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criminal justice reform in the united states

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post–civil rights era in african-american history

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Activists accuse Saratoga PD of excessive force during protest last week

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Black Lives Matter activists accused Saratoga Springs police Monday of using excessive force during their protest last Wednesday that led to five arrests for disorderly conduct. Sitting on the steps of City Hall today, the BLM members said all they have ever wanted is a conversation with police that addresses their concerns.

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Schools across the country are making the news as sites of heated political debates and culture wars as parents and teachers waste the school board meetings on defining Critical Race Theory and political flags. Students in one school district are doing something about the sudden uptick in racist incidents at their schools.

On Wednesday morning, students from the Pittsford Central School District in New York walked out of their high schools to protest the district's response to a racist video that circulated on social media this week.

According to NBC affiliate , the district's handling of the incident was the final straw for the hundreds of students who walked out.

From News10:

"It felt like Pittsford always just tries to sweep racism under the rug and sort of toss those issues aside and try and cover it up ... save their reputation," said Pittsford Sutherland senior and organizer of Wednesday's walk-out, Jaylen Wims. "I hope to see sort of fine lines ... and more of a ... a sense of security, fine lines drawn in the code of conduct and serious penalties for racism. Things that are clear and concise."

Superintendent Michael Pero, who released this letter to the Pittsford community earlier this week, supported the students' protest and said he has worked with students for their input on the current code of conduct.

Superintendent Michael Pero estimates that between 300 to 400 students were a part of the demonstration.

The video in question showed a student with an airsoft gun saying he carries it to "Kill N-words." Pero, who involved the Monroe County Sheriff Office, was alerted about the video on Friday. According to Rochester First, officials from the office announced on Sunday that the video is months old and there is no credible threat to students. However, MCSO still stationed deputies at the school to make students and parents feel safe.

Rochester First also notes that in an email Pero sent to parents titled "Recent Racist Incidents," the superintendent mentions other cases occurring on social media and in text messages alongside the video.

"What our code of conduct would say in situations like this is that we suspend a student, and then we have a hearing where an impartial hearing officer comes in, listens to the case, and makes a recommendation based on what the next steps should be," Pero said at Wednesday's demonstration, according to News10.

He confirms that the student responsible for the video is no longer in school, but it is unclear when the hearing will happen, News10 notes. Pero says the district plans to have a student assembly on Friday and will have parent forums to discuss recent incidents.

He also says that they will work with the Monroe County Sheriff's Office to increase the current police presence if needed.

I mean, no wonder students are protesting. The fact that a possible response to racist incidents includes an increase in police presence at school is tone-deaf. School policing contributes to the criminalization of Black and brown children, introducing them to the school-to-prison pipeline that traps marginalized individuals for the rest of their lives. Real change comes with informed action, Pittsford.

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New York Students Stage School Walkout in Protest of District's Response to Racist Incidents

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Schools across the country are making the news as sites of heated political debates and culture wars as parents and teachers waste the school board meetings on defining Critical Race Theory and political flags. Students in one school district are doing something about the sudden uptick in racist incidents at their schools.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/24/us/obama-says-movements-like-black-lives-matter-cant-just-keep-on-yelling.html?_r=0

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I don't act like an 'angry black woman' – but I'm read that way if I broach race | Rebecca Carroll | Comment is free | The Guardian

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I don't act like an 'angry black woman' – but I'm read that way if I broach race | Rebecca Carroll | Comment is free | The Guardian

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I don't act like an 'angry black woman' - but I'm read that way if I broach race | Rebecca Carroll

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The trope is alive and well; I'm never just offended, or annoyed, or feeling strengthened by my convictions in the eyes of others

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‘The Game Done Changed’: Reconsidering ‘The Wire’ Amidst the Baltimore Uprising | The Nation

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‘The Game Done Changed’: Reconsidering ‘The Wire’ Amidst the Baltimore Uprising | The Nation

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I fanatically loved HBO's Baltimore-based television drama, The Wire. It's difficult to even imagine my pop-cultural brain without the presence of Omar Little, Stringer Bell, Bunk, and "McNutty." When I started doing my sports radio show eight years ago, I scheduled interviews with as many of the actors as I could for no other reason than I wanted to breathe their air. Talking to Michael K. Williams about the method of Omar's "long game" while he aggressively chewed on a sandwich will forever remain a career highlight. In every interview, I would always ask the same question: I wanted the cast to tell me whether working on this program was just another acting gig or if they all knew that they were doing something utterly unique in television history. When I asked this of Seth Gilliam, who played Officer Ellis Carver, he said, "It felt to us more like we were a movement, on a mission, in an army to bring awareness." What really stoked me back then was the bracingly original political message that ran through The Wire compared to a typical Hollywood production. Most assembly-line entertainment is a variation on the shopworn theme of lone heroes confronting obstacles and then overcoming them. The connective thread of every Wire season, as described by show co-creator David Simon was that when individuals, no matter how heroic, fight to change entrenched power structures and bureaucracies-whether in the form of City Hall politics, police, or organized crime-the individual is going to lose.

That's why I always shoved it to the back of my mind when my friends in Baltimore-I live about 45 minutes from the city-almost uniformly would tell me they either did not like or would not watch the show. People were hostile toward The Wire for a multiplicity of reasons. Some felt it was like gangster rap for a more sophisticated audience, glorifying black-on-black hyper-masculine street violence while selling itself as somehow more literate and ennobling to consume. My friend Mark once pissed me off fiercely when he told me that my favorite show was "NWA for people who read The New Yorker."

My Baltimore friends who had seen the show also believed, given the police violence in their town, that The Wire's view of Baltimore's finest was almost comically kind. The one policeman who accidentally shoots someone (a fellow officer) not only isn't prosecuted but gets reintroduced later in the series as a big-hearted public school teacher. And then other people just said to me that living in Baltimore was a struggle and the idea of anyone making commerce out of their pain was simply not their idea of entertainment.

I would casually dismiss these concerns, thinking people were being overly sensitive, overly critical, or just not "seeing" the brilliance in front of them. I also politically defended the show as one of the few spaces on television that, through its brilliant multiracial cast, looked at issues of crime, corruption, and urban blight in a systemic manner. The fact that it actually cared about the hopes, dreams, and lives of street criminals and not just cops felt more than radical. It felt revolutionary.

The events of the last two weeks, however, have changed my view of The Wire in a very fundamental way. I have spent most of my time listening to people in Baltimore speak about how this uprising came to be and why the anger runs so deep. I've been primarily speaking to black Baltimoreans in grassroots organizations who have, in a state of MSM invisibility, been building movements for years to fight poverty, end street violence, and challenge police brutality. This is humbling to admit, but this experience has made me reassess my favorite show, as if a very dim light bulb was being switched on above my head. I am now seeing what the The Wire was missing, despite its much lauded, painstaking verisimilitude: the voices of people organizing together for change. Everyone on The Wire seeks individual solutions for social problems: the lone cop, the lone criminal, the lone teacher, the lone newspaper reporter. Yes, it is certainly true that when entrenched bureaucracies battle individuals, individuals lose. But when bureaucracies battle social movements, the results can be quite different.

It is also impossible for me to separate David Simon's view of people as either passive sheep or lone-wolf heroes from his comments about the events last week in Baltimore. Not his comments to " end the fucking drug war," which are surely welcome, but his other public perspective.

With the fires in Baltimore just hours old, Simon wrote, "But now-in this moment-the anger and the selfishness and the brutality of those claiming the right to violence in Freddie Gray's name needs to cease ... This, now, in the streets, is an affront to that man's memory and a dimunition of the absolute moral lesson that underlies his unnecessary death. If you can't seek redress and demand reform without a brick in your hand, you risk losing this moment for all of us in Baltimore. Turn around. Go home. Please."

It's always cringe-worthy when a wealthy middle-aged white guy lectures young black people about who they are and what they should do. In other words, if you had said two weeks ago-in the battle of prominent Baltimore Caucasians-that Orioles Manager Buck Showalter would represent himself better than David Simon, I think many would have been surprised. But his comments also revealed far more than was intended. The idea that David Simon, praised as someone with an ear to these Charm City streets like no one since H.L. Mencken, could look at what was happening in the Baltimore of 2015 and not see the social movements and organization beneath the anger, makes me wonder how much he truly "saw" when producing the show. That David Simon could tell people with bricks in their hand to "go home," and have no direct words of condemnation for the violence displayed by the police made me remember my friend Dashon-from Baltimore-who told me he would never watch The Wire because he believed it to be "copaganda," since it was created not only by Simon but by longtime Baltimore police officer Ed Burns.

Now, I cannot help but recall all my favorite Wire moments through a lens that has me wondering if the show was both too soft on the police and incredibly dismissive of people's ability to organize for real change. In the season that took place in the public schools, where were the student organizers, the urban debaters, and teacher activists I've met this past month? In the season about unions, where were the black trade unionists like the UNITE/HERE marchers who were-in utterly unpublicized fashion-at the heart of last Saturday's march? In the season about the drug war and "Hamsterdam," where were the people actually fighting for legalization? In the stories about the police, where were the people who died at their hands? It all reveals the audacity-and frankly the luxury-of David Simon's pessimism. Perhaps this pessimism, alongside the adrenalizing violence, created, as Jamilah Lemieux put it in Ebony, a show steeped in the voyeurism of "Black pain and death" for a liberal white audience that "cried for Stringer Bell and a burned out CVS, but not Freddie Gray."

I am not saying that art should conform to a utopian political vision of struggle like some dreck from the Stalinist culture mills. But I am asking a question that I wasn't before: Why were those fighting for a better Baltimore invisible to David Simon? I don't mean those fighting on behalf of Baltimore-the (often white) teachers, the social workers, and the good-natured cops who are at the heart of The Wire-but those fighting for their own liberation? Why was The Wire big on failed saviors and short on those trying to save themselves? And if these forces were invisible to David Simon, shouldn't we dial down the praise of the show as this " Great American Novel of television" ( Variety!) and instead see it for what it is: just a cop show? There's no shame in that. I'll even call it the greatest cop show ever, a cop show with insanely brilliant dialogue, indelible performances, and more three-dimensional roles for black actors than 99 percent of what comes out of Hollywood. But all the same-still just a cop show.

After reading stories like this, I think I'm done with cop shows for now. There's a line from the Bible that says, "When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child. But when I grew up, I put away childish things." In the wake of the Baltimore uprising, The Wire's pessimism seems childish to me, and I'm going to put it away for a while. I could see myself revisiting it in the future, maybe amidst a more dreary political moment. But that moment isn't now. Baltimore in 2015 shows that we can do more than just chronicle the indignities imposed by entrenched urban power structures-we can challenge them. David Simon should listen to the folks who are engaged in that collective project. As Cutty said, "The game done changed."

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'The Game Done Changed': Reconsidering 'The Wire' Amidst the Baltimore Uprising

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I fanatically loved HBO's Baltimore-based television drama, The Wire. It's difficult to even imagine my pop-cultural brain without the presence of Omar Little, Stringer Bell, Bunk, and "McNutty." When I started doing my sports radio show eight years ago, I scheduled interviews with as many of the actors as I could for no other reason than I wanted to breathe their air.

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‘Our Demand Is Simple: Stop Killing Us’ - NYTimes.com

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‘Our Demand Is Simple: Stop Killing Us’ - NYTimes.com

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Johnetta Elzie (left) and DeRay Mckesson at MoKaBe's Coffeehouse in St. Louis. Credit Credit Christaan Felber for The New York Times

How a group of black social media activists built the nation's first 21st-century civil rights movement.

Johnetta Elzie (left) and DeRay Mckesson at MoKaBe's Coffeehouse in St. Louis. Credit Credit Christaan Felber for The New York Times

On the evening of April 25 at the corner of Pratt and Light Streets, in Baltimore's revitalized downtown district, more than 100 police officers in riot gear stood shoulder to shoulder, shields up. Six officers on horseback fidgeted behind them, staring down at a crowd of about 40, an odd mixture of protesters, journalists and protester-journalists. Earlier in the afternoon, well over a thousand people marched from the Western District police station to City Hall to protest the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man whose spinal cord was severely injured while he was in the custody of the Baltimore Police Department. Only a handful of live-streamers, an older man in a kente-cloth kufi, five or six teenagers with bandannas drawn across their faces and two young women in cocktail attire who had just been kicked out of a wedding were left. Each person was filming the police.

In the coming days, riots would convulse the city, with young people running through the streets, looting stores and setting fires, and the National Guard descending on their neighborhoods. But this protest looked much like the ones that have characterized the growing movement against police violence. Bodies moved in the dark, but the faces - protesters and police officers alike - were lit up by the thin, lunar glow of cellphone screens.

One protester was DeRay Mckesson, a 29-year-old former school administrator who has spent much of the past nine months attending and catalyzing such protests, from Ferguson, Mo., last summer and fall, to New York City and Milwaukee in December, to North Charleston, S.C., in April. Mckesson, who is from Baltimore, had returned to his hometown not long after Gray's death to join the protests. Now he stood in his usual pose - his slender back straight as a ramrod, phone held in front of angular face, camera lens pointed directly ahead.

The phalanx of police officers began tapping their riot shields with their batons and shouting, "Move back!" Then, in a sloppy, seemingly unrehearsed lock step, they advanced on the protesters.

Tap -

Moooove back.

Tap -

Moooove back.

Mckesson crouched down and angled his phone. On its screen, I could see the dramatic shot he had composed: the faces of police officers, flat and impassive. As the police marched their way up the street, Mckesson posted a Vine, a photo and a 30-second video to his 85,000 Twitter followers. "What in the world is going on?" he asked. "There's, like, how many hundred cops for 40 of us? This is wild." He walked backward at a slow pace, eyes on his screen.

"It's strange to come home after all that time in St. Louis," he said, calmly. "I know it's a cliché, but it's really driven home the saying: 'There's a Mike Brown in every town.' "

Since Aug. 9, 2014, when Officer Darren Wilson of the Ferguson Police Department shot and killed Michael Brown, Mckesson and a core group of other activists have built the most formidable American protest movement of the 21st century to date. Their innovation has been to marry the strengths of social media - the swift, morally blunt consensus that can be created by hashtags; the personal connection that a charismatic online persona can make with followers; the broad networks that allow for the easy distribution of documentary photos and videos - with an effort to quickly mobilize protests in each new city where a police shooting occurs.

We often think of online activism as a shallow bid for fleeting attention, but the movement that Mckesson is helping to lead has been able to sustain the country's focus and reach millions of people. Among many black Americans, long accustomed to mistreatment or worse at the hands of the police, the past year has brought on an incalculable sense of anger and despair. For the nation as a whole, we have come to learn the names of the victims - Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Tony Robinson, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray - because the activists have linked their fates together in our minds, despite their separation by many weeks and thousands of miles.

In the process, the movement has managed to activate a sense of red alert around a chronic problem that, until now, has remained mostly invisible outside the communities that suffer from it. Statistics on the subject are notoriously poor, but evidence does not suggest that shootings of black men by police officers have been significantly on the rise. Nevertheless, police killings have become front-page news and a political flash point, entirely because of the sense of emergency that the movement has sustained.

The movement began with a single image: Michael Brown, lying facedown on the asphalt, a stream of blood running from his head. That picture, combined with the testimony of witnesses who claimed to see the teenager surrender before being shot several times, brought hundreds of people from St. Louis out to the scene of his death the same evening. The following day, Aug. 10, protests began on West Florissant Avenue nearby, as well as outside the Ferguson Police Department; the crowds demanded justice for Brown and that the name of the officer who shot him be released, prompting the police to come out in force. That night, the QuikTrip gas station on West Florissant burned, which in turn brought out the mainstream media and an even more militarized police response. By Aug. 13, images from the Ferguson protests - plumes of tear gas, armored vehicles in the streets, packs of heavily armed police officers wearing military fatigues - were leading the news.

