Editorial
How Racism Doomed Baltimore
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD NY TIMES
The Baltimore riots threw a spotlight on the poverty and isolation of the African-American community where the unrest began last month. The problems were underscored on Friday when the Justice Department, in response to Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake’s request, started an investigation of the Police Department, which has an egregious history of brutality and misconduct.
Other cities are plagued by the same difficulties, but they have proved especially intractable in Baltimore. A new study from Harvard offers evidence that Baltimore is perhaps the worst large city in the country when measured by a child’s chances of escaping poverty.
The city’s racially segregated, deeply poor neighborhoods cast an especially long shadow over the lives of low-income boys. For example, those who grew up in recent decades in Baltimore earn 28 percent less at age 26 than otherwise similar kids who grew up in an average county in the United States.
As shocking as they are, these facts make perfect sense in the context of the century-long assault that Baltimore’s blacks have endured at the hands of local, state and federal policy makers, all of whom worked to quarantine black residents in ghettos, making it difficult even for people of means to move into integrated areas that offered better jobs, schools and lives for their children. This happened in cities all over the country, but the segregationist impulse in Maryland generally was particularly virulent and well-documented in Baltimore, which is now 63 percent black.
Americans might think of Maryland as a Northern state, but it was distinctly Southern in its attitudes toward race. In the first decade of the 20th century, for example, the Legislature approved amendments to the State Constitution to deny the vote to black citizens. Voters rejected these amendments, not out of sympathy for civil rights, but because of suspicion that the political machine would use disenfranchisement to gain a stranglehold over state politics.
The segregationist effort in Baltimore gained momentum in 1910, shortly after a Yale-educated black lawyer bought a house in the well-heeled Mount Royal section of the city. The uproar among whites led to an ordinance that partitioned the city into black blocks and white blocks: No black person could occupy a home on a block where more than half the people were white; no white person could move into a block where more than half the residents were black. In 1910, The New York Times described this as "the most pronounced ‘Jim Crow’ measure on record."
When the courts overturned the ordinance, the city adopted a strategy, already successful in Chicago, under which building and health department inspectors lodged code violations against owners who ignored the apartheid rule. Civic leaders then imposed restrictive covenants that barred black residents.
‘House Not For Sale’
The Federal Housing Administration, created in 1934 by Congress to promote homeownership by insuring private mortgages, could have staved off housing segregation by enforcing a nondiscrimination policy. Instead, as the historian Kenneth Jackson explained in "Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States," the agency reflected "the racist tradition of the United States." It insisted on a rigid, white-black separation in housing. It openly supported racist covenants that largely excluded African-Americans — even the middle class and well-to-do — from the homeownership boom that took place between the 1930s and the 1960s. And it typically denied mortgages to black residents wherever they lived.
As Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote last year in The Atlantic, this policy meant that the federal government had endorsed a system of financial apartheid under which "whites looking to achieve the American dream could rely on a legitimate credit system backed by the government. Blacks were herded into the sights of unscrupulous lenders who took them for money and for sport."
African-Americans who were cut off from legitimate bank mortgages paid a price. But the penalty was especially high in Chicago and Baltimore, where laws allowed the worst kinds of financial predation. Black buyers often resorted to what was known as the contract system, run by sellers who were the subprime sharks of their time. They rigged up ruinously priced installment plans and financial booby traps with the express aim of repossessing the home when the buyer missed even one payment and then selling it again. To meet the outrageous costs, borrowers sometimes subdivided apartments and skimped on repairs, allowing properties to fall into decay.
The system accelerated urban decline and ghettoization. It also prevented a generation of black citizens from gaining the wealth that typically flows from homeownership. Writing of Baltimore just last month, Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, argued that "the distressed condition of African-American working- and lower-middle-class families" in Maryland’s largest city and elsewhere "is almost entirely attributable to federal policy that prohibited black families from accumulating housing equity during the suburban boom that moved white families into single-family homes from the mid-1930s to the mid-1960s — and thus from bequeathing that wealth to their children and grandchildren, as white suburbanites have done."
Trapped in the Neighborhood
Segregation that traps black families in dangerous, decrepit neighborhoods continues to be an issue in Baltimore. As recently as 2012, for example, the United States District Court in Maryland approved a settlement in the long-running public housing desegregation suit, Thompson v. HUD, which sought to eradicate 100 years of government-sponsored segregation in the Baltimore region. The settlement called for expanding a housing mobility program that helps black residents move to low-poverty neighborhoods that are racially integrated in the city and surrounding region.
Against this backdrop, the data showing diminished life chances for poor people living in Baltimore should not be startling. The tensions associated with segregation and concentrated poverty place many cities at risk of unrest. But the acute nature of segregation in Baltimore — and the tools that were developed to enforce it over such a long period of time — have left an indelible mark and given that city a singular place in the country’s racial history.
Suspects in Freddie Gray Case: A Portrait of Baltimore Police in Miniature
BALTIMORE — The first police officer Freddie Gray encountered on the morning he sustained a fatal spinal cord injury was Lt. Brian Rice, a seasoned 41-year-old white law enforcement officer who, several years earlier, had his guns confiscated by deputies who took him to a hospital after a worried ex-girlfriend expressed alarm about his well-being.
