the Baltimore media when the Freddie Gray story first broke, mentioned that two people were in the alley when approached by officers. Two people took off running in opposite directions. One person, Freddie Gray, was immediately caught. The other, was caught later in the day and released without incident.All indications are that Donta Allen was this second person who fled, was caught/questioned, and then released. There is no evidence of Donta Allen ever being in custody on 04/12/15.
So how did this story come to the media, and why would the originator of Donta Allen to the public, WBAL-TV reporter Jayne Miller, sell it?
It is not coincidental Donta Allen appeared the day following the explosive Washington Post story.
Indeed by all accounts if the Washington Post story was accurate it seriously undermined the case against the Baltimore officers. Especially given the medical examiner stating that Freddie Gray’s injuries occurred INSIDE the transport vehicle during transit and not when he was stopped by police.
This is where State Attorney Marilyn Mosby’s main Deputy Attorney and lead investigator, Janice Bledsoe, comes in to play:
****
Shoes for Industry Comrade.
I have seen a couple of different types of spring knives. Some just unsheathe the blade and you have to lock the blade by hand or a good flip of the wrist. Others lock into place when you push the button. I assume this may be the difference?
Add this to my 7:11 am above and Seattle has lots of “Grimm” work ahead.