Mckesson watched all this from Minneapolis, where he was working in the public-school system. He was struck by the distance between the sensational accounts of rioting he saw on television and the reports he was reading on Twitter from people in Ferguson, who claimed that the cops had been firing tear gas and rubber bullets into crowds of peaceful protesters. Mckesson decided to go see the protests for himself.

On the morning of Aug. 16, Mckesson drove to St. Louis. Inspired, in part, by the Twitter accounts he had been following - at the time, Mckesson had fewer than 900 followers and tweeted inconsistently - he decided to live-tweet the trip. Setting out, he tweeted: "En route." A couple hours later, he tweeted: "So, this stretch through Iowa has trucks that aren't very good drivers." And when he finally arrived in St. Louis, Mckesson noted: "I should've gotten gas in Iowa. Much more expensive in St. Louis."

Mckesson arrived in Ferguson, and the next day he headed over to West Florissant, where he was tear-gassed. His terse, matter-of-fact updates, which had seemed almost comical when describing the banalities of everyday life, took on a forceful lucidity in the context of the protests, especially when they were accompanied by raw photographs from the scene.

"Y'all, tons of police," he tweeted that night. "Tear gas. It has begun #Ferguson." He added: "Also, the noise sirens are out. Tear gas feels like extreme peppermint tingling. F.Y.I. #Ferguson." Then, about an hour and 30 tweets later: "Phone is dying. I am nowhere near my car. I am lost in #Ferguson. Really bad car accident. Looting across from it. Pray for me. #Ferguson."

Mckesson was radicalized that night. "I just couldn't believe that the police would fire tear gas into what had been a peaceful protest," he told me. "I was running around, face burning, and nothing I saw looked like America to me." He also noticed that his account of that night's tear-gassings, along with a photo he took of the rapper J. Cole, had brought him quite a bit of attention on Twitter. Previously, Mckesson used the social-media platform to post random news articles that interested him, but now he was realizing its documentary power. He quickly grasped that a protester's effectiveness came mostly from his ability to be present in as many places as possible: He had to be on West Florissant when the police rolled up in armored vehicles; inside the St. Louis coffee shop MoKaBe's, a safe haven for the protesters in the city's Shaw neighborhood, when tear gas started to seep in through the front door; in front of the Ferguson Police Department when shots rang out. He had to keep up a steady stream of tweets and carry around a charger so his phone wouldn't die.

Mckesson eventually returned to Minneapolis, but by then he had committed himself to the protests. He started traveling down to St. Louis every weekend. On one of those trips, Mckesson met Johnetta Elzie, a fellow protester who goes by Netta. They became fast friends.

Elzie is "Day 1," the term given to Ferguson protesters who showed up on Aug. 9. She grew up all around St. Louis, spending much of her childhood in the beauty salons where her mother worked. The day Michael Brown was killed, Elzie, who had been mourning the death of her mother, went down to Canfield Green, a housing complex near where Brown was shot, to pay her respects.

The first thing Elzie did was tweet: "It's still blood on the ground where Mike Brown Jr was murdered. A cone in place where his body laid for hours today. #STL #Ferguson." She experimented with other networks to see if they could do a better job of spreading what she was seeing. "I took an Instagram photo - there was one teddy bear; maybe three, four candles on the ground," she told me. "I even tried Tumblr, a social-media platform that I never use. Those videos got hundreds of thousands of reposts."

Over the next few weeks, Elzie, who studied journalism in college, emerged as one of the most reliable real-time observers of the confrontations between the protesters and the police. She took photos of the protest organizers, of the sandwiches she and her friends made to feed other protesters, of the Buddhist monks who showed up at the burned QuikTrip. Mckesson, too, was live-tweeting when he was back in Ferguson, integrating video and referring to protesters and police officers alike by name. Mckesson's tweets were usually sober and detailed, whereas Elzie's were cheerfully sarcastic, mock-heroic and forthright: a running account of events that felt intimate.

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Credit Christaan Felber for The New York Times

Other voices came to the fore as well. There was Bassem Masri, perhaps Ferguson's most famous live-streamer, who attracted tens of thousands of viewers to nightly feeds that showed what the protests looked like beyond the media barricades. Another local activist, Ashley Yates, created T-shirts and hoodies that read "ASSATA TAUGHT ME" - a reference to the former Black Panther Party member Assata Shakur - and that became part of the protest iconography. Clifton Kinnie, a senior in high school, organized other students throughout St. Louis. By the fall, these activists and a handful of others had gone from lone Internet figures to recognized faces of the movement.

Mckesson and Elzie focused much of their attention on criticizing the mainstream media, who devoted too much airtime, they felt, to violence and discord among the protest community. As a corrective, in mid-September, they teamed up with Brittany Packnett, the executive director of St. Louis's Teach for America program, and Justin Hansford, a law professor at St. Louis University, to publish the This Is the Movement newsletter, which scrutinized and curated the daily news out of Ferguson. A wide range of readers, from reporters to protesters to officials within the Department of Justice, subscribed. Pretty soon, Mckesson and Elzie were appearing regularly on TV and radio. The two cultivated appealing personas, becoming easily recognizable to their many followers. Mckesson had begun wearing red shoes and a red shirt to protests. Later, he replaced this outfit with a bright blue Patagonia vest, which he now wears everywhere he goes. (Someone created a DeRay's vest Twitter account.) Elzie often wore dark lipstick, a pair of oversize sunglasses and a leather jacket: the beautician's daughter channeling a Black Panther.

Mckesson and Elzie have always insisted that the movement is leaderless, that it is a communal expression of pent-up anguish spilling onto the streets, but over the fall, they were frequently called upon to serve as its spokespeople. Elzie was invited to conferences and panels, and talked with established social-justice activists around the country about the actions in Ferguson. Mckesson, who was dutifully putting out the newsletter during this time while still working at his job in Minneapolis, began using Twitter to announce actions throughout St. Louis. He and Elzie would tweet a time and location and then wait for the people to show up. By October, they were also being followed by the police, who would sometimes arrive at the scene of the action before the protesters themselves.

Together, Mckesson and Elzie were developing a model of the modern protester: part organizer, part citizen journalist who marches through American cities while texting, as charging cords and battery packs fall out of his pockets. By Nov. 24, when Robert McCulloch, the St. Louis County prosecutor, announced that Darren Wilson would not be indicted on murder charges, a network of hundreds of organizers was already in place, ready to bring thousands of people into the streets with a tweet.

I first met Mckesson on Dec. 7, the 121st day of continuous protests in Ferguson. Three days before, a grand jury in Staten Island decided not to indict Officer Daniel Pantaleo, of the New York Police Department, on charges of killing Eric Garner, an unarmed black man, by choking him. Demonstrations broke out across the city, with major bridges and tunnels shut down every night by protesters, and Mckesson traveled to New York to join them. In Grand Central Terminal, I ran into a group of 30 protesters who had just performed a "die-in," lying quietly on the ground for four and a half minutes - the duration symbolizing the four and a half hours Michael Brown's body was left in the street. A handful of police officers stood by, looking bored and stern.

The crowd headed outside into a cold rain and started up the chants: "Black lives matter!" "I can't breathe!" "We need freedom from these racist-ass cops!" Three young white protesters in front of me - all dressed alike in thick, fur-fringed coats covered with see-through, formless rain ponchos - marched in a straight line with their phones set to video mode, holding them solemnly in the air like processional candles. At 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, near the New York Public Library's main branch, I saw Mckesson, recognizing him by his blue Patagonia vest. He was walking at the edge of the crowd, head buried in his phone.

THE MOVEMENT ON TWITTER | Johnetta Elzie (top row, left to right). St. Louis: ''STL City got me with the teargas twice last night! Not tonight!'' New York: ''I can't breathe." Selma, Ala.: ''The Edmund Pettus Bridge.'' Baltimore: ''Baltimore.''

DeRay Mckesson (bottom row, left to right). St. Louis: ''#ferguson today.'' New York: ''Protesters. Chokehold. Moment of silence. Protest. NYC. Grand Central.'' Selma, Ala.: ''Masons.'' Baltimore: ''Horses. Baltimore.'' Credit Top row: Johnetta Elzie. Bottom: DeRay Mckesson.

We walked with the group until it came to a halt in Times Square. Mckesson stood under a bank awning, shivering. When I asked why he didn't wear something warmer than a vest, he smiled and said, "I feel bulletproof in this."

An elderly man in an orange rain parka walked up to us and said he had been inspired by Mckesson's Twitter account and wanted to thank him for the work he did in Ferguson. "You just keep it up and stay safe," the man said. Mckesson, who speaks in a high-pitched, singsong voice, thanked the man for his kindness before turning his attention back to his phone.

After the protest, Mckesson and I retired to a nearby cafe in a Japanese bookstore. Mckesson took out a large charging device, roughly the size of a deck of cards, and plugged in his white iPhone 6 Plus. Then, reaching into a vest pocket, he pulled out another white iPhone and plugged that in as well. Dozens of Twitter notifications piled up on his screen, and Mckesson shared them with me. Earlier that day, he asked if any of his followers knew the address of William Bratton, New York's police commissioner, thinking that he might organize a protest.

In response, one person called Mckesson a "Mongoloid," while others asked if he was threatening Bratton's life. Some tweets were obliquely menacing: "I look forward to seeing your ass rightfully beaten" or "I hope one of his Rottweilers takes a bite out of your ass." The tone of these replies went beyond standard trolling - an odd familiarity ran through them. The Twitter users, especially the more vicious ones, seemed to actually know Mckesson and some of his fellow protesters.

"This is, like, every day," Mckesson told me. "The trolls are wild. They know where I am at all times."

Mckesson had come to New York to attend workshops and to spread the word about actions in the city. He wanted to see if the wave of dissent that had gathered in the streets of Ferguson and radiated out across the Internet could become something substantial and organized. Two weeks later, after a series of actions involving tens of thousands of people, the murder of two New York police officers had a chilling effect on the street protests. For now, though, Mckesson was in his element, using his phone to create a connection between the outrage on social media and the actions in the streets.

In the cafe, surrounded by shrink-wrapped pastries and a gathering of lucky cat figurines, he answered WhatsApp messages from fellow organizers and text messages from friends, and tried to fact-check a future tweet. When he wasn't sending out data, he was swiping down on Twitter to refresh his timeline with such frequency that it looked as if he were petting his phone.

"When I tweet, I'm mostly preaching to the choir," he said. "But the heart of the movement is in the actions. It's in shutting down streets, shutting down Walmarts, shutting down any place where people feel comfortable. We want to make people feel as uncomfortable as we feel when we hear about Mike, about Eric Garner, about Tamir Rice. We want them to experience what we go through on a daily basis."

Mckesson is a restless man. In the time we spent together, the only occasion I can recall him sitting in one spot for more than 15 minutes was in an Applebee's in St. Louis, where, after a long day of protests and TV interviews, he laid his head down next to a plate of salmon - he almost always orders salmon - and fell asleep. But his habit of seeing every minute of relaxation as a minute lost serves his activism well. In the rare quiet moments between police shootings and actions, Mckesson tweets and retweets stats, trivia, inspirational messages and the names of the dead.
NYC TV stations report crimes committed by blacks more frequently than they even occur. Love is the Why.

Justice is not an abstract concept. Justice is a living Mike Brown. Justice is Tamir playing outside again. Justice is Darren Wilson in jail.
I once watched Mckesson spend a good five minutes trying to edit down a tweet that ran long before calling one of his closest friends. They talked through the tweet together. Ultimately they landed on this: "Blackness in America is never a question of afraid or unafraid; it's a matter of varying degrees of fear, as we are victims of state terror." This obsessive focus is evident in every part of Mckesson's life. He makes a point to never curse in public. He is too busy to watch movies or television. He does not have a boyfriend (some in the movement have objected to having a gay man in a prominent position). And although fellow protesters sometimes call him "the storyteller," his tweets gain their force from their concision and relentlessness rather than from narrative flair.

Mckesson grew up in Baltimore, the son of drug addicts; his mother left the family when he was 3, so his father and great-grandmother raised him and his sister. Starting in sixth grade, Mckesson was elected to the student government every year all the way through college. He went to Bowdoin, the small, elite liberal-arts college in Maine, paying part of his own way through a work-study job in the mailroom. During lulls, he would study the rows of mailboxes in the student union, trying to learn the name of every student on campus, hoping it would give him an edge in the coming campaigns. He also worked as a campus tour guide and diligently honed his patter. When he found that he was stumbling through the list of languages Bowdoin offered, he practiced reciting them. When he saw that prospective students weren't reacting to his presentation as enthusiastically as he hoped, he tweaked his delivery until he got it right. There is a touching earnestness to Mckesson that makes you want to believe everything he says.

Credit Christaan Felber for The New York Times

"There was a whole generation of Bowdoin students who came to the college because of the campus tours DeRay would do," said Barry Mills, the president of Bowdoin, who considers Mckesson a close friend. "He's always known how to inspire a group of people, so it doesn't surprise me that he's become a thought leader for what's going on out in Ferguson."

After graduating in 2007, Mckesson joined Teach for America and taught middle school for two years in East New York, Brooklyn, before moving back home to Baltimore to work in H.R. for the city's schools. He developed a reputation as a ruthless administrator - every hiring and firing was justified, in his own mind, by what was best for the kids in the district.

His career, both academic and professional, was built on an unusual faith in effecting change from within a bureaucratic organization, whether a student government or the city public-school system. But when he saw Michael Brown lying dead in the street, he felt as if he had come up against the edge of that belief. "I kept thinking, Kids can't learn if they're dead," he told me.

There is an indelible picture of Mckesson taken on his first full day in Ferguson. He is standing by the side of the road, right fist raised defiantly in the air; in his left hand, he holds a cardboard sign that reads: "My Blackness Is Not a Weapon. #handsup #dontshoot." Behind him are the dull greenery of St. Louis in August and hints of the one-story, uniform brick houses off West Florissant. After a night of photographing and documenting everyone else at the protest, Mckesson, the education executive with a six-figure salary, finally turned the camera around on himself, revealing the awkward resolve of a student-body president who had lost confidence in all those systems and was trying something new.

In March, Mckesson and Elzie traveled to Selma, Ala., for the 50th-anniversary commemoration of Bloody Sunday, the pivotal moment in the civil rights era when protesters marching on the Edmund Pettus Bridge were brutally attacked on national television by Alabama state troopers. I stood with Mckesson on the bridge. "We're really up high," he said, staring down at the brown waters of the Alabama River. "Can you imagine having all those troopers on horseback riding toward you, trying to beat you down? Where do you run? You definitely can't jump over the side here." All day, hundreds of tourists had been walking over the bridge, solemnly touching its supports and snapping selfies in front of its historical markers. If Mckesson was feeling the sway of the 50th anniversary, he betrayed no emotion. Instead, he asked me how far I thought the drop was down to the river, and started searching Google for answers.

Mckesson and Elzie have each expressed ambivalence over whether the youth movement should try to draw from the popular image of the civil rights movement. They worry that the constant comparisons with something that happened 50 years ago will dilute the immediacy of today's protests. Much as they admire the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. - each is well versed in his writings - they feel his legacy has been distorted. He is held up as an avatar of genteel protest, invoked by conservative politicians and leaders in the black community as a way to discredit their movement. Mckesson and Elzie frequently point out that King was in fact a revolutionary who believed in the power of confrontation, and that it's a crime against American history to confuse the real King with an appealingly passive one. To make their point, they participated in an action called #ReclaimMLK, which sought to counter "efforts to reduce a long history marred with the blood of countless women and men into iconic images of men in suits behind pulpits."

"Also," Elzie often says whenever someone brings up King as a way of questioning their work, "they killed him too."

If you ask Mckesson and Elzie why there is no central figure in today's movement, they will again insist on the advantages of leaderlessness. If you bring up legislative reform, they will point out that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 has been all but rolled back and that their aims go well beyond small changes to the criminal-justice system. If you bring up nonviolence as the only civilized way to effect change, they will recite King's words: "A riot is the language of the unheard," or they will say they don't condone rioting, but they understand it. Their resistance to confining the civil rights movement to a museum made Mckesson and Elzie an awkward fit for Selma, which was filled with people doing just that.