About 40 minutes later, when Mr. Gray, who was black, lay shackled in a police van and was no longer breathing, Sgt. Alicia White — a 30-year-old churchgoing black woman with a reputation as a rising star — tried to remove him. "She’s not even the type of person that would jaywalk," one neighbor said.
In between, Mr. Gray was subdued and handcuffed by two rookie bicycle officers, each in his 20s, both white. A 25-year-old black patrolman arrived to check on him. The van driver, Officer Caesar Goodson, also black, is an old-timer at 45. Described by colleagues as "passive," he never moved up the ranks.
In this mix of officers — who now face criminal charges in Mr. Gray’s death, including, for some, murder and manslaughter — one can see a portrait in miniature of the Baltimore Police Department, an agency mistrusted by many black residents, and one suffering from its own racial divide despite a decades-long effort to integrate. As the Justice Department begins a full-fledged civil rights investigation, the Gray case throws into sharp relief the department’s shortcomings and struggles for change
"You can’t just label this something racial," said Representative Elijah E. Cummings, a Democrat who lives just four blocks from West North and Pennsylvania Avenues, where a burned and looted CVS store stands as a symbol of the riots set off by Mr. Gray’s death on April 19. "When you have three African-American officers involved, you’ve got to say: ‘Wait a minute, is there a system in place in which they don’t want to tell on each other? Has it become a routine?’ "
Over the past three decades, Baltimore’s roughly 3,000-member police force has undergone a slow, painful process of integration. In 1984, the year the city settled a lawsuit that forced the department to hire and promote more minorities and women, 19 percent of officers were black. By 2007, blacks were 44 percent of the force; the city’s population is nearly two-thirds black. The commissioner, Anthony W. Batts, is black, and African-Americans hold other high-ranking posts.
Despite that, tensions between black residents and the police run deep. Last week’s decision by Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake to request a "pattern or practice" Justice Department inquiry — something she had long resisted, even as she pushed for changes — emphasizes that mistrust. Civil rights advocates say it is long overdue.
So do some black police officers. In 2004, Sgt. Louis Hopson, now the board chairman of the Vanguard Justice Society, the association that represents the city’s black officers, was the lead plaintiff in a federal lawsuit alleging that the department systematically disciplined black officers more harshly than whites. In 2009, the city settled the case, agreeing to pay $2.5 million to more than a dozen plaintiffs and to hire an outside consultant to monitor the internal discipline process for three years.
But the problems have persisted, some black officers say. In March, court records show, Baltimore settled another bias suit, brought by a former officer, Richelle Johnson, a black woman who complained that she was forced to retire and that the department was more accommodating to white officers who were injured and requested light duty than to blacks. The terms of the settlement have not been made public, and a lawyer for Ms. Johnson would not discuss it.
An Internal Divide
"There are two Baltimores, and there are two Baltimore City Police Departments," said Sergeant Hopson, 63, a 35-year veteran. "This department is a very racist police department. The issues that you see manifesting themselves on the outside are the same problems we have been dealing with on the inside for years."
The relentless drumbeat of criticism is depressing officer morale. Many police officers are furious with Ms. Rawlings-Blake, whom their union supported when she ran for mayor in 2011, for asking for the Justice Department review. They feel undermined as they work to maintain the peace in a city with a high homicide rate.
"Our police officers have a number of conflicting emotions, from anger and shock to sadness and depression," said Sgt. Robert F. Cherry, a 21-year veteran and former president of the Baltimore chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 3, in an interview. "It is a tough time to be a police officer."
The union has stood firmly behind the six arrested in Mr. Gray’s death; Sergeant Cherry accused Marilyn J. Mosby, the prosecutor who filed the charges, of "political opportunism" and wondered aloud if she had "an exit strategy for grossly overcharging our six officers." Sergeant Hopson said the Vanguard Justice Society was also planning a news conference for this week to show support for the three black officers.
Sergeant White, the lone woman among them, is an example of how the six officers reflect the two Baltimores, and the two Baltimore Police Departments. After joining the force in 2010, she caught the eye of Sergeant Hopson, who said he recruited her into a program he runs to prepare black officers to take tests required for promotions.
She became a sergeant this year, said Dana Neal, a nondenominational minister who said Sergeant White regarded her as an adopted aunt. "She is a Christian and wants to be a good role model for young black women," Ms. Neal said, adding that Sergeant White hoped to "bridge the gap between the police and the neighborhoods."
Sergeant White grew up in Baltimore and lives here; Sergeant Cherry said 35 percent of the force now lives in the city. But black residents have complained that too many officers live outside Baltimore and feel no attachment to it. Sergeant White has worked for the Police Athletic League, helping young people with homework, and her church, New Bethlehem Baptist Church, is in Sandtown-Winchester, the blighted neighborhood where Mr. Gray grew up and was arrested before his fatal injury.
