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Capitalism, the working class and the fight against police violence

1 May 2015

The events in Baltimore, Maryland following the police killing of 25-year-old Freddie Gray mark a political turning point in the United States. The enormous class divide in America, the bankruptcy of the entire political system and the collapse of democratic forms of ruleall have been laid bare by this latest act of state brutality and the military-police mobilization against the eruption of social anger.

In recent days, thousands of people have participated in demonstrations in Baltimore, New York, Philadelphia and other cities throughout the country. Further protests will take place today and over the weekend. While the police violence is the immediate spark, far deeper issues are involved: mass unemployment, poverty, the decay of cities and social infrastructure, and unprecedented levels of social inequality.

The entire political superstructure has responded to the unrest in Baltimore by backing the deployment of thousands of troops from the National Guard, a branch of the armed forces. Baltimore, only 40 miles from the nations capital, has effectively been occupied, with heavily armed units placed in key public locations throughout the city, accompanied by armored vehicles and military helicopters. A state of emergency has been declared, and a curfew imposed on all residents.

The actions in Baltimore come half a year after the crackdown in Ferguson, Missouri last August, when the city was turned into a war zone in response to demonstrations over the police killing of Michael Brown. The state violence was repeated later in the year, following a rigged grand jury proceeding that exonerated Browns killer.

The irony is hard to miss. The United States government, which wages war all over the world on the phony pretext of defending democracy and human rights, increasingly relies on the methods of martial law in response to any indication of social unrest within its borders.

Conditions in Baltimore exemplify the immense social inequality that is the defining feature of American society. As a whole, it is ranked the sixth poorest city in the country. In the Sandtown-Winchester area where Gray was arrested, more than half of the working-age population is unemployed, and a third of all residential properties are vacant or abandoned. A report put out by the city in 2011 found that nearly a third of all families in the neighborhood live in poverty.

To regulate this social catastrophe, the police have been armed to the teeth and given free rein to terrorize the population. Arrests, beatings and harassment are a daily reality. A report by the Baltimore Sun last year found that the city paid out $5.7 million since 2011 over lawsuits related to police violence. Officers have battered dozens of residents who suffered broken bonesjaws, noses, arms, legs, ankleshead trauma, organ failure, and even death, coming during questionable arrests, the newspaper reported.

While the vast majority of the population in Sandtown-Winchester is African-American, the fundamental division in Baltimoreas in American society as a wholeis class, not race. Like many urban centers, Baltimore is run by a predominantly black political elite, including the mayor, the city council president, the police chief, the top prosecutor and many others. Half of the police force is black as well.

Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blakewho led the charge in denouncing Baltimore youth as thugs earlier this weekpersonifies a layer of the African-American upper middle class that has become part the Democratic Party political establishment and attained positions of power and privilege. The daughter of a longtime Maryland politician, Rawlings-Blake has worked closely with the citys business elite to develop and gentrify sections of downtown, while areas like West Baltimore have been laid to waste.

It is now a half century since the wave of urban uprisings that swept the United States in the late 1960sincluding in Baltimore and countless other cities following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in April 1968.

The rebellions in the 1960s came during the last gasp of liberal reformism in the United States. Over the past 50 years, the ruling class has gone on the offensive, carrying out a relentless assault on jobs, wages and living standards. Social inequality has soared to levels not seen since before the Great Depression of the 1930s. Cities like Baltimore have been deindustrialized, with entire sectors of the economy wiped out.

To facilitate the war on the working class, the ruling class worked deliberately to integrate a small minority of the African-American middle class into the mechanisms of state power, including through policies such as affirmative action. Meanwhile, conditions for the vast majority of African-American workers and youth are worse today than they were in the 1960s.

Obama himself represents the culmination of this process. The first African-American president has presided over an unprecedented transfer of wealth to the top one percent, unending war abroad and an assault on the most basic democratic rights. Since the economic crisis of 2008, unlimited resources have been funneled to the banks and Wall Street. The stock market and corporate profits are at record highs, while the administration has spearheaded the assault on wages, public education, health care and the conditions of life of the working class as a whole.

Since 2009, nearly all income gains in the United States have been captured by the top one percent of the population, with the 400 wealthiest individuals in the country now controlling a staggering $2.29 trillion. More than $600 billion a year is devoted to financing the US military juggernaut, yet in cities like Baltimore and Detroit thousands of households are being shut off from running water, the most basic necessity of modern life.

There are no political mechanisms within the political system through which any of the grievances of the vast majority of the population can find expression. Everything that has passed for progressive or left politicsincluding the politics of racehas been exposed by events. It is precisely this that terrifies the ruling class, and explains its ever more direct resort to force and violence.

The rights of the working class can be achieved only through revolutionary struggle, uniting workers of all races in an independent political movement in opposition to the Democratic and Republican Parties and the capitalist profit system they defend.

The Socialist Equality Party calls for the mobilization of the entire working class in defense of the workers and youth of Baltimore. The same police-state apparatus, trained in Iraq and Afghanistan, that terrorizes the population of Baltimore and has been called out to suppress popular protests is and will be deployed against all opposition to the policies of the corporate and financial aristocracy.

Mass meetings and demonstrations should be organized throughout the country to demand the immediate arrest of Grays killers, the lifting of the state of emergency in Baltimore and the withdrawal of the National Guard and the demobilization of the police. These democratic demands should be linked to a program that advances the social rights of the entire working classincluding a massive redistribution of wealth to provide decent-paying jobs, education and health care for all.

Nothing can be achieved without a frontal assault on the domination of society by a financial aristocracy that is determined to maintain its stranglehold through violence and terror. Their grip over economic and political life must be broken through the establishment of a society based on public ownership and democratic control of the forces of production. To implement this program, the working class must take political powerin the United States and internationally.

The solution to the crisis confronting workers depends on the construction of an independent, socialist leadership of the working class. It is to build this leadership that the International Committee of the Fourth International has organized the International May Day Online Rally, to be held on Sunday, May 3. We call on all workers and youth to make plans to participate today.

Joseph Kishore

Violent arrests of protesters follow charges against Baltimore cops in murder of Freddie Gray

By Jerry White 2 May 2015

Police in Baltimore, Maryland moved aggressively to arrest protesters Friday night, following an announcement earlier in the day that state prosecutors were charging six police officers in the murder of 25-year-old Freddie Gray.

Shortly after the 10:00 pm curfew imposed earlier this week, riot police with shields and batons began making arrests. National Guard troops and armored vehicles stood by, and a helicopter flew overhead. One young protester told CNN that she saw two of her friends beaten during the arrests.

Police ordered reporters, under the threat of arrest, to stop interviewing arrested protesters and forced them into a special pen some distance away. It was evident that the aim was to block cameras from filming the crackdown.

The arrests were aimed at reinforcing the authority of the police following the announcement of charges earlier in the day. It was also intended to make clear to residents of Baltimore that the antidemocratic curfew and state of emergency remain in effect.

Maryland State Attorney Marilyn Mosby unexpectedly announced the charges early on Friday, saying that Gray had been illegally arrested by the police and had died from fatal injuries incurred inside a Baltimore Police Department van.