zlacker

>>dsr12+(OP)
Timely article, but what about violent criminal activity during protests? Peaceful protests are wonderful and have been very effective throughout history. The protests we've seen for the past few days are not helping anything. Yes, people are angry at the criminal behavior of the police officer/murderer, but manifesting that anger by destroying property, looting, injuring, and threatening others, is only going to justify the use of more police violence.

>>anonym+rv
Oh, I don't know. Peaceful protests of police violence have been a regular feature of life here in Baltimore, thanks to our famously corrupt and racist PD, but it took the 2015 Freddie Gray protests - which occurred in the wake of the same kind of murder as was done to George Floyd, and were violent enough to garner nationwide coverage - to spark the federal investigation that led to the 2017 consent decree and the ongoing scrutiny that, among other improvements in police behavior and in response to police misbehavior, looks to have so far at least kept Baltimore noticeably absent from the lists of cities seeing significant violence this time around.

So, at least in my town, it looks a lot like violent protests of the sort you decry do help. Certainly nothing else has done as well.

>>throwa+ZA
I've heard the 2015 riots resulted in a stand down of the police force in Baltimore, and since then crime in the city has increased significantly. Sounds like the reason criminals are not rioting is because they won. Great for the criminals, but not great for their victims, which are probably mostly the improvished, not the affluent who can afford a replacement for the missing police.

In all these riot situations, it is portrayed as the poor sticking it to the rich, who presumably are using the police to oppress the poor. But I suspect that in reality it is mostly the poor becoming even more downtrodden by the criminal elements, and the rich remain unaffected. Perhaps the rich even profit a bit from what happens, such as politicians winning more government money to "help with all the troubles".

>>yters+fG
Leaving aside that the next plea I hear from black Baltimore for more policing on the BPD model will absolutely be the first - I find it odd that you know so much about this, and so little about other things people have said in this thread that you also disagree with. You've asked others to cite their sources. Why be so unforthcoming with your own?

>>throwa+FI
There's the homicide rate, which jumped from 33.8% in 2014 to 55.4% in 2015, and has stayed above 50% since.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Baltimore#Crime_stati...

A little further down:

"Homicides in Baltimore are heavily concentrated within a small number of high-poverty neighborhoods."

So, my prima facie impression from these data points is the stand down has not benefitted the poor.

>>yters+OL
Would that be the homicide rate that's shown no significant first-derivative variance from the national rate since 2015? - the homicide rate that you're not even bothering to cite correctly? Those are figures per hundred thousand, not per hundred as you give them here.

In either case, you're massively misrepresenting the "stand down" order, which was not a policy of indefinite disengagement, but rather a specific instruction given in the scope of the 2015 protests in an attempt to avoid further escalation. Whether or not the order was successful in that sense is a matter for separate discussion, but to claim it's a permanent thing, the way you are doing, is simply false to fact - which is probably why you still haven't sourced that claim.

While we're on the topic of BPD actions during the 2015 protests, have you heard about the cop who used the opportunity to loot drugs from a pharmacy and later sell them on to street dealers? [1] I suspect not; for all your apparent interest in the doings of the Baltimore PD, you seem surprisingly ill informed. That's far from all the Gun Trace Task Force got up to, either [2], nor were they alone in their corruption. These are things you need to know about, if you want to talk about policing in my town and expect to be worth taking seriously. But here you are, needing to be told about them. I wonder why that is.

[1] https://archive.is/UeB7E

[2] https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/policy-and-politics/2018/2/...

>>throwa+FO
This article from USA Today in 2018 implies the effect has been indefinite. Interesting graph, too, that shows the drop in police actively stopping petty crime correlates with a growth in homicides. I heard a Baltimore radio show in 2019 that said pretty much the same thing, highlighted by the police commissioner getting mugged in broad daylight as he was walking down the street with his wife.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2018/07/12/baltim...

“These guys aren’t stupid. They realize that if they do something wrong, they’re going to get their head bit off. There’s no feeling that anybody’s behind them anymore, and they’re not going to do it,” he says. “Nobody wants to put their head in the pizza oven when the pizza oven is on.”