Now, she faces charges of involuntary manslaughter, second-degree assault and misconduct in office; Ms. Mosby alleges Sergeant White "did nothing" to help Mr. Gray even though he was lying on the floor of the van and unresponsive.
The encounter that led to Mr. Gray’s death began around 8:40 a.m. on April 12, when the three white officers — Lieutenant Rice, Officer Edward Nero and Officer Garrett Miller — were patrolling the streets around the Gilmor Homes, a public housing development in West Baltimore. Lieutenant Rice spotted Mr. Gray, making eye contact with him, police have said, and Mr. Gray ran off.
Three years earlier, amid a dispute with his ex-girlfriend over custody of their child, Lieutenant Rice had been taken to a hospital by sheriff’s deputies in Carroll County, Md., who — apparently fearing he was unstable — confiscated his weapons and contacted his Baltimore police commanders, according to sheriff’s records and court filings. The documents were previously reported by The Guardian newspaper and The Associated Press.
In court papers, the ex-girlfriend’s husband, Andrew McAleer, a Baltimore firefighter, accused the lieutenant of a pattern of stalking and intimidation; at one point, he wrote that he feared he was "about to be killed by Brian Rice." In January 2013, a judge granted Mr. McAleer a temporary "peace order" — a type of protective order — finding "reasonable grounds" that Lieutenant Rice had committed harassment and had trespassed. The order was rescinded a week later because of a lack of proof needed to make the protective order final, records show.
Baltimore police officials declined to comment on the court filings, or to say what, if any, medical treatment or disciplinary action Lieutenant Rice received. He now faces one count of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of second-degree assault, two counts of misconduct in office and one count of false imprisonment.
Officers’ Stories
The two bicycle officers who arrested Mr. Gray, Officers Miller, 26, and Nero, 29, have been on the force for just three years. Both face two counts of second-degree assault, two counts of misconduct in office and two counts of false imprisonment. The prosecutor asserts that Lieutenant Rice and the two officers failed to establish probable cause for Mr. Gray’s arrest and then, after placing him in handcuffs and leg shackles, did not secure him with a seatbelt in the police van, as required by police policy. The medical examiner has concluded that Mr. Gray’s fatal neck injury occurred in the van, according to a person with knowledge of the investigation.
All six officers have filed motions asserting that Ms. Mosby has multiple conflicts of interests in the case and asking that she be required to step aside or that all charges be dismissed.
In a brief interview outside his modest two-story beige brick home in the distant Baltimore suburb of Bel Air, Officer Nero declined to address the charges against him. Standing in his doorway, he said he and his family were going through a difficult time, and were getting by with "a lot" of support from relatives and friends and by concentrating on their young daughter.
Officer Nero’s neighbor Seth Ranneberger, a high school science teacher, said that on one of the rare occasions when the officer spoke of his work, he described being a Baltimore police officer as "one of those jobs — the doormat job — you do it and get no thanks for it."
Officer William G. Porter, who arrived on the scene as backup when the van carrying Mr. Gray made the second of several stops — seemed to be coming to grips recently with just how tough his job was. Officer Porter grew up in North Baltimore, in a transition neighborhood of simple brick rowhouses, just one block away from Guilford, a neighborhood of stately single-family homes. One neighbor, Keysha Waters, 40, described how, as a teenager, the future officer smelled a fire that had started in her home and rushed inside to grab her children and hustle them out the door. When he dropped out of college and joined the police academy, he told Ms. Waters that he wanted to "make a difference."
She and others described Officer Porter as quiet and respectful, but said he lately had seemed a bit worn down by his job. When Olivia Whitlock, a childhood friend, sent him a Facebook message in August saying another neighbor had seen him on the television news, he replied, "I’m surprised you don’t see me more often," because there is so much crime in the tough Western District, where he worked.
Now Officer Porter faces charges including involuntary manslaughter and second degree assault. Ms. Mosby says that although Mr. Gray complained he "could not breathe" and twice asked for a medic, Officer Porter and Officer Goodson, the van driver, ignored the request.
Officer Goodson, whose neighbors in the Baltimore suburb of Catonsville describe him as friendly and kind, faces the most serious charge, second-degree depraved-heart murder — in effect, murder with callous indifference, or an intent to cause an injury that could lead to death. This has led to speculation in Baltimore that Officer Goodson, who faces other charges as well, was intentionally giving Mr. Gray a "rough ride," meaning he intended to jostle him and cause serious injury — though Ms. Mosby has not used that term.
As Baltimore tries to make sense of what happened to Mr. Gray, and the Justice Department inquiry gets underway, some say city leaders are awakening to problems that black residents knew existed all along. Even Representative Cummings, who said he had asked for a "pattern or practice" review before Mayor Rawlings-Blake, said he had learned something about Baltimore’s police. Never before, he said, had he heard the term "nickel ride," another term for "rough ride."
On the wall of his home, Mr. Cummings said, he keeps pictures that ran in The Baltimore Sun of people who have been beaten by the police. "That," he said, "seems to cry out for a deep dive."
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