At dinner that night in Montgomery, Mckesson and Elzie received the news that a 19-year-old unarmed black man, Tony Robinson, had been shot and killed in Madison, Wis. They spent the meal with their heads bent over their phones, compiling and tweeting out all the information they could confirm through their sources in the Madison protest community. Piece by piece, a digital portrait of Robinson emerged: a photo of him in a graduation gown, his arm around a female friend; a few tweets he sent out in the days before his death. Then, around midnight, dinner long gone by, Mckesson sighed and held up his phone to show Elzie a photo of the front steps of Robinson's home, which were streaked with blood. "That's where they dragged him out of his house," Mckesson said.

The next morning, in the lobby of the education center at Selma's George C. Wallace State Community College, Mckesson and Elzie took selfies with Diane Nash and her son Douglass Bevel. In the early '60s, Nash, along with Bernard Lafayette Jr., John Lewis and others, founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (S.N.C.C.). She also helped organize the Freedom Riders, helped lead the march from Selma to Montgomery and played a key role in the push to integrate lunch counters throughout the South. Between photos, Nash talked to another admirer about a call she had received from one of Bobby Kennedy's aides, who pleaded with her to cancel an action because Kennedy thought there was a good chance people would be killed.

Mckesson and Elzie seemed almost star-struck, peppering Nash with questions about the civil rights movement and then posting her answers on Twitter. Mckesson told Nash she needed to get on Twitter to share her wisdom.

"Twitter?" Nash asked. "I just figured out how to have a Facebook."

"Twitter is the revolution, Ms. Nash," Mckesson said.

For him, the social network seemed to have become not just the site of revolution but the conduit for his ideas. Two days later, on the anniversary of Bloody Sunday, Mckesson was scheduled to speak at a rally before a ceremonial crossing of the bridge. As we drove from Montgomery to Selma, Mckesson wrote drafts of tweets on his phone.

"I do this to make sure what I say can be tweetable," he explained. "And it helps me be precise in what I say."

He muttered lines to himself. "We must always confront," he said, but something about the phrase displeased him. He deleted the words and started from the top.

Mckesson and Elzie arrived in Selma and walked to the Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church, the starting point for the original march across the bridge. Inside, Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. was addressing the congregation. The crowd outside was made up largely of union members carrying placards for their local chapters. Mckesson, Elzie and Packnett, who arrived the night before, tried to find a contact who would take them to the foot of the bridge, where Mckesson would speak. After 20 minutes of confusion, they walked back through the crowd to a small auditorium off Broad Street, where Bernard Lafayette Jr. was holding a book signing. When they walked in, an elderly woman said, loudly enough for all to hear, "Social media just showed up."

In the end, Mckesson did not get to deliver his speech. The Rev. Al Sharpton, who followed Holder, went long, and there was no time left.

In an interview with People magazine to promote the release of the film "Selma," Oprah Winfrey voiced some of the questions skeptics have had about the modern protest movement. "I think it's wonderful to march and to protest, and it's wonderful to see, all across the country, people doing it," she said. "But what I'm looking for is some kind of leadership to come out of this to say: 'This is what we want. This is what has to change, and these are the steps that we need to take to make these changes, and this is what we're willing to do to get it.' "

Certain factions of the movement have made explicit demands. During the Eric Garner protests in New York, a group called the Justice League NYC, which is affiliated with Harry Belafonte, came out with a list that included the immediate firing of Officer Pantaleo and the appointment of a special prosecutor. In the wake of the Department of Justice's report on Ferguson, some people within the St. Louis protest community demanded the recall of Mayor James Knowles III. But on the whole, the movement does shy away from specific policy prescriptions. Instead, the work seems to be aimed at an abrupt, wide-scale change in consciousness, channeling the grief and anger that these police killings engender around the country. The pipelines for that energy are still under construction, but asking the leaders of the youth movement what they plan on doing with it is akin to barging into a funeral and asking the mourners why they haven't donated their inheritance to charity yet.

Soon after I met them, Mckesson and Elzie took me on a tour of some of the sites around St. Louis where black men have been killed by the police. Many of the buildings that burned during the protests were standing in ruin. "They want to leave them all up," Elzie said, referring to the St. Louis city government. "They want this to be a museum of black rage." As we drove from the Six Stars Market, where Kajieme Powell, 25, was shot in August, to the gas station where Antonio Martin, 18, was killed in December, Elzie talked about the emotion behind the movement and how, for many people in St. Louis, the Ferguson protests represented the first time they were able to collectively voice their frustrations with the police. "Our demand is simple," Elzie said. "Stop killing us."

The starkness of that demand has been enough to create some measure of change, purely by creating an atmosphere of awareness and constant urgency around an issue that was previously ignored. Although Ferguson's mayor was not recalled, the Department of Justice report did lead to the resignation of the police chief, the city manager and a handful of city employees who sent racist emails. The swiftness with which the movement now acts, and the volume of people it can bring out to every protest, have turned every police killing into a national referendum on the value of black lives in America.

In April, after cellphone video footage showed a North Charleston police officer firing eight times at the back of a 50-year-old black man named Walter Scott as he was running away, the officer was arrested and booked on murder charges the same day, and nearly every prospective candidate in the coming presidential election subsequently released a statement, expressing horror at Scott's death and promising to address criminal-justice-system reform. Later that month, after riots broke out in Baltimore, Hillary Clinton gave a speech at Columbia University in which she explicitly allied herself with the goals of the Black Lives Matter movement, and implicitly rejected some policies that her husband put in place during his presidency. Her proposals were hardly specific or new: widespread adoption of body cameras by police officers, "a renewed focus on working with communities to prevent crime" and a call for a "true national debate" on how to end the "era of mass incarceration," but the fact that Clinton chose to address these issues at such length suggests that police reform will be an unavoidable subject during the campaign season. "What we've seen in Baltimore should, indeed does, tear at our soul," Clinton said. "And from Ferguson to Staten Island to Baltimore, the patterns have become unmistakable and undeniable." She listed the names of Walter Scott, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner and Freddie Gray, and called for "real reforms that can be felt on our streets, in our courthouses and our jails and prisons, in communities too long neglected."

Perhaps the most telling evidence of change was the charges filed on May 1 against six Baltimore police officers related to the death of Freddie Gray, which ranged from misconduct in office to second-degree depraved heart murder. While making the announcement, Marilyn Mosby, the Baltimore state's attorney, said: "To the people of Baltimore and the demonstrators across America, I heard your call for 'no justice, no peace.' Your peace is sincerely needed as I work to deliver justice on behalf of this young man."

The attention that political figures are paying to the movement points to real anxiety that African-American voters who supported President Obama won't turn out again. "This issue is at the forefront of people in the black community," Quentin James, co-founder of the public-affairs firm Vestige Strategies, which specializes in engaging communities of color, told me. "Not voting is a choice, and many may choose to stay home. If you look at a pivotal state like Ohio, African-Americans ended up overvoting in 2012. If they undervote in 2016, the election becomes a little bit shakier."

In talking about the problem of police violence at all, these national political figures are reversing a three-decade presumption within the Democratic Party, one established by Bill Clinton himself in 1994, that there is zero incentive to advocate for the rights of criminal suspects. "The narrative used to be: 'We support the police and whatever police unions say,' " James said. "That has changed. Technology, having a video camera anywhere, has changed the game."

Most of the activists are deeply skeptical that the candidates will follow through on their promises. Rachel Gilmer, the associate director for the African American Policy Forum, pointed to the long history of Democratic candidates who have "embraced rhetoric that implies their willingness and readiness to produce systemic change. However, once they've solidified our support and are elected into office, we've seen that they aren't willing to confront or align themselves with the powers, systems and interests that continue to exploit black lives." Gilmer went on to say that, absent a candidate who would be willing to address white supremacy directly, many within the movement would be content to opt out of voting for "the lesser of two evils."

But perhaps the question of political follow-through is misplaced. "Black lives matter" is a vital statement, especially when people are confronted with all the footage that shows police officers who may not agree. But it is more a provocation than a platform, a phrase that might be more appropriate for a rally than a sustained political movement. Jim Crow was an evil that could be addressed by Congress and argued against before the Supreme Court. But how do you legislate the worth of black lives? Could a law force a police officer to cut out the possible prejudice and fear he feels when he sees a young black man, however seemingly unarmed, reach for his waistband?

For now, the victories of the movement are difficult to quantify - the paradox, perhaps, of a movement that exists to raise awareness of death. Shortly after Tony Robinson was shot and killed in Madison, Mike Koval, the city's police chief, released the name of the officer involved and visited Robinson's mother. In an interview with CNN, Koval said: "We have a person of color cut down in his prime - he was unarmed - by a police officer. So whether I like it or not, I am inextricably tied to the Ferguson phenomenon."

"Do I think that was influenced by the protests in Ferguson?" Mckesson said. "Yes. But Tony's still dead, so how do you call that a win?"

On April 26, a bright, warm Sunday in Baltimore, Mckesson attended Freddie Gray's wake. Across the street from the funeral home, a group of demonstrators held up signs that read: "We are ONE Baltimore," "Our hearts are with you" and "We grieve with you." Television crews had set up nearby. A cable-news anchor grabbed Mckesson and said, "It's the esteemed DeRay." The two had met back in St. Louis. Mckesson agreed to come back later that afternoon to record a short interview.

Inside, Gray's body was laid out behind a gauzy shroud. His head, swollen and shiny, was covered by a white baseball cap. A pair of spotless white sneakers had been placed on his feet.

Looking at the body, I couldn't help thinking that in the coming months, more incidents would arise in more American cities. Nobody can predict where and when these killings may happen, only that they will happen, and that the movement will continue to draw attention to them, and that the sense of grief within black America and of constant siege at the hands of the police will not abate.

"They never look like they do in life," Mckesson said. "Being back here, it reminds me of how many funerals we attend."

We walked back to Mckesson's rental car. A big man in a tank top stood in the center of the road, holding up a sign that asked passing drivers to honk for Freddie Gray. "We come in peace!" he screamed. "We come in peace!"

I asked Mckesson what his thoughts were after seeing Gray's body.

"I just tweeted my thoughts," Mckesson said. Over the five months I had been following him and Elzie around, from Ferguson to New York to Selma and now to Baltimore, I found that Mckesson often tweeted the answers to my questions before I could think to ask them. I took out my phone to check Twitter, but this time Mckesson saved me the effort.

"I'm not desensitized to death," he said. "I just expect trauma now and am trying to steel myself for what's coming next." For the first time since I met him, Mckesson seemed overcome by emotion. He turned his head away and covered the bridge of his nose with his hand.

"It's going to be a long summer," he said.

Jay Caspian Kang is a contributing writer for the magazine and the author of the novel "The Dead Do Not Improve."

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How a group of black social media activists built the nation's first 21st-century civil rights movement. Johnetta Elzie (left) and DeRay Mckesson at MoKaBe's Coffeehouse in St. Louis. Credit Credit Christaan Felber for The New York Times On the evening of April 25 at the corner of Pratt and Light Streets, in Baltimore's revitalized downtown district, more than 100 police officers in riot gear stood shoulder to shoulder, shields up.

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Larry Wilmore Sits Down With Baltimore Gang Members To Discuss Truce And Ongoing Unrest

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Larry Wilmore Sits Down With Baltimore Gang Members To Discuss Truce And Ongoing Unrest

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Larry Wilmore continued his coverage of ongoing protests in Baltimore on Thursday night's episode of "The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore." After lambasting the media's approach to the unrest earlier this week, the comedian took coverage into his own hands. His angle? Discussing the issue with local rival gangs at a diner over a slice of pie.

Wilmore sat down with members from the Bloods, Crips, and Black Guerilla families for a roundtable discussion on a number of topics, namely their recent truce in an effort to bring peace and justice to Baltimore.

"We didn't have a truce or a treaty; we just had men respecting men as men. And we carried it just like that," one member said before later explaining why he feels many Americans can't relate to the oppression that takes place in impoverished inner city neighborhoods.

"If you're living in a million dollar house how could you relate to living in the hood getting pushed? You good," he added. "So you can't understand what we're going through. Same as when you're like, 'Hey man, I gotta pay my property taxes.' I can't relate to that. I never paid property taxes before. So I understand that. We just need them to understand that."

Another man went on to recall a personal encounter with authorities that took place during Monday night's violence, describing what happened when he and other gang members attempted to stop middle school and high school students from throwing objects at police and looting local businesses.

"The police pull up in their tank... they jumped out with their assault rifles. And I'm like, Damn, this is 'Call of Duty.' What the f*ck is going on here," he explained. "So we ran through the alley to the projects, made sure everyone else was O.K., and went right back to our post and linked arms to make sure nobody got into that store. They set one police car on fire and we stopped them from setting the other one on fire."

Check out more of Larry Wilmore's segment with local Baltimore gang members in the clip above.

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Baltimore Gang Members Open Up To Larry Wilmore Over A Slice Of Pie

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Larry Wilmore continued his coverage of ongoing protests in Baltimore on Thursday night's episode of "The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore." After lambasting the media's approach to the unrest earlier this week, the comedian took coverage into his own hands. His angle? Discussing the issue with local rival gangs at a diner over a slice of pie.

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Prison Culture » Some Thoughts On the Run…

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Prison Culture » Some Thoughts On the Run…

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I've already received emails from people asking for my thoughts on the decision to criminally charge the 6 cops who killed Freddie Gray. I am getting ready to head to the airport and don't have time for any in depth responses. I shared these very quick thoughts on Facebook and re-post them here for those who want to know what I think in this moment.

I'll admit to being alarmed that people who call themselves having a structural analysis are rejoicing over cops being charged for Freddie Gray's death. I am even more alarmed that smart people who know that the current system is unable to offer any actual 'justice' are all over my timeline canonizing a state's attorney whose actual JOB it is in a system that would be 'functioning' to prosecute killer cops. The expectations are so low as to be self-defeating. I understand. But I am supremely dismayed.

I want to also add that those of us who have studied, researched, experienced and lived the criminal punishment system cannot suffer from the collective amnesia that pervades at times like these. If your concept of 'justice' means convictions for cops, then you should be very concerned because this current system as designed is unlikely to deliver. If your concept of 'justice' means prison time for cops, then you should be despondent because this system as currently constituted almost NEVER delivers that either. If your concept of 'justice' means Black people being able to live our lives free from state violence, then today is not a day of celebration. Sorry but I have to say it since others are selling something else.

I know for sure that there would not even have been charges against these cops without the uprising of young Black people and others in Baltimore and across the country. And activism, organizing matter tremendously. They do. But to transform a death-making system, our expectations have to be much higher. Celebrating charges is like celebrating crumbs. It really, really is. I understand why people do it but I think according great significance to charges misses the point and it also freezes people in place. It has the effect of demobilizing collective action. Just watch what happens over the next couple of days. The "wait and see" chorus, the "let the system work" chorus will be out in full force. Organizers have our work cut out for us in that climate.

Finally, it feels terrible to have to depend on a system that you know is illegitimate to adjudicate your "worth." It really does. The criminal punishment system has ALWAYS been a tool in this country for enforcing and maintaining white supremacy. Yet that 'analysis' goes out the window as we are compelled by some to 'celebrate' charges and to 'canonize' public officials who under the rules of said system are SUPPOSED to prosecute killer cops.

P.S. That same State's Attorney is also likely to be prosecuting protesters and so called 'looters.' She's the STATE's attorney. Not the "people's attorney." Please stay awake. Challenge the conventional narratives that you will be fed. Always be critical. (thanks to Tamara Nopper for always being on the ball).

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Prison Culture " Some Thoughts On the Run...

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I've already received emails from people asking for my thoughts on the decision to criminally charge the 6 cops who killed Freddie Gray. I am getting ready to head to the airport and don't have time for any in depth responses.

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Fmr. CNN Anchor Soledad O’Brien to Journalists: Stop Saying ‘Thug’ | Mediaite

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Fmr. CNN Anchor Soledad O’Brien to Journalists: Stop Saying ‘Thug’ | Mediaite

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Former CNN host Soledad O'Brien told her old network's Reliable Sources Sunday morning that journalists had an obligation to choose their words more carefully than simply calling protesters, however violent, "thugs," arguing the word lacked descriptive properties and functioned solely as racial code.

"For journalists to have a debate back and forth about thugs or thuggery is naive and misplaced," O'Brien said. "Journalists should strive to use words to describe accurately what's happening."

A semantic debate erupted on CNN earlier this week when Baltimore City Council Member Carl Stokes objected to host Erin Burnett's use of the word, telling her to drop the charade and just say "nigger." Stokes continued to draw out the racial implications of the word with numerous CNN hosts.
RELATED: Larry Wilmore Calls Out Cable News for Turning 'Thug' into New N-Word
Guest-host Frank Sesno asked O'Brien if the peaceful protesters would object to the word being used to describe those who just showed up to throw rocks and loot CVSs.

"I think there's violent protesters, there's drunk protesters, angry protesters," she said. "When you look specifically about how the word riot is used, how the word thug is used, it's always used around people of color, specifically in an inner city context...Journalists should think about a word that actually doesn't have a lot of nuance and isn't specific, but somehow seems to be used a lot when talking about African-Americans."

Watch below, via CNN:

[ Image via screengrab]

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>> Follow Evan McMurry (@evanmcmurry) on Twitter
Have a tip we should know? tips@mediaite.com

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Fmr. CNN Anchor Soledad O'Brien to Journalists: Stop Saying 'Thug'

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Former cable news host Soledad O'Brien told CNN's Reliable Sources Sunday morning that journalists had an obligation to choose their words more carefully than simply calling protesters, however violent, "thugs," arguing the word lacked descriptive properties and functioned solely as racial code.

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White protestors politely asked to leave, black protestor pepper sprayed and dragged away - Boing Boing

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White protestors politely asked to leave, black protestor pepper sprayed and dragged away - Boing Boing

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Until recently, Baltimore has been under a curfew as activists protest the death of Freddie Gray

. Some have decided not to follow that curfew as a means of peaceful civil disobedience, but not all protestors are getting the same treatment.

In this first video, a black protestor in a mostly black neighborhood is pepper sprayed directly in the face, pushed to the ground, and dragged away for remaining on the street reportedly 10 minutes after the 10 p.m. curfew began.

(There's another angle that captures the relatively calm moment before the man was sprayed as well as a few frustrated protestors who threw bottles near police after the man was forced to the ground.)

Meanwhile, in this second video an officer gives a group of white protestors in a predominately white neighborhood a kindly worded request to leave the area. "The last thing I want to do is put people in handcuffs," he explains. The white protestors were reportedly given their first warning before the curfew began, their second at 10:05 p.m., and their final warning at 10:10 p.m. No one was arrested or detained.

The videos were part of a larger movement that looked to prove Baltimore's curfew was not being enforced equally and was specifically targeting black communities. Activists and allies used the #TwoBaltimores and #BreakTheCurfew hashtags to document the discrepancy. This is yet another stark reminder that white people and people of color often have very different experiences with law enforcement.

Activist Brittany Packnett (@MsPackyetti) shared these thoughts:

That this curfew is being enforced selectively according to race and neighborhood is the very reason why people are breaking it. #Baltimore

- Brittany Packnett (@MsPackyetti) May 3, 2015

This curfew looks to be about controlling black pain, black struggle, black voice, black bodies. The white ones got 15 minutes to walk home.

- Brittany Packnett (@MsPackyetti) May 3, 2015

I'm tired, frustrated, confused and sad tonight. The inequality is so obvious. And yet some just refuse to see it.

- Brittany Packnett (@MsPackyetti) May 3, 2015

The comfort of privilege is like a soft blanket in a warm bed. Some keep hitting the snooze button. And some sleep on a bed of nails.

- Brittany Packnett (@MsPackyetti) May 3, 2015

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White protestors politely asked to leave, black protestor pepper sprayed and dragged away

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Until recently, Baltimore has been under a curfew as activists protest the death of Freddie Gray. Some have decided not to follow that curfew as a means of peaceful civil disobedience, but not all protestors are getting the same treatment. In this first video, a black protestor in a mostly black neighborhood is pepper sprayed...

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Paul Ryan: Baltimore is stuck in ‘poverty trap’ because welfare benefits are too lucrative

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Paul Ryan: Baltimore is stuck in ‘poverty trap’ because welfare benefits are too lucrative

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When it became clear that President Donald Trump was seriously considering nominating Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court, the conservative judge's former law clerks swung into action as among his most energetic public cheerleaders.

But in making the case for him in the media on issues including his stance toward abortion, healthcare and an expansive view of religious liberty, they may have opened up lines of attack on Kavanaugh by Democrats and liberal advocacy groups seeking to derail his nomination in the U.S. Senate.

Trump named Kavanaugh, 53, on July 9 to replace retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy. Before he can assume the lifetime job on the nine-member court, the Senate must vote to confirm him. No date has yet been set for the customary Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings.

Kavanaugh has served for 12 years on an influential federal appeals court in Washington. Several of the 48 lawyers who served as his clerks - a year-long job working for a judge, usually straight out of law school - appeared on cable TV shows, wrote opinion articles and spoke to reporters, often trying to shore up support among conservatives.

Their comments may have helped Kavanaugh's cause before Trump nominated him by pushing back on complaints by some conservatives that the judge would not lean far enough to the right on social issues like abortion as well as on a conservative legal challenge to the Obamacare healthcare law.

But the chief threat to Trump's nominee now is the Democratic campaign to block Kavanaugh's confirmation in a Senate in which the president's fellow Republicans hold a slim 51-49 majority.

Of the 48 clerks, 34 signed a letter calling for the Senate to confirm his appointment. Many secured prestigious Supreme Court clerkships after working for Kavanaugh and subsequently landed jobs at law firms, law schools and in government.

'ROCK SOLID RECORD'
One clerk, Sarah Pitlyk, wrote a piece for the conservative National Review a week before the nomination was announced in which she touted Kavanaugh's "clear, consistent and rock solid record on the issues that matter most to social conservatives."

Pitlyk, who could not be reached for comment, said that "no court of appeals judge in the nation has a stronger more consistent record" than Kavanaugh on "protecting religious liberty and enforcing restrictions on abortion."

Democrats have raised the possibility that the Supreme Court, with Trump's appointment of a second justice in Kavanaugh, could overturn the landmark 1973 ruling legalizing abortion nationwide. Conservatives had advocated a broad view of religious liberty and free speech, arguing for example that certain types of businesses can refuse to serve gay couples if they have a religious objection to same-sex marriage.

Another clerk, Justin Walker, wrote an article in another conservative publication, The Federalist, defending Kavanaugh against criticism from the right about a 2011 opinion he wrote concerning Democratic former President Barack Obama's 2010 healthcare law.

Walker talked up Kavanaugh's conservative credentials on Fox News ahead of the nomination. "He is a warrior with a backbone of iron," Walker told Fox, also calling Kavanaugh "a fighter for conservative legal principles" who would not "go wobbly" if appointed to the Supreme Court.

"I felt like his record was being misrepresented," Walker said in an interview, adding that he was speaking only about Kavanaugh's approach to the law, not his politics.

Christopher Kang, who worked in the Obama White House and helped with the nominations of liberal Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, said he was surprised by some of the comments by Kavanaugh's clerks.

"I think that is really striking. We would not have used clerks to talk about a judge's political philosophy," said Kang, who now works for Demand Justice, a liberal group that opposes Kavanaugh's nomination.

Supreme Court nominees routinely try to avoid being pinned down during confirmation hearings on how they would rule on given issues, especially controversial ones like abortion. But some of the comments made by clerks, Kang said, will "make it harder" for Kavanaugh to fend off questions about whether he will rule conservatively on social issues.

Reporting by Lawrence Hurley; Additional reporting by Richard Cowan; Editing by Will Dunham

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Comments by former clerks may backfire on Trump's high court pick Brett Kavanaugh

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When it became clear that President Donald Trump was seriously considering nominating Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court, the conservative judge's former law clerks swung into action as among his most energetic public cheerleaders.

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How Baltimore's Top Prosecutor Is Defying The Status Quo | ThinkProgress

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How Baltimore's Top Prosecutor Is Defying The Status Quo | ThinkProgress

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Baltimore State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby surprised many observers by announcing severe criminal charges against all six officers involved in the death of 25-year-old Gray of a spinal cord injury, including depraved heart second-degree murder, a crime that suggests "callous disregard" on the part of the officers.

During her live press conference Friday morning, Mosby immediately set herself apart from the other prosecutors in prominent police death cases in the past few months, both by announcing that her office would file charges against her own police officers, without even the cover of a grand jury, but also with the rhetoric that she chose.

"I will seek justice on your behalf," she said in closing her remarks. "This is a moment. This is your moment. Let's ensure that we have peaceful and productive rallies that will develop structural and systemic changes for generations to come. You're at the forefront of this cause. As young people, our time is now."

Mosby, who noted with pride that she comes from five generations of police officers, also denounced those who led a skewed media narrative suggesting Gray was responsible for his own death with harsh words, saying, "I strongly condemn anyone in law enforcement with access to trial evidence who has leaked information prior to the resolution of this case." And she balanced that with a message to rank-and-file officers: "please know that these accusations of these six officers are not an indictment on the entire force."

Mosby's comments stand in remarkable contrast to those of other prosecutors in recent prominent cases. St. Louis County prosecutor Robert McCulloch, for example, gave a winding late-night press conference this summer that lambasted the media, Michael Brown, and a host of other parties that were not the police.

"The most significant challenge encountered in this investigation has been the 24-hour news cycle and its insatiable appetite for something, for anything to talk about, following closely behind with the non-stop rumors on social media," McCulloch said, as he made the case for exonerating Darren Wilson on behalf of the grand jury who had been tasked with assessing the case.

Mosby, 35, is "the youngest top prosecutor of any major city in America," according to a recent NBC News profile, and was elected to office just four months ago on a campaign in which she pledged to tackle police brutality. She has received the highest of praise even from defense attorneys and community activists. She also has the credibility of coming from a family of police officers.

With Friday's announcement, Mosby had an early opportunity to make the most forceful demonstration of her commitment on police brutality.

"She gave us her word," activist Tawanda Jones told the New York Times. Jones' brother was killed by police after a violent altercation. "I said, 'How will you handle police brutality?' She said, 'If you put me in this chair, I don't care if they are in uniform or not. I come from a family of officers. Some are good, some are bad, I will hold everybody accountable to the law.' And thank you, Jesus, she lived it out."

In addition to her supportive tone, Mosby is also extraordinary for having filed charges at all. Over the seven-year period ending in 2011, for example, a recent Bowling Green State University study found that only 41 officers had been charged with murder or manslaughter for on-duty shootings. During that period, there were, at the very least 2,718, shooting deaths - a federal figure that is known to vastly underestimate the true count. Freddie Gray's case did not even involve a gun.

Part of the reason for this figure is that prosecutors are usually not well suited to file criminal charges against their own police. Prosecutors are law enforcers, like police. In most every case they take, they rely on police to provide them with cases, make arrests, present evidence, and even testify at trial. If prosecutors can't work with cops, they can't convict anybody. And they don't want to alienate those very same people, particularly because they often maintain personal relationships. As a result, when faced with a case charging the police, "prosecutors face enormous pressure from both police and fellow prosecutors not to go forward with such cases," explains law professor David A. Harris in a law review article on police accountability.

Because of this, it is the community that frequently calls for the appointment of a special prosecutor who is independent of this bias. But in the case of Baltimore, it was actually the police union that was calling for a special prosecutor, likely because they had heard about Mosby's reputation.

If history is any indication, Mosby may face an extraordinary uphill battle going forward. When Bernalillo County District Attorney Kari Brandenburg recently filed charges against two police officers for the first time in recent memory over the shooting of an unarmed homeless man, police responded by excluding her from future investigations of police shootings. After Chicago prosecutors filed charges for the first time in 15 years against a cop for an on-duty shooting, a judge acquitted the officer in a bizarre ruling that reasoned the charges filed against the officer actually weren't severe enough. If Mosby's prosecution reaches a jury, she could face an audience with its own set of biases, as juries also tend to favor the police.

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Marilyn Mosby Went Into Today's Press Conference Unknown, Emerged A Champion Of Reform

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Baltimore State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby surprised many observers by announcing severe criminal charges against all six officers involved in the death of 25-year-old Gray of a spinal cord injury, including depraved heart second-degree murder, a crime that suggests "callous disregard" on the part of the officers.

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Shakesville: Six Officers Charged in Freddie Gray's Death

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Shakesville: Six Officers Charged in Freddie Gray's Death

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[Content Note: Police brutality; racism.]

State's Attorney Marilyn J. Mosby, pictured above, has announced that Freddie Gray's cause of death has been ruled a homicide by the medical examiner, and has brought criminal charges against all six officers involved.
Via Alan Blinder, the documents detailing the charges:

* Officer Caesar R. Goodson, Jr. is being charged with second-degree depraved heart murder (with a maximum sentence of 30 years), involuntary manslaughter (10 years), second-degree assault (10 years), manslaughter by vehicle-gross negligence (10 years), manslaughter by vehicle-criminal negligence (3 years), misconduct in office for failure to secure a prisoner and failure to render aid (per the 8th amendment; no sentence indicated).
* Officer William G. Porter is being charged with involuntary manslaughter (10 years), second-degree assault (10 years), misconduct in office.

* Lieutenant Brian W. Rice is being charged with involuntary manslaughter (10 years), two counts of second-degree assault (intentional and negligent; 10 years each), two charges of misconduct in office, and false imprisonment.

* Officer Edward M. Nero is being charged with two counts of second-degree assault (intentional and negligent; 10 years each), two charges of misconduct in office, and false imprisonment.

* Officer Garrett E. Miller is being charged with two counts of second-degree assault (intentional and negligent; 10 years each), two charges of misconduct in office, and false imprisonment.

* Sergeant Alicia D. White is being charged with involuntary manslaughter (10 years), second-degree assault (10 years), and misconduct in office.

Said SA Marilyn Mosby: "To the youth of this city: I will seek justice on your behalf."

The announcement of these charges is not the end of a journey; they are only the beginning. Let us fervently hope there will be meaningful accountability in this case, unlike so many others.

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Six Officers Charged in Freddie Gray's Death

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Content Note: Police brutality; racism.] State's Attorney Marilyn J. Mosby, pictured above, has announced that Freddie Gray's cause of death has been ruled a homicide by the medical examiner, and has brought criminal charges against all six officers involved. Via Alan Blinder, the documents detailing the charges: * Officer Caesar R.

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Police van carrying Freddie Gray made previously undisclosed stop after his arrest | US news | The Guardian

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Police van carrying Freddie Gray made previously undisclosed stop after his arrest | US news | The Guardian

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Freddie Gray died after head 'slammed into bolt in police van', reports say

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Injury on head of man whose death sparked Baltimore riots matched a bolt in the back of police van, according to local ABC news station

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Political cartoon skewers biased media coverage - Boing Boing

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Political cartoon skewers biased media coverage - Boing Boing

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This simple cartoon speaks volumes about the media's tendency to demonize black people and sympathize with white people.

Illustrator and graphic novelist Vincent Kao created the image for a political cartoon contest. And while Kao's work is examining individuals, it also speaks to the contrast between how the media reports on riots over racial tension with mostly black participants vs. riots over sporting events with mostly white participants.

Find more of Kao's work on his website and Tumblr.

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Political cartoon skewers biased media coverage

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This simple cartoon speaks volumes about the media's tendency to demonize black people and sympathize with white people. Illustrator and graphic novelist Vincent Kao created the image for a political cartoon contest. And while Kao's work is examining individuals, it also speaks to the contrast between how the media reports on riots over racial tension...

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Its interesting listening to all the news pundits and government officials condemn the so-called riots in Baltimore. The mayor referred to citizens upset with police killing and brutalizing them as...

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Jon Stewart on CNN Coverage oF WHD /Baltimore Uprising

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Jon Stewart on CNN Coverage oF WHD /Baltimore Uprising

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Trevor Noah and The World's Fakest News Team tackle the biggest stories in news, politics and pop culture.

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Suspect Laid to Rest As Cops Face Threat

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Suspect Laid to Rest As Cops Face Threat

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Dear @CNN: #FreddieGray was a "victim" w/ a severed spine & crushed voice box. Not a "suspect." http://t.co/5RTSRDXsNP

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Dear @CNN: #FreddieGray was a "victim" w/ a severed spine & crushed voice box. Not a "suspect." http://t.co/5RTSRDXsNP

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Dear @CNN: #FreddieGray was a "victim" w/ a severed spine & crushed voice box. Not a "suspect." pic.twitter.com/5RTSRDXsNP
— Lamont Lilly (@LamontLilly) April 27, 2015

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Dear @CNN: #FreddieGray was a "victim" w/ a severed spine & crushed voice box. Not a "suspect." http://t.co/5RTSRDXsNP

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Dear @CNN: #FreddieGray was a "victim" w/ a severed spine & crushed voice box. Not a "suspect." http://t.co/5RTSRDXsNP

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Dear @CNN: #FreddieGray was a "victim" w/ a severed spine & crushed voice box. Not a "suspect." http://t.co/5RTSRDXsNP

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As someone who has not closely followed Maryland politics, I will admit to being guilty of seeing photos of Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake come across my news feed and quietly smiling. I hadn't spent much time considering who she is or what she actually means to the historic city. I say this not to suggest that the explosive events of the past week prove that the mayor is of no service to her constituents, but instead to acknowledge how easy it is for us to get caught up in the idea of Black faces in political spaces as The Solution-even for those of us who've long since known it's not that simple. As someone who has been both an ardent supporter and fierce critic of our Black president (who will eventually go down in the history books as our "president, Black"), I should know better than to be caught up in the glow.

Alas, as the two-term presidency of President Obama did nothing to save the lives (nor punish the killers) of Michael Brown, Rekia Boyd and Eric Garner, the presence of Mayor Rawlings-Blake did nothing to prevent the violent, prolonged death of Freddie Gray in the custody of the Baltimore police. It did nothing to assure the city's residents on April 12, when they became aware that the young man's arrest left him in grave condition, or on April 19, when his broken body was finally granted the rest of death, that there would be #JusticeforFreddieGray outside of Instagram memes and poignant Twitter quotes.

This was made painfully clear when police union president Gene Ryan referred to early peaceful protestors as "a lynch mob. " A lynch mob! The irony, stupidity and lack of self-awareness is at Jeff Roorda/Ferguson PD levels! When we needed to see this woman in the streets letting her people know that she was them, and that she cared, and that she, too, wanted answers, we instead saw the standard issue calls for calm that put the onus of responsibility on the rightfully outraged.

And just a few short days later, Baltimore is on fire. Hashtag Baltimore uprising. It's here.

This fire was a long time coming and is bigger than Mayor Rawlings-Blake. She's low hanging fruit here, and the same Black womanhood that makes some of us want more (compassion, understanding, outrage) from her in these bleak moments will allow folks on both sides of the conflict to present her as the scapegoat for Gray's death and for the ensuing police violence and citizen uprising. I don't want to add to that chorus, but to instead acknowledge the flaws in how she has responded her city in its most vulnerable moment. Referring to protestors as "thugs" who are "destroying the city in a senseless way" speaks to the inability of so many of us to really do the emotional and intellectual labor of getting past the good/bad binary, and recognizing how hurt and righteously indignant our people really are.

If the sight of a burning drugstore can do so much to change the perception of people who claimed to be "down for the cause" beforehand, then one can be pretty sure you haven't done that work. If your assumption is that anyone who riots or destroys property is a "thug" and on the same plane as a violent police officer who'd beat someone ultimately to death for no other reason but "he ran from me," then you're still missing a few things here.

"But what does burning down your own neighborhood prove?" The same refrain our parents and grandparents heard, or perhaps parroted, when Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered is on the tongues of many today. Rioting and looting are not strategic sustained action; they are cries of grief and utter despair. And while I certainly pity any small business owner or retail employee who will suffer as a result, it's hard for me to feel a sense of moral outrage over some stolen sneakers and hair weave bringing a fleeting feeling of power or pleasure to people who have had their humanity assaulted to the point that they thought to grab sneakers and weave at a time like this.

If the sustained psychological terror of being reared in an economically disenfranchised neighborhood, babysat by a failing school, and abused by aggressive police didn't leave you with the tools to effectively organize against state sanctioned terrorism in a way that society finds "respectable"-in other words, voting and being polite enough to say, "Please, suh, don't kill us no mo'!"-then far be it from me to mourn the loss of Nike socks and Remy bundles and exaggerated reports of violence against police that leave out this week's violence at the hands of police, and of White counter-protestors who attacked and berated people for the past three days on the city's streets.

When we see images of revolution and resistance across the world, we salute them. Some of the same Black folk who clutched at pearls at the sight of a burning Baltimore-as if Baltimore hasn't been on fire, as if The Corner and The Wire were simply the product of some White liberal imagination-will gladly cheer the liberators of Egypt and lament the struggle of Palestine with the same breath they use to imply that the Maryland protestors are no better than the police because a few cops got hit with rocks and some police cars got the Jazmine Sullivan treatment.

As my friend dream hampton pointed out the other day, American police have a fantastic PR campaign via decades of Law and Order and Cops, and society has bought into the idea that law enforcement is such a dangerous job that officers have no real choice to be consistently on edge and ready to pull a trigger to protect themselves and their truest interest: property. Laws have been put into place to make it virtually impossible in some states to hold officers accountable for murdering innocent citizens. Note the recent Baltimore Sun report about widespread police violence (and that the paper still led with "the perception that officers are violent" before explaining that, spoiler alert!, officers ARE violent.) Do you still think Malik and Keisha are "just as bad" as the cops for taking to the streets and demanding something-accountability, attention, retribution... something- in such a desperate way?

( Sidenote: Black pain and death was way more entertaining when TV writer David Simon was at the helm, amirite? Can't wait to see how he fictionalizes this and compels the sympathy of the White moderate "stumbling block," as MLK called them, who cried for Stringer Bell and a burned out CVS, but not Freddie Gray.)

This is the formal reminder that your city is the next Baltimore, the next Ferguson. Your son, daughter, mother or partner is one unfortunate encounter away from becoming a hashtag. While there may be "best practices," there is no failsafe method for dealing with a police encounter. You meet a cop at the wrong place at the wrong time and you might die. Period. Doesn't matter if you are moving weight or haven't smoked an L in your life, this is just a Black fact. A cop may kill you, maybe even today. Did we not forget Anthony Hill's heartbreaking tweets that were steeped in respectability politics and the notion that we have to respect ourselves before anyone else does, just days before he was gunned down, unarmed, in the throes of a mental health crisis? Are these not reasons to rise up?

An unarmed man spent a week dying after being chased by police and suffering a lethal injury over the course of a mysterious 45-minute encounter. He was one of too many to name and the ensuing chaos is wholly the fault of the Baltimore Police Department and our broken system of law enforcement in this country.

If you are more bothered by the images of stolen Enfamil and burned-out squad cars than those of highly militarized police-who were meeting children in the streets donning riot gear before a single store had been vandalized-and people treating tear gas burns, then it's hard to take seriously the idea that you actually care about the crisis of police violence.

If you are unable to understand that the protestors who turned violent (and the majority who did not) hit the streets of Baltimore informed by near-daily reports of police killings of unarmed Blacks by officers who face virtually no chance of being punished, then your critique of their actions isn't one we should be compelled to consider.

If the events of the last 400 years have not left you with, at the absolute least, a sense of "it's not right, but I understand" as it relates to the utter despair that leads one to go into the streets with destruction on their mind, then you may want to reconsider the levels to which you actually understand what is taking place in Baltimore and beyond.

A verse from Langston Hughes' "Warning" has made the rounds the last few days and it's too perfect not to cite here: "Negroes, sweet and docile. Meek and humble and kind. Beware the day they change their mind!"

Continuing to perpetuate the myth of "act good, get treated that way" does nothing to protect us from the reality of police terror and mass incarceration, which work hand-in-hand. This is not a case for riots, but acknowledgment that they aren't the work of thugs and ne'er-do-wells, but an SOS call. The question is, are we willing to listen? We should, because our people have finally changed their mind.
Jamilah Lemieux is EBONY.com's Senior Editor. Views expressed here are her own.

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As someone who has not closely followed Maryland politics, I will admit to being guilty of seeing photos of Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake come across my news feed and quietly smiling. I hadn't spent much time considering who she is or what she actually means to the historic city.

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On April 12, Freddie Gray got into a Baltimore police van, after being chased down and arrested by police. Thirty minutes later, he emerged with severe injuries that led to his death a week later.

There are many unanswered questions in the case, like why police chased him down and arrested him, when there is no indication that Gray was in the process of or had committed a crime or why they didn't belt him into the van, as required by their own internal regulations. The Baltimore Sun has reported that Gray is not the only arrestee to have suffered serious injuries from a ride in a police van.

Like the police-involved killings of Oscar Grant and Eric Garner and Michael Brown-all young, black men-Gray's death touched off a series of protests seeking justice and reform of police practices.

Baltimore native and self-taught photographer Devin Allen hit the streets to document the deep pain and righteous anger of his city. The photos he produced are searing, intimate, and remarkable.

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These are the most striking pictures of the Freddie Gray protests in Baltimore

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On April 12, Freddie Gray got into a Baltimore police van, after being chased down and arrested by police. Thirty minutes later, he emerged with severe injuries that led to his death a week later.

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One Tweet Shows Media Hypocrisy in Coverage of Baltimore Protests

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One Tweet Shows Media Hypocrisy in Coverage of Baltimore Protests

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On Saturday, over 2,000 protesters marched to Baltimore's City Hall to protest the death of 25-year-old black man Freddie Gray. Gray died on April 19 after suffering a spinal injury while in Baltimore Police Department custody a week earlier. At some point between when Gray was put into a police van and shackled and the time paramedics were called over half an hour later, something nasty happened.

According to Gray's family attorney, his spine was at the neck. Deputy Police Commissioner Jerry Rodriguez that Gray gave up without the use of force.

Since then, thousands of people have taken to the streets every day to demonstrate against the fate that befell Freddie Gray and countless other people who have been killed by police in America. But on Saturday night, a small minority of Baltimore's residents decided to irresponsibly engage in property destruction and acts of violence - and the media lost its mind.

Here's how the Baltimore Sun covered the events on Sunday:

One tweet from American hip-hop artist Talib Kweli shows how the protests could and should have been covered: as a movement against police brutality so heartfelt and widespread that it united even rival gangs.

A "war zone": One could practically sense right-wing media hooting with glee at Baltimore's pain. Drudge Report's eponymous Matt Drudge was quick to play up the racial angle:

Breitbart ran referring to "1,000 black rioters" and called the city a "." CNS News on how "the demonstration turned violent and volatile," while the Daily Caller played up a viral video showing a group of young black guys stealing a reporter's purse:

A false narrative: The vast majority of people who turned out to protest Freddie Gray's death on Saturday didn't engage in violence, smash windows or hurl beer bottles at people. Out of the more than 2,000 people who marched to City Hall that afternoon, Al-Jazeera America that about 100 were responsible for the chaos. CNN that there was an "overwhelming peaceful majority" and that members of protests put themselves between the "small group" of angry demonstrators and police lines, leading Police Commissioner Anthony Batts to thank the peacemakers in the crowd.

Despite the fact that there have been peaceful protests in Baltimore every day since Gray died on April 19, some folks seem determined to frame the narrative around the actions of a disgruntled minority.

As Mic's Zak Cheney-Rice previously pointed out while covering the protests in Ferguson, Missouri over the death of 18-year-old unarmed black man Mike Brown at the hands of police, somehow the media doesn't react with the same kind of breathless denunciations when white college students turn unruly:

The narrative coalescing around some of the nastier things that happened in Baltimore on Saturday is easily distorted. City Paper's Brandon Soderberg, for example, explained the backstory of Drudge's "race riot" photo:

The Wall Street Journal's Christopher Mims chimed in:

Somehow, photos of peaceful protesters intervening - the same peacemakers the police commissioner credited with helping to neutralize the angry minority - aren't getting the same coverage.

Lost in all this, too, is how a few scuffles and broken windows pale in comparison to the violence visited upon Freddie Gray by the Baltimore Police Department:

The Department of Justice is not only investigating Gray's death, but the entire police force after years of allegations of brutality.

Why you should care: Disproportionate focus on the violent actions of a few hurt, pained and disenfranchised people unfairly ignores the much larger peaceful movement protesting Gray's death. It paints an entire minority community as intrinsically violent and unreasonable when, in fact, they are the ones under siege by a police department that has paid out millions of dollars to the plaintiffs of excessive force lawsuits. Officers in Baltimore have been accused of vicious misconduct on a regular basis.

"Please don't allow a few angry protesters shift the focus of what created this movement in the city," local activist Albert Phillips wrote on Facebook. "Rioting and looting is only a reaction to compounded injustice. The larger issue here is police brutality. Stay focused."

When the police have so clearly lost the trust of the public, there's a bigger problem than one night of rioting at hand. Baltimore's residents deserve better than for the nation to ignore that problem.

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One Tweet Shows the Hypocrisy of the Media's Reaction to Riots in Baltimore

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On Saturday, over 2,000 protesters marched to Baltimore's City Hall to protest the death of 25-year-old black man Freddie Gray. Gray died on April 19 after suffering a spinal injury while in Baltimore Police Department custody a week earlier.

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10,000 Protest Peacefully in Baltimore, Despite Media Slant

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10,000 Protest Peacefully in Baltimore, Despite Media Slant

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Note: The following is dated Monday, April 27 as the mass protests in Baltimore were devolving into a riot that lasted until the early morning hours.
First things first.

Yes, there is a lot to be argued, debated, addressed. And this moment, as inevitable as it has sometimes seemed, can still, in the end, prove transformational, if not redemptive for our city. Changes are necessary and voices need to be heard. All of that is true and all of that is still possible, despite what is now loose in the streets.

But now - in this moment - the anger and the selfishness and the brutality of those claiming the right to violence in Freddie Gray's name needs to cease. There was real power and potential in the peaceful protests that spoke in Mr. Gray's name initially, and there was real unity at his homegoing today. But this, now, in the streets, is an affront to that man's memory and a dimunition of the absolute moral lesson that underlies his unnecessary death.

If you can't seek redress and demand reform without a brick in your hand, you risk losing this moment for all of us in Baltimore. Turn around. Go home. Please.
Additional Notes: Second thing second: The death of probable cause in Baltimore. Third thing third: http://davidsimon.com/zero-tolerance-is-exactly-what-it-sounds-like/ . So eyes on the real prize here.

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Note: The following is dated Monday, April 27 as the mass protests in Baltimore were devolving into a riot that lasted until the early morning hours. First things first. Yes, there is a lot to be argued, debated, addressed.

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CHAOS: 15 Officers Injured, Businesses Looted, Fires Set As Violent Riots Plague Baltimore

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CHAOS: 15 Officers Injured, Businesses Looted, Fires Set As Violent Riots Plague Baltimore

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BALTIMORE (WJZ) - Fifteen Baltimore City police officers were injured, multiple vehicles were vandalized and set on fire, and businesses were looted as a massive group of rioters ran wild along North Avenue early Monday evening.

As a result, a city-wide curfew was put in place in an effort to restore order.

"I am extremely disappointed in this beautiful city tonight, I'm disappointed in the fact that the damage has been done to these communities, I'm disappointed that we cannot be more responsible in an embarrassment that we have nationwide in our community," said Baltimore Police Commissioner Anthony Batts. "This is not protesting, this is not your First Amendment rights, this is just criminal acts doing damage to a community that is challenged in some ways that do not need this and do not need to be harmed in a way that we have today."

It's believed the riots may be a result of fliers that were apparently shared over the weekend on social media asking high schoolers to rally at Mondawmin Mall. It was supposed to be a peaceful march for Freddie Gray that extended from Mondawmin Mall to The Avenue.

Instead, things quickly spiraled out of control.

"These are Baltimore youthful residents, a number of them came right out of the local high schools there on the other side of Mondawmin and started engaging in this. And if you saw in one scene, you had one a mother who grabbed their child who had a hood on his head and she started smacking him on the head because she was so embarrassed. I wish I had more parents who took charge of their kids tonight," said Commissioner Batts. "I think these were youth coming out of the high school and they thought it was cute to throw cinder blocks at the police department and address it that way."

Police said the hurt officers suffered injuries from flying debris in the melee as rioters began attacking them unprovoked. At least one was knocked unconscious. Six officers remained hospitalized Monday night at Shock Trauma in serious condition. They are all expected to be OK. Twenty-seven suspects were arrested.

By 7 p.m., Gov. Larry Hogan declared a state of emergency and activated the National Guard to address the growing violence and unrest. Many businesses in downtown Baltimore closed early and streets were eerily quiet as workers and residents feared the protests and violence would return to the heart of Charm City.

"I have not made this decision lightly. The National Guard represents a last resort in order to restore order," said Hogan. "People have the right to protest and express their frustration, but Baltimore City families deserve peace and safety in their communities and these acts of violence and destruction of property cannot and will not be tolerated."

Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake declared a week-long curfew to be in effect from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. in the city in an effort to curb further violence and rioting. This curfew is in addition to the juvenile curfew already in effect for the city.

"What we see going on tonight that is going on in our city is very disturbing. It is very clear there is a difference between what we saw over the past week with the peaceful protests, those who wish to seek justice, those who wish to be heard and want answers, and the difference between those protests and the thugs who only want to incite violence and destroy our city," said Rawlings-Blake during a press conference Monday evening.

The mayor said the only exceptions for people to be on the streets during the curfew would be for medical emergencies or those going to work.

"I'm a life-long resident of Baltimore, and too many people have spent generations building up this city for it to be destroyed by thugs who, in a very senseless way, are trying to tear down what so many have fought for," she said. "We are deploying every resource possible to gain control of the situation and to ensure peace moving forward."

Rep. Elijah Cummings decried the violence to WJZ's Derek Valcourt outside City Hall.

"We're better than this, and I know that people are upset, but this is not the way to go about change," said Cummings. "When we see policemen being hit, stores being broken into and burned, that's not who we are. I'm asking people to refrain from that. This is our city. After all the cameras are gone, we still have to live here."

Most of the violence was contained to the area around North Ave. at Pennsylvania Ave., reported WJZ's Sky Eye Chopper 13 Captain Jeff Long from Sky Eye Chopper 13.

WJZ's Christie Ileto witnessed students and other participants throwing rocks and bricks at officers in riot gear. Tear gas and pepper spray were utilized by officers and Ileto received treatment from police after the wind carried pepper spray into her face.

"This is nothing like Saturday's protests, nothing," Ileto said.

The baseball game scheduled to be played between the Orioles and the Chicago White Sox was canceled after officials consulted with Baltimore Police. No makeup date has been announced yet.
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Some of the worst damage came at a CVS store at Pennsylvania Ave. and North Ave. where looters ransacked the building. Several police vehicles were also set on fire nearby. By 6:30 p.m., that CVS was engulfed in flames. Thick clouds of dark smoke could be seen billowing from the store across the city.

Police said members of the group rioting at Pennsylvania and North Aveenues cut the fire hose while they were attempting to put out the blaze.

"It's idiotic to think that by destroying your city, you're gonna make life better for anybody," the mayor said.

Sky Eye Chopper 13 also appeared to show one looter who backed up a car to the other side of CVS and was loading it up with goods from the store.

Another vehicle was seen driving onto the sidewalk directly in front of the store through the crowd.

Long said the group that caused damage to the CVS eventually looted a check cashing business. Dozens could be seen surrounding that business as some ran in and out of the broken building.

Looting reportedly spread to Lexington Market in downtown Baltimore by 8:30 on Monday night. A cell phone store, poultry market, and 7-Eleven near the market were destroyed by looters during the protest on Saturday night.

Officers used mace and what appeared to be tear gas to disperse crowds.

"We don't want to see any level of unnecessary violence. We're using appropriate crowd control tactics. You're going to see us continue to use gas, pepper balls and other means in order to bring about order, but we have to do it in a way that's responsible," said Kowalczyk. "We can't rush in, we don't want to put innocent people at risk. We don't want to put our officers at risk and we certainly don't want to put the community at risk."

City Council President Jack Young urged rioters to "stop the madness."

"We can not go back to 1968 where we burned down our own infrastructure and our own neighborhoods. We still have scars from 1968 where we had some burnt out building and businesses did not want to come back to the city of Baltimore. We have to stop the burning down and the breaking in of these stores because in the end it hurts us as a people," he said. "This is no reason to loot and rob in the city of Baltimore. The whole world is watching us and some people are even calling us animals."

99.1 WNEW reporter Steve Dorsey was attacked by one person while covering the riots near the CVS.

"I was just about to do a live shot on the phone when out of no where a protester came up in front of me, shouted something at me, hit me in the face. I fell down and my phone dropped out of my hand and at that point he was going to kick me while I was laying down on the asphalt, and a few other protesters intervened and they pushed that guy back and I was able to escape with the help, limping, with some other protesters," he told WJZ's Mary Bubala.

Dorsey said he witnessed "nothing but chaos" as he covered the riots.

"I actually saw a fire truck pull up to the scene, stay about two minutes - there were only two firefighters on board - and just left. There was really nothing they could do in an uncontrolled chaotic scene like that. Also the back of a police van was completely wide open. A witness told me he actually saw someone steal a shotgun out of the van and leave with it," he added.

Senator Catherine Pugh joined WJZ's Christie Ileto shortly after the violent riots broke out. She urged parents to call their children and make sure they were safe.

"What the family of Freddie Gray has asked is that there be peace in the streets today and that even when we begin to protest again, and we know that people are looking for justice, let's do this peacefully," she said. "I'm looking down the street smoke, seeing cars being burned in our neighborhood. This is not the way. I'm asking people in Baltimore, please let's quell the violence. If we want to protest, we can begin tomorrow but let's do it in a peaceful way because that is the only way that the public gets to see that we care about our city, that we care about violence against our people and we can do better than what's being done today."

Residents were stunned by the chaos and disorder that controlled the area. One resident known as "Cool Anthony" on social media told WJZ's Marcus Washington he was hoping for a peaceful end to the situation.

"We have to live here, this is our home. We didn't live in the best neighborhoods as there was, but now it's like you all are breaking into stores and taking things like toilet tissue and dollar bills, for what? You're not doing it for Freddie no more, ya'al are doing it for your own personal enjoyment now," he said.

This all comes hours after the funeral for Freddie Gray, despite his family asking there be no protests

"The family is dead set against what they're seeing and hearing about violence. They know non-violence is the only way to deal with this problem. We don't need to hurt innocent people, innocent police officers, because the majority of police officers are law-abiding," said Gray family attorney Billy Murphy. "This is something that we need to come together as a community and get out in the streets ourselves and have peaceful marches to set an example for these kids. They don't know. They just don't know."

Attorney General Loretta Lynch told President Obama she would continue to monitor events in Baltimore and the Department of Defense stands ready to provide any assistance needed.

Baltimore City Schools released this statement, saying:

"At this time of tension and anxiety regarding the tragic events surrounding Mr. Freddie Gray, we have a heightened responsibility to our students, families, and school communities. First, the safety of our staff and students is our top concern. We are in constant contact with the Mayor's Office, Baltimore City Police Department, and the City Health Department, and are coordinating with them to ensure we are ready to respond to situations as they arise. We will make crisis counselors and mental health professionals available at schools throughout the city for all of our students, and they will remain as long as it is necessary. Additionally, we have redeployed senior district staff and mobile units to assist in ensuring safe passage of our students between school buildings and bus stops."

We are also communicating with each one of our school leaders around effective instructional strategies to heighten student awareness and understanding of social justice issues. We are deeply concerned about our students and community, and we hope to treat this situation not only as a teachable moment but also a time for thoughtful reflection on how we can reduce conflict and violence in our society. We will continue to be vigilant in our support for all of the city's young people."

Anne Arundel County schools have canceled all field trips into Baltimore City through May 3.

Police are asking motorists to avoid the area of Gwynns Falls, Reisterstown and Liberty Heights.

E. Fayette is closed between and President and Gay streets as well.

The MTA says that due to police activity, trains will be bypassing Lexington, Upton, State Center, Mondawmin and Penn North Metro stations.

For a full list of closings and delays, CLICK HERE.

Stay with WJZ and CBSBaltimore.com for the latest on this developing story.

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CHAOS: 15 Officers Injured, Businesses Looted, Fires Set As Violent Riots Plague Baltimore

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BALTIMORE (WJZ) - Fifteen Baltimore City police officers were injured, multiple vehicles were vandalized and set on fire, and businesses were looted as a massive group of rioters ran wild along North Avenue early Monday evening. As a result, a city-wide curfew was put in place in an effort to restore order.

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Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan said at a news conference today the immediate need is to restore calm in Baltimore and that the city is well on its way.

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"We're not going to have a repeat of last night," Hogan said. "It's not going to happen tonight."

President Obama today called the riots in Baltimore "senseless violence and destruction."

"They're not protesting, they're not making a statement. They're stealing," Obama said at an afternoon news conference in Washington. "They're destroying and undermining businesses and opportunities in their own communities.

"They need to be treated as criminals," he added.

Police in Baltimore said 235 people were arrested Monday, including 34 juveniles. Seven adults and five juveniles were arrested today.

Matt Rourke/AP Photo

Meanwhile, national guard troops were deployed in front of Baltimore City Hall this morning and a state of emergency was issued after violence erupted in the city Monday afternoon. The city will have 2,000 national guardsman and over 1,000 law enforcement on duty, Hogan said today.

Numerous fires were reported overnight and Baltimore police reported people throwing cinder blocks at fire engines as firefighters worked to extinguish the flames. Fifteen structure fires and 144 vehicle fires were reported, according to Howard Libit, director of strategic planning and policy at the Mayor's Office.

Baltimore City Public Schools were closed today, but will reopen Wednesday, a school spokesperson said.

Tonight's baseball game at Oriole Park between the Orioles and the Chicago White Sox has been postponed to May 28. Wednesday's game between the Orioles and the White Sox will be closed to the public.

A citywide curfew will be in effect from 10 p.m. today until 5 a.m. Wednesday. The 10 p.m. curfews will last for one week, mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said, and could be extended as necessary. A 9 p.m. curfew is already in effect for children 14 and younger.

Matt Rourke/AP Photo

Monday's standoff began near the Mondawmin Mall in the northwest part of the city, the Baltimore Police Department said, as the group threw bricks, rocks and other objects at officers. Protesters were seen climbing on a police cruiser and damaging several others, and fires broke out, including flames that engulfed a community center project.

At least 20 officers were injured, police said.

The unrest was sparked by the death of Freddie Gray, who died after being in police custody. Gray's mother, speaking the night of the 25-year-old's funeral, made a plea for peace.

"I want you all to get justice for my son, but don't do it like this here. Don't tear up the whole city just for him," Gloria Darden said. "It's wrong."

Rawlings-Blake, speaking to reporters late Monday, decried the violence and property damage.

"People say they care about their community and want to be heard, but you can't care about your community and do what they did," Rawlings-Blake said. "I understand anger, but what we're seeing isn't anger, it's destruction of a community."

Patrick Semansky/AP Photo

Newly minted Attorney General Loretta Lynch also weighed in, condemning the "senseless acts of violence by some individuals in Baltimore."

"The Department of Justice stands ready to provide any assistance that might be helpful," Lynch added. "The Civil Rights Division and the FBI have an ongoing, independent criminal civil rights investigation into the tragic death of Mr. Gray."

Get real-time updates as this story unfolds. To start, just "star" this story in ABC News' phone app. Download ABC News for iPhone here or ABC News for Android here.

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Violence 'Not Going to Happen Tonight,' Governor Says

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Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan said at a news conference today the immediate need is to restore calm in Baltimore and that the city is well on its way. Add as an interest to stay up to date on the latest news, video, and analysis from ABC News.

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Baltimore Riots "Not Going to Happen Tonight," says governor

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Baltimore Riots "Not Going to Happen Tonight," says governor

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Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan said at a news conference today the immediate need is to restore calm in Baltimore and that the city is well on its way.

Interested in ?

Add as an interest to stay up to date on the latest news, video, and analysis from ABC News.

"We're not going to have a repeat of last night," Hogan said. "It's not going to happen tonight."

President Obama today called the riots in Baltimore "senseless violence and destruction."

"They're not protesting, they're not making a statement. They're stealing," Obama said at an afternoon news conference in Washington. "They're destroying and undermining businesses and opportunities in their own communities.

"They need to be treated as criminals," he added.

Police in Baltimore said 235 people were arrested Monday, including 34 juveniles. Seven adults and five juveniles were arrested today.

Matt Rourke/AP Photo

Meanwhile, national guard troops were deployed in front of Baltimore City Hall this morning and a state of emergency was issued after violence erupted in the city Monday afternoon. The city will have 2,000 national guardsman and over 1,000 law enforcement on duty, Hogan said today.

Numerous fires were reported overnight and Baltimore police reported people throwing cinder blocks at fire engines as firefighters worked to extinguish the flames. Fifteen structure fires and 144 vehicle fires were reported, according to Howard Libit, director of strategic planning and policy at the Mayor's Office.

Baltimore City Public Schools were closed today, but will reopen Wednesday, a school spokesperson said.

Tonight's baseball game at Oriole Park between the Orioles and the Chicago White Sox has been postponed to May 28. Wednesday's game between the Orioles and the White Sox will be closed to the public.

A citywide curfew will be in effect from 10 p.m. today until 5 a.m. Wednesday. The 10 p.m. curfews will last for one week, mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said, and could be extended as necessary. A 9 p.m. curfew is already in effect for children 14 and younger.

Matt Rourke/AP Photo

Monday's standoff began near the Mondawmin Mall in the northwest part of the city, the Baltimore Police Department said, as the group threw bricks, rocks and other objects at officers. Protesters were seen climbing on a police cruiser and damaging several others, and fires broke out, including flames that engulfed a community center project.

At least 20 officers were injured, police said.

The unrest was sparked by the death of Freddie Gray, who died after being in police custody. Gray's mother, speaking the night of the 25-year-old's funeral, made a plea for peace.

"I want you all to get justice for my son, but don't do it like this here. Don't tear up the whole city just for him," Gloria Darden said. "It's wrong."

Rawlings-Blake, speaking to reporters late Monday, decried the violence and property damage.

"People say they care about their community and want to be heard, but you can't care about your community and do what they did," Rawlings-Blake said. "I understand anger, but what we're seeing isn't anger, it's destruction of a community."

Patrick Semansky/AP Photo

Newly minted Attorney General Loretta Lynch also weighed in, condemning the "senseless acts of violence by some individuals in Baltimore."

"The Department of Justice stands ready to provide any assistance that might be helpful," Lynch added. "The Civil Rights Division and the FBI have an ongoing, independent criminal civil rights investigation into the tragic death of Mr. Gray."

Get real-time updates as this story unfolds. To start, just "star" this story in ABC News' phone app. Download ABC News for iPhone here or ABC News for Android here.

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Violence 'Not Going to Happen Tonight,' Governor Says

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Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan said at a news conference today the immediate need is to restore calm in Baltimore and that the city is well on its way. Add as an interest to stay up to date on the latest news, video, and analysis from ABC News.

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Crips and Bloods say they want "Nobody to Get Hurt" in Baltimore Protests

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Crips and Bloods say they want "Nobody to Get Hurt" in Baltimore Protests

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Amid mounting unrest in Baltimore, an unexpected alliance-members of the Bloods and Crips- emerged yesterday to call for protection of local residents. At an event in a local church shown in a Baltimore Sun video, a man named Charles, who said he was a member of the Crips, wrapped his arm around a self-described Bloods member named Jamal to call for an end to riots over the death of Freddie Gray.

Hours earlier, Baltimore police had warned that members of "various gangs," including the Bloods, Crips, and Black Guerrilla Family, would "team up" to attack police officers and posed a "credible threat." In January, a member of the Black Guerrilla Family walked into a Baltimore police station with a loaded .22-calibur handgun, marijuana, and cocaine to "test security."

"We not here for nobody to get hurt," Charles told the Sun reporter. "We don't want nobody to get hurt. All that about the police getting hurt by certain gangs, that's false. We not here for that. We here to protect our community, and that's it. We don't want no trouble. We're doing this because we don't want trouble."

"The police department hate to see us right now," Jamal said.

Though unusual, a Bloods-Crips alliance would not be without precedent. On Saturday, members of both groups joined protests throughout Baltimore, marching side by side against police brutality. The Daily Beast reported that in August, several former Bloods and Crips carried signs while protesting in Ferguson, Missouri, that read: "NO MORE CRIPS. NO MORE BLOODS. ONE PEOPLE. NO GANG ZONE."

And more than two decades ago, when four white Los Angeles police officers were acquitted in the 1992 beating of Rodney King, the two factions struck a truce that drew skepticism from officers and community workers, but is thought to have helped limit street violence in LA for years.

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Bloods and Crips members say they want "nobody to get hurt" in Baltimore protests

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Amid mounting unrest in Baltimore, an unexpected alliance-members of the Bloods and Crips- emerged yesterday to call for protection of local residents. At an event in a local church shown in a Baltimore Sun video, a man named Charles, who said he was a member of the Crips, wrapped his arm around a self-described Bloods member named Jamal to call for an end to riots over the death of Freddie Gray.

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We Have a Right to Be in the Streets for Freddie

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We Have a Right to Be in the Streets for Freddie

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PROTESTERS IN Baltimore erupted in fury over the murder of Freddie Gray, who died in the hospital on April 19, days after his voice box was crushed and spine nearly severed while in police custody.

Throughout the week that followed, protesters filled the streets demanding accountability and expressing anger at the killing of another unarmed Black man by police. The biggest demonstrations yet came over the weekend. Most of the media sensationalized the small amount of property damage that took place during demonstrations last weekend--while downplaying all evidence of the systemic racism and police violence that stirred this reaction.

The outrage is another symptom of the simmering anger at the epidemic of police murder that has taken place once every eight hours on average across the country in 2015.

Gray was arrested on April 12 outside of Gilmor Homes, where he lived, a few blocks away from the Western District police station in the neighborhood of Sandtown-Winchester. Police say they chased Gray and arrested him after he "made eye contact" with officers and ran away from them. The cops have not disclosed what, if anything, Gray was charged with, although they later "discovered" that Gray was carrying a pocketknife--not exactly a crime, as even Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake was forced to admit.

Cell phone video shows Gray being dragged, legs limp and handcuffed, into a police van. He apparently asked for an inhaler, but was never given one. Later, the van made a stop, and Gray was put in leg irons. There were other stops, too, and other requests for medical attention, before paramedics were called about 40 minutes later.

At the hospital, doctors discovered that Gray's spine was 80 percent severed at his neck, and his voice box had been crushed. Police have refused to say how Gray suffered these injuries--all this is still "under investigation."

Police may have taken Gray for a deliberate "rough ride"--an illegal police technique in which unsecured suspects are driven around in a police van erratically in order to injure and frighten them. Baltimore police have a history of giving suspects so-called rough rides--including Dondi Johnson, who died of a fractured spine in 2005 after a rough ride following his arrest for public urination.

The six officers who arrested and accompanied Gray in the van were suspended at full pay. After Gray died and protests demanding accountability began, the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) released a statement comparing demonstrators to "lynch mobs" who were denying the officers their Constitutional right to due process. The FOP also stated, "We are not concerned with the community's confidence in the investigation"--and that there is "no indication of any criminal activity whatsoever but our support will not waiver (sic) for any reason."

FREDDIE GRAY is the latest in a long list of victims of Baltimore police that continues to the present day.

In February of this year, 30-year-old Travon Scott died in a holding cell after allegedly being found having difficulty breathing--although police say no force was used in his arrest. Nineteen-year-old George V. King died from injuries related to officers striking him with a Taser in May 2014, but the officers were not charged.

At age 44, Tyrone West was beaten to death by police and a Morgan State University security guard during a traffic stop in July 2013. No one was charged in his death. Forty-six-year-old Anthony Anderson's death in September 2012 was ruled a homicide by blunt force trauma after police tackled him. But prosecutors decided the officers didn't use excessive force--once again, no one was charged.

According to the American Civil Liberties Union, between 2010 and 2014, 109 people died in Maryland after encounters with police--Baltimore City had the highest number in the state at 31. Around 70 percent of those who died from police encounters statewide were Black.

Baltimore is different from Ferguson, Missouri, in many ways--yet there are similarities reflected in racial discrepancies in poverty and incarceration rates.

Baltimore is a major city of over 620,000 people that is 63 percent Black, with a median annual household income of $41,000. Outside of the city, the population is 60 percent white and the median income is $73,000. The city is currently shutting off water to 25,000 residents who are behind on their unpaid water bills after a spike in rates--while it looks the other way corporate accounts go unpaid. Baltimore City schools and recreation centers have suffered a series of closures, especially in poorer Black neighborhoods.

Each of the six legislative districts located in Baltimore has at least 1,000 residents incarcerated--a number not matched anywhere in the rest of the state--with Baltimore City's Western district, which contains the neighborhood of Sandtown-Winchester, topping the list at 1,855 residents serving prison sentences.

Meanwhile, fewer than 30 percent of Baltimore City police officers actually live in the city. Since 2011, the city has used taxpayer dollars to pay out $5.7 million in court judgments and settlements for 102 civil lawsuits alleging police misconduct.

THE NARRATIVE in the media is that protests against Freddie Gray's death supposedly "turned violent" without provocation on Saturday, April 25. The press has focused on smashed windows and traffic disruptions downtown that night, the "looting" of a 7-Eleven store, and confrontations with officers near the Western District police headquarters.

Ignored in these representations is that day's eight hours-plus of peaceful demonstrations that started in the economically devastated Black neighborhood of Sandtown-Winchester, where Freddie Gray lived. Later, protesters marched through downtown and converged on City Hall, where the crowd swelled to about 2,000 people--all without incident.

The media aren't reporting photos circulating on social media of members of the Crips and Bloods gangs standing side by side in protest, along with members of the Nation of Islam--after calling a truce to come together to demand justice. Also written out of the news are the images of racially diverse families with children, elderly people, clergy with their congregations, union workers, students and community activists who all came together with the message: "All night, all day, we're gonna fight for Freddie Gray!"

The media also haven't provided context for the property damage, which some protesters say was at least partially provoked by intoxicated sports fans, downtown for that evening's Orioles game, who reportedly shouted racial epithets and threw water bottles at a group of about 100 people who broke off from the larger march to head toward the heavily guarded baseball stadium.

The claim by Baltimore officials that the property damage was the work of "outside agitators"--another connection to Ferguson--fails to acknowledge the deep and justified anger of city residents.

At the peaceful gathering at Gilmor Homes on Saturday, 17-year-old James made the main issue clear: "I want police to stop killing us. We can't go nowhere without being harassed." Another resident who identified himself as Ray said, "How are you going to kill someone over eye contact? Cops are racist as hell in Baltimore."

Looking out at the maze of police, their equipment and their barricades around the Western District station, a man named Alonzo said, "We're taught that the police are supposed to be a public service. Looks more like an armed encampment."

THERE ARE many activists and organizations in Baltimore that have been doing long, painstaking work against police brutality for years, but their struggles have gone largely unreported.

Baltimore Bloc has organized with the families of the victims of police brutality and monitored police activity to keep communities informed. They supported Tawanda Jones, the sister of Tyrone West, who was beaten to death by police in 2013, in her organization of weekly "West Wednesday" protests since her brother was killed.

The Baltimore Algebra Project has called attention to the school-to-prison pipeline and successfully stopped a new youth jail from being constructed. City Bloc is a group of students at Baltimore City College who have led young people in protest against police brutality. The Right to Housing Alliance has been instrumental in fighting the economic violence against targeted Black communities around tenants' rights and the water shutoffs, while also speaking out against police misconduct.

This year, Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle and Rev. Heber Brown III of Pleasant Hope Baptist Church worked together to push for legislation to amend the "Law Enforcement Officers Bill of Rights," which is a barrier to police accountability and hinders investigations of civilian complaints.

The Ujima People's Progress Party has community control of police as part of its platform and has been working to reform the Civilian Review Board, which currently does not have the power to subpoena or charge officers who have complaints made against them and rarely hears complaints.

UNITE HERE Local 7, which organizes low-wage workers in the hotel, gaming, food service, airport, laundry and other service industries, unanimously voted to support the Black Lives Matter movement and has turned out in numbers at the protests against police violence. The All People's Congress and Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Baltimore called for mass gatherings around the murders of Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, Eric Garner and Freddie Gray.

Activism in Baltimore is notoriously fragmented, but around the killing of Freddie Gray, some groups have made an attempt to work together in coalition, forming Bmore United as a centralized way for people to get information, share resources and offer support around the issue of police brutality and accountability in Baltimore.

Black Lawyers for Justice is planning to hold a town hall meeting on April 29, and more protests are set for Saturday, May 2.

So far, the response of the political and press establishment to the Baltimore protests has centered on minor vandalism and the 34 arrests. Those arrests were mainly of young Black men, including those who had not been violent, but were targeted for merely being vocal. Many who protested peacefully refuse to distance themselves from those who broke windows because they can see how the media are using this issue to discredit the movement as a whole.

In fact, the massive police mobilization--an estimated 1,200 cops from Baltimore and other jurisdictions, along with state troopers, took part in policing Saturday's protests--has stoked entirely justified anger. In effect, the city mobilized an occupying force to stand guard in front of an empty stadium, long before sports fans arrived--a clear display of the city's priority of protecting property, and not the lives of Black city residents.

After days of protesting Gray's murder, only to be met by more violence and repression from the robo-cops, it's not surprising when there are bitter expressions of anger among protesters. But these examples are not the real crime--far from it.

Accepting "business as usual" in Baltimore might feel like "peace" to the city's elite, but what it actually means is more police brutality, more mass incarceration, more economic violence, the devastation of Black communities and more deaths--and that deserves to be disrupted until we have justice.

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We have a right to be in the streets for Freddie

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PROTESTERS IN Baltimore erupted in fury over the murder of Freddie Gray, who died in the hospital on April 19, days after his voice box was crushed and spine nearly severed while in police custody. Throughout the week that followed, protesters filled the streets demanding accountability and expressing anger at the killing of another unarmed Black man by police.

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Baltimore Mom Smacks Son for Participating in Riots

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Baltimore Mom Smacks Son for Participating in Riots

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BALTIMORE (CBSDC/AP) - One Baltimore mother was caught on video dragging out her son who was taking part in the Baltimore riots.

Toya Graham was shown on television smacking her 16-year-old son - who was dressed all in black - for taking part in the riots against police and businesses Monday afternoon and dragging him away.

Baltimore Police Commissioner Anthony Batts even acknowledged the mother's actions during a press conference early Tuesday morning.

"And if you saw in one scene, you had one a mother who grabbed their child who had a hood on his head and she started smacking him on the head because she was so embarrassed. I wish I had more parents who took charge of their kids tonight," Batts said.

"I'm a no-tolerant mother. Everybody that knows me, know I don't play that," Graham, a single mother of six, told CBS News. "He said, when 'I seen you,' he said, 'ma, my instinct was to run.'"

The mother said when they made eye contact, he knew he was in trouble.

"At that point, I just lost it," she said. "I was shocked, I was angry, because you never want to see your child out there doing that."

Graham said she and her son watched news coverage of the riots together. And then the images of her reaction went viral. Comments started appearing on her son's Facebook page, many in support of her, she said.

"Friends and everybody making comments and saying, 'you know, you shouldn't be mad at your mother, you should give her a hug,'" Graham said.

She hopes it will be a teachable moment.

"And by him seeing everything what's going on I just hope, I'm not sure, but I hope that he understands the seriousness of what was going on last night," she said.
RELATED: Riots in Baltimore Raise Questions About Police Response
National Guard troops fanned out through the city, shield-bearing police officers blocked the streets and firefighters doused still-simmering blazes early Tuesday as a growing area of Baltimore shuddered from riots following the funeral of a black man who died in police custody.

The violence that started in West Baltimore on Monday afternoon - within a mile of where Freddie Gray was arrested and placed into a police van earlier this month - had by midnight spread to East Baltimore and neighborhoods close to downtown and near the baseball stadium.

It was one of the most volatile outbreaks of violence prompted by a police-involved death since the days of protests that followed the death of Michael Brown, an unarmed black man who was shot and killed during a confrontation with a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, last summer.

At least 15 officers were hurt, including six who remained hospitalized late Monday, police said. Two dozen people were arrested.

State and local authorities pledged to restore order and calm to Baltimore, but quickly found themselves responding to questions about whether their initial responses had been adequate.
RELATED: Cleanup Begins In Baltimore Following Monday Riots
Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake was asked why she waited hours to ask the governor to declare a state of emergency, while the governor himself hinted she should have come to him earlier.

"We were all in the command center in the second floor of the State House in constant communication, and we were trying to get in touch with the mayor for quite some time," Gov. Larry Hogan told a Monday evening news conference. "She finally made that call, and we immediately took action."

Asked if the mayor should have called for help sooner, however, Hogan replied that he didn't want to question what Baltimore officials were doing: "They're all under tremendous stress. We're all on one team."

Rawlings-Blake said officials believed they had gotten the unrest that had erupted over the weekend under control "and I think it would have been inappropriate to bring in the National Guard when we had it under control."

But later on, Batts made it clear events had become unmanageable. "They just outnumbered us and outflanked us," Batts said. "We needed to have more resources out there."
RELATED: Chaos, Then Cleanup in Baltimore (PHOTOS)
Batts said authorities had had a "very trying and disappointing day."

Police certainly had their work cut out for them: The rioters set police cars and buildings on fire in several neighborhoods, looted a mall and liquor stores and threw rocks at police with riot gear who responded occasionally with pepper spray.

"I understand anger, but what we're seeing isn't anger," Rawlings-Blake said. "It's disruption of a community. The same community they say they care about, they're destroying. You can't have it both ways."

U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch, in her first day on the job, said she would send Justice Department officials to the city in coming days. A weeklong, daily curfew was imposed beginning Tuesday from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m., the mayor said, and Baltimore public schools announced they would be closed Tuesday.

Maj. Gen. Linda Singh, adjutant general of the Maryland National Guard, said up to 5,000 troops would be available for Baltimore's streets.

"We are going to be out in massive force, and that just means basically that we are going to be patrolling the streets and out to ensure that we are protecting property," Singh said at a news conference Monday night.

Singh said they will be acting at the direction of Baltimore police.

Col. William Pallozzi, the superintendent of the state police, said a request for up to 500 additional law enforcement personnel in Maryland had been sent. Pallozzi added that the state is putting out a request for up to 5,000 more law enforcement personnel from around the mid-Atlantic region.

