When Baltimore erupted in an uprising last year following the violent death of Freddie Gray in police custody, angry protesters, most of them black youth, were widely denounced as criminals and thugs. Maryland’s governor deployed the national guard as riot police poured in from across the state and residents faced a city-wide curfew. At one point, cops surrounded and maced high school students in the Mondawmin neighborhood, a provocation described as “absolutely vile” by Brian Arnold, an eyewitness and former Baltimore City high school teacher. As rumors of a “gang truce” circulated, no holds were barred in the clampdown on protests.
Yet, as in Ferguson, Missouri, it was the sustained mobilization to Baltimore’s streets that forced the world to see the systemic racism of the city’s police department, and forced Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake to ask the Department of Justice to launch an investigation. Poor black residents of the deeply segregated city described a police department that behaved like an occupying force, brutalizing and disproportionately targeting them with unnecessary stops and deadly force....
http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/federal-investigation-lays-bare-how-baltimore-police-systematically-abuse-civil
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