I don't normally watch the news. I listen when it impinges, and pay attention to the big stuff, put things together and decide, based on the information available, what's important and what isn't.
My attitude is that news services are almost always nothing better than gossip mongers. They tell us what they want us to hear, parsing it until reality and truth are completely distorted, often to the point of bearing little resemblance to fact. So I ignore it.
Sometimes, though, I have to stop and watch, to try to understand. Baltimore is one of those times.
I don't get it. On many levels, I simply do not understand.
Baltimore police have, according to this article http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/04/nonviolence-as-compliance/391640/ paid significant sums of money to more than 100 people over the course of the past four years as the result of excessive force complaints. That's a lot of people - 25 per year. Even one is too many.
We count on the police to protect us, not to harm us. But they are, first and foremost, fallible human beings. There are times in every life when 'things' sometimes happen. Mistakes are made, and it really is no one's fault. Unless there is deliberate malice or anger or some other emotion that reduces the rational thinking human being to the level of something less than an animal. At that point, all bets are off and the civilized rational being turns into something else, a Barbarian, perhaps.
Could that have been the case here? An officer, maybe even two, who were angry or frustrated, tired of being verbally abused by the very people whom they are sworn to protect and defend, is it possible they just reached the point of 'too much' and over-reacted? Possibly.
I would say that it's definitely possible because looking at just the first nine weeks of 2015, there have been 5,219 arrests for various crimes. Five-thousand two hundred nineteen arrests in just 9 weeks! That does not include the traffic stops, the routine investigations and interventions that don't result in a ride downtown.
So let's say you're Joe Friday and Harry Morgan, riding around in your patrol car.
For every stop you make, you run the risk of someone at least swearing at you, calling you names, treating you like something found on the bottom of a shoe after a visit to the dog park - and all you are trying to do is your job. Never mind the risk of someone pulling a gun and trying to turn your wife to widow.
How many of us, sitting on the sidelines and watching what's going on in Baltimore this week, and Ferguson not so long ago and Staten Island in between, would strap it on and go out and do what these men and women do? I wouldn't. You couldn't pay me enough to do what these men and women do, but they strap it on and go do it - and get verbally and physically abused for it. For just doing their job each day.
Back to Baltimore. If you're interested, the arrest statistics are here:
https://data.baltimorecity.gov/Public-Safety/Summarized-Crime-Data-By-District-Week-9/4nh3-w6zf?
So, 5,219 arrests from January 1 to February 28 this year, down from 6,792 arrests for the same period last year - nine weeks, more than 5,000 arrests.
Taking the 2015 arrest numbers from January 1 through February 28 - the reporting period - that works out to just under 580 arrests per week. If we extrapolate that through the year, that works out to about 30,154 arrests in the city of Baltimore. Of those, 0.0008% or 1:8,000 of those arrested were awarded some sort of settlement because the police went overboard and did things they shouldn't have.
That is bad. It might be statistically insignificant, looking at the numbers, but from the human side, there's nothing good about it.
However, looking at it from a non-emotional standpoint, there is a 1:3000 chance that each of us will be struck by lightning in our lifetime. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/06/0623_040623_lightningfacts.html
• The odds of becoming a lightning victim in the U.S. in any one
year is 1 in 700,000. The odds of being struck in your lifetime is 1 in
3,000.
So I have a 250% better chance of being struck by lightning in my lifetime than in being awarded punitive damages resulting from an arrest in Baltimore.
But, because people are frightened, fed-up and frustrated, Baltimore burns. People are rioting, destroying private property, burning people from their homes, robbing and looting. Shop owners who have worked hard and scraped and tried to do the right thing have seen their efforts gone - in an hour or less. The market, the liquor store, the dress shop, the nail salon - all of those people who screwed their courage up, opened up their mom-and-pop businesses and tried to make things better for themselves and their neighbors are suddenly left with less than nothing.
If they have insurance, and pray they do, they're going to have to fight their insurance company to get a pay-out of benefits. Many policies probably have specific exclusions - like riots and acts of God - meaning that the shopkeeper is simply SOL when it comes to seeing a dime against the premiums s/he's paid for however many years.
The city is not going to pay for the clean-up. Nope. That is up to the building owner, the storekeeper.
What about the good, honest people who were gainfully employed yesterday and now, because of deliberate actions by a group of thugs, have no job? What are they going to do? Where are they going to work to pay the bills and make ends meet?
One young man dies because of what appears to be gross negligence on the part of the police and this is the result.
Do the police have a lot of questions to answer? Hell yes!
Why did they not get the man medical attention as soon as it was clear he wasn't kidding around, that he was in pain?
Why did the officers not restrain the man in the back of the van, to prevent him from being tossed around with his hands tied behind his back?
Why was there not a public investigation into the actions of the police officers involved?
Yes, Baltimore police do have a lot to answer for, but I would say the community has even bigger, more important and, yes, but it's relevant, burning questions to answer:
First and foremost, who benefits from burning down large areas, mostly lower income areas, of the city?
Where are the parents and families teaching their children that destruction of property is wrong, that there are better ways of dealing with anger and inequality than destroying your neighbor's property?
Since it takes two to tango, doesn't at least some of the responsibility for the divide between community and police fall on the community?
If the sewer starts backing up, you don't sit back and talk about the stench. You do something about it - and that is where I think the citizens of Baltimore are almost as much at fault as the police. They have sat back, wrung their hands, and done nothing proactive to try to bridge that gap between us and them - and this is the result.
So, that's my two-cents worth, and I still don't get it.
Best~
Philippa
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