Maryland Congressman Elijah Cummings and about 200 others, including ministers, tried unsuccessfully to quell the violence at one point Monday night, marching arm-in-arm through a neighborhood littered with broken glass, flattened aluminum cans and other debris. As they got close to a line of police officers, the marchers went down on their knees. They then rose to their feet and walked until they were face-to-face with the police officers in a tight formation and wearing riot gear.

But the violence continued, with looters later setting a liquor store on fire and throwing cinder blocks at fire trucks as firefighters labored to put out the blazes.

Monday's riot was the latest flare-up over the death of Gray and came amid a national debate over police use of force following the high-profile deaths of several black men in encounters with police - from the Brown death in Ferguson to the deaths of Eric Garner in New York and Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina.

Gray was black. Police have declined to specify the races of the six officers involved in his arrest, all of whom have been suspended with pay while they are under investigation.

While they are angry about what happened to Gray, his family said riots are not the answer.

"I think the violence is wrong," Gray's twin sister, Fredericka Gray, said late Monday. "I don't like it at all."

The attorney for Gray's family, Billy Murphy, said the family had hoped to organize a peace march later in the week.

Hours before the riots began Monday, mourners filled the 2,500-capacity New Shiloh Baptist church to attend Freddie Gray's funeral.

Gray was arrested on April 12 after making eye contact with officers and then running away, police said. He was held down, handcuffed and loaded into a van without a seat belt. Leg cuffs were put on him when he became irate inside.

He asked for medical help several times even before being put in the van, but paramedics were not called until after a 30-minute ride. Police have acknowledged he should have received medical attention on the spot where he was arrested, but they have not said how he suffered a serious spine injury. He died April 19.
(TM and © Copyright 2015 CBS Radio Inc. and its relevant subsidiaries. CBS RADIO and EYE Logo TM and Copyright 2015 CBS Broadcasting Inc. Used under license. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)

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VIDEO: Mom Caught Hitting Son Taking Part in Baltimore Riots

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BALTIMORE (CBSDC/AP) - One Baltimore mother was caught on video dragging out her son who was taking part in the Baltimore riots. Toya Graham was shown on television smacking her 16-year-old son - who was dressed all in black - for taking part in the riots against police and businesses Monday afternoon and dragging him away.

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Why can't Baltimore's Black female mayor stop saying "thug"?

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Why can't Baltimore's Black female mayor stop saying "thug"?

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On Monday night, protesters took to the streets of Baltimore hours after the funeral of Freddie Gray, a young man who died following injuries he sustained while in police custody. Last night, Baltimore's Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake stood before news cameras, asking for peace and calling the protesters "thugs," all without acknowledging the root of the problem-cops who think breaking a suspect's spine by driving too fast in a squad vans is acceptable. And who's telling them it isn't?

At the Baltimore Sun, Doug Donovan and Mark Puente wrote about the many other victims of Baltimore police department's "rough rides," described as when a person is cuffed and put in the back of a squad van, then driven around in such a reckless, fast manner that their body slams around the van's walls, injuring them. This practice is "unsanctioned," but clearly happens so often that the city has paid out millions to people like Alston who've been paralyzed and sometimes killed like Gray because of these "rides." It would've been great if Mayor Rawlings-Blake mentioned that bit.

Alston sued, and ... A jury awarded Alston $39 million, but he and the city settled for $6 million. In settlements, the city generally does not acknowledge liability; the officers involved in the case did not face disciplinary actions.

Alston's attorney, Philip Federico, said Thursday that the Gray case brought back memories of Alston, who died about eight years ago. What jumped out was that both men had asthma and were denied when they asked police for inhalers, he said.

The piece lists numerous other people who suffered this "rough ride," like 27-year-old librarian Christine Abbott.

"They were braking really short so that I would slam against the wall, and they were taking really wide, fast turns," Abbott said in an interview that mirrored allegations in her lawsuit. "I couldn't brace myself. I was terrified."

"You feel like a piece of cargo," she added. "You don't feel human."

Dehumanization is obviously the goal of the "rough ride." Police instruct their suspect that they, the cops, hold the power over whether that person lives or dies in that moment and, whatever they decide, there will likely be no consequences. Mayor Rawlings-Blake could've said this also. However, the protests in Baltimore, and across the country, have shown that the assumption of no consequences is no longer viable, at least not in terms of social unrest.

Police can no longer kill civilians with impunity and trust that they'll be exonerated by a unequal legal system, or that everyone will just go home and forget about it. People are tired of being brutalized, tired of seeing a new victim's name nearly every day, pairing that person's senseless death with the name of yet another police officer behind the gun and in Baltimore, the wheel. Now, instead of head-shaking, there are protests and riots. When the system preaches peace but deals violently with its civilians, we see the emperor has no clothes on and the people take to the streets.

As Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote at The Atlantic on Monday night:

When nonviolence is preached as an attempt to evade the repercussions of political brutality, it betrays itself. When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse. When nonviolence is preached by the representatives of the state, while the state doles out heaps of violence to its citizens, it reveals itself to be a con. And none of this can mean that rioting or violence is "correct" or "wise," any more than a forest fire can be "correct" or "wise." Wisdom isn't the point tonight. Disrespect is. In this case, disrespect for the hollow law and failed order that so regularly disrespects the rioters themselves.

Now, with all that you've just read, here's what Mayor Rawlings-Blake did say via Twitter, which she doubled-down on during her press conference last night, posted above.

Then on Tuesday morning:

OK, girl. But you know what would be amazing, Mayor Rawlings-Blake? If you directed those statements to the police you work so closely with, and not in some back room with your city's police chief. I understand that walking the line between calling for police accountability and supporting the constituents who voted for you is a tough spot, especially considering how New York City Mayor DeBlasio was treated by NYPD after Officer Daniel Pantaleo killed Eric Garner on camera and didn't receive any punishment but this is the job. But you need to do better, Rawlings-Blake, because, right now, you look like the woman who is protecting the people who are killing your voters. Like Malcolm X once said, "If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing."
Contact the author at Hillary@jezebel.com.

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Why Can't Baltimore's Black Female Mayor Stop Saying 'Thug'?

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On Monday night, protesters took to the streets of Baltimore hours after the funeral of Freddie Gray, a young man who died following injuries he sustained while in police custody.

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Rioting broke out on Monday in Baltimore-an angry response to the death of Freddie Gray, a death my native city seems powerless to explain. Gray did not die mysteriously in some back alley but in the custody of the city's publicly appointed guardians of order. And yet the mayor of that city and the commissioner of that city's police still have no idea what happened. I suspect this is not because the mayor and police commissioner are bad people, but because the state of Maryland prioritizes the protection of police officers charged with abuse over the citizens who fall under its purview.

The citizens who live in West Baltimore, where the rioting began, intuitively understand this. I grew up across the street from Mondawmin Mall, where today's riots began. My mother was raised in the same housing project, Gilmor Homes, where Freddie Gray was killed. Everyone I knew who lived in that world regarded the police not with admiration and respect but with fear and caution. People write these feelings off as wholly irrational at their own peril, or their own leisure. The case against the Baltimore police, and the society that superintends them, is easily made:

Over the past four years, more than 100 people have won court judgments or settlements related to allegations of brutality and civil rights violations. Victims include a 15-year-old boy riding a dirt bike, a 26-year-old pregnant accountant who had witnessed a beating, a 50-year-old woman selling church raffle tickets, a 65-year-old church deacon rolling a cigarette and an 87-year-old grandmother aiding her wounded grandson ....

And in almost every case, prosecutors or judges dismissed the charges against the victims-if charges were filed at all. In an incident that drew headlines recently, charges against a South Baltimore man were dropped after a video showed an officer repeatedly punching him-a beating that led the police commissioner to say he was "shocked."

The money paid out by the city to cover for the brutal acts of its police department would be enough to build "a state-of-the-art rec center or renovations at more than 30 playgrounds." Instead, the money was used to cover for the brutal acts of the city's police department and ensure they remained well beyond any semblance of justice.

Now, tonight, I turn on the news and I see politicians calling for young people in Baltimore to remain peaceful and "nonviolent." These well-intended pleas strike me as the right answer to the wrong question. To understand the question, it's worth remembering what, specifically, happened to Freddie Gray. An officer made eye contact with Gray. Gray, for unknown reasons, ran. The officer and his colleagues then detained Gray. They found him in possession of a switchblade. They arrested him while he yelled in pain. And then, within an hour, his spine was mostly severed. A week later, he was dead. What specifically was the crime here? What particular threat did Freddie Gray pose? Why is mere eye contact and then running worthy of detention at the hands of the state? Why is Freddie Gray dead?
When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse.
The people now calling for nonviolence are not prepared to answer these questions. Many of them are charged with enforcing the very policies that led to Gray's death, and yet they can offer no rational justification for Gray's death and so they appeal for calm. But there was no official appeal for calm when Gray was being arrested. There was no appeal for calm when Jerriel Lyles was assaulted. ("The blow was so heavy. My eyes swelled up. Blood was dripping down my nose and out my eye.") There was no claim for nonviolence on behalf of Venus Green. ("Bitch, you ain't no better than any of the other old black bitches I have locked up.") There was no plea for peace on behalf of Starr Brown. ("They slammed me down on my face," Brown added, her voice cracking. "The skin was gone on my face.")

When nonviolence is preached as an attempt to evade the repercussions of political brutality, it betrays itself. When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse. When nonviolence is preached by the representatives of the state, while the state doles out heaps of violence to its citizens, it reveals itself to be a con. And none of this can mean that rioting or violence is "correct" or "wise," any more than a forest fire can be "correct" or "wise." Wisdom isn't the point tonight. Disrespect is. In this case, disrespect for the hollow law and failed order that so regularly disrespects the community.

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Rioting broke out on Monday in Baltimore-an angry response to the death of Freddie Gray, a death my native city seems powerless to explain. Gray did not die mysteriously in some back alley but in the custody of the city's publicly appointed guardians of order.

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Cops out in ‘massive force’ as rioters set Baltimore aflame

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Cops out in ‘massive force’ as rioters set Baltimore aflame

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BALTIMORE - Rioters plunged part of Baltimore into chaos Monday, torching a pharmacy, setting police cars ablaze and throwing bricks at officers hours after thousands mourned the man who died from a severe spinal injury he suffered in police custody.

The governor declared a state of emergency and called in the National Guard to restore order - but authorities were still struggling to quell pockets of unrest after midnight.

The violence, which began in West Baltimore - within a mile of where Freddie Gray was arrested and pushed into a police van earlier this month - had by the end of the day spread to East Baltimore and neighborhoods close to downtown and near the baseball stadium.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch, in her first day on the job, said she would send Justice Department officials to the city in coming days. A weeklong, daily curfew was imposed beginning Tuesday from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m., the mayor said, and Baltimore public schools announced that they would be closed on Tuesday. At least 15 officers were hurt, including six who remained hospitalized late Monday, police said. Two dozen people were arrested.

Officers wearing helmets and wielding shields occasionally used pepper spray to keep the rioters back. For the most part, though, they relied on line formations to keep protesters at bay.

Monday's riot was the latest flare-up over the mysterious death of Gray, an African-American whose fatal encounter with officers came amid the national debate over police use of force, especially when black suspects are involved. Police have declined to specify the races of the six officers involved in his arrest, all of whom have been suspended with pay while they are under investigation.

But Gray's family said violence is not a way to honor him.

"I think the violence is wrong," Gray's twin sister, Fredericka Gray, said late Monday. "I don't like it at all."

The attorney for Gray's family, Billy Murphy, said the family had hoped to organize a peace march later in the week.

Emergency officials were constantly thwarted as they tried to restore calm in the affected parts of the city of more than 620,000 people. Firefighters trying to put out a blaze at a CVS store were hindered by someone who sliced holes in a hose connected to a fire hydrant, spraying water all over the street and nearby buildings. Later Monday night, a massive fire erupted in East Baltimore that a spokesman for Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake initially said was connected to the riots. He later texted an AP reporter to say officials are still investigating whether there is a connection.

The Mary Harvin Transformation Center was under construction and no one was believed to be in the building at the time, said the spokesman, Kevin Harris. The center is described online as a community-based organization that supports youth and families.

Kevin Johnson, a 53-year-old resident of the area, said the building was to have been earmarked for the elderly. Donte Hickman, pastor of a Baptist church that has been helping to develop the center, shed tears as he led a group prayer near the firefighters who fought the blaze.

"My heart is broken because somebody obviously didn't understand that we were for the community, somebody didn't understand that we were working on behalf of the community to invest when nobody else would," he said.

Earlier Monday, the smell of burned rubber wafted in the air in one neighborhood where youths were looting a liquor store. Police stood still nearby as people drank looted alcohol. Glass and trash littered the streets, and other small fires were scattered about. One person from a church tried to shout something from a megaphone as two cars burned.

"Too many people have spent generations building up this city for it to be destroyed by thugs, who in a very senseless way are trying to tear down what so many have fought for, tearing down businesses, tearing down and destroying property, things that we know will impact our community for years," said Rawlings-Blake, a lifelong resident of the city.

Police urged parents to locate their children and bring them home. Many of those on the streets appeared to be African-American youths, wearing backpacks and khaki pants that are part of many public school uniforms.

The riot broke out just as high school let out, and at a key city bus depot for student commuters around Mondawmin Mall, a shopping area northwest of downtown Baltimore. It shifted about a mile away later to the heart of an older shopping district and near where Gray first encountered police. Both commercial areas are in African-American neighborhoods.

Later in the day, people began looting clothing and other items from stores at the mall, which became unprotected as police moved away from the area. About three dozen officers returned, trying to arrest looters but driving many away by firing pellet guns and rubber bullets.

Downtown Baltimore, the Inner Harbor tourist attractions and the city's baseball and football stadiums are nearly 4 miles away. While the violence had not yet reached City Hall and the Camden Yards area, the Orioles canceled Monday's game as a safety precaution.

On Monday night, Maryland Congressman Elijah Cummings and about 200 others, including ministers and mostly men, marched arm-in-arm through a neighborhood littered with broken glass, flattened aluminum cans and other debris, in an attempt to help calm the violent outbursts. As they got close to a line of police officers, the marchers went down on their knees. After the ministers got back on their feet, they walked until they were face-to-face with the police officers in a tight formation and wearing riot gear.

In a statement issued Monday, Attorney General Lynch said she would send Justice Department officials to the city in coming days, including Vanita Gupta, the agency's top civil rights lawyer. The FBI and Justice Department are investigating Gray's death for potential criminal civil rights violations.

Many who had never met Gray gathered earlier in the day in a Baltimore church to bid him farewell and press for more accountability among law enforcement.

The 2,500-capacity New Shiloh Baptist Church was filled with mourners. But even the funeral could not ease mounting tensions.

Police said in a news release sent while the funeral was under way that the department had received a "credible threat" that three notoriously violent gangs were working together to "take out" law enforcement officers.

Gray was arrested April 12 after making eye contact with officers and then running away, police said. He was held down, handcuffed and loaded into a van without a seat belt. Leg cuffs were put on him when he became irate inside.

He asked for medical help several times even before being put in the van, but paramedics were not called until after a 30-minute ride. Police have acknowledged he should have received medical attention on the spot where he was arrested, but they have not said how his spine was injured. He died on April 19.

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Cops out in 'massive force' as rioters set Baltimore aflame

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BALTIMORE - Rioters plunged part of Baltimore into chaos Monday, torching a pharmacy, setting police cars ablaze and throwing bricks at officers hours after thousands mourned the man who died from a severe spinal injury he suffered in police custody.

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Baltimore Residents Volunteer to Clean Up Damage From Riots, Looting

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Baltimore Residents Volunteer to Clean Up Damage From Riots, Looting

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As Baltimore braces itself for a second day of potentially violent protests, volunteers gathered this morning at North and Pennsylvania Avenues-the epicenter of yesterday's protests-to clean up the destruction from the rioting and looting at a CVS and other neighborhood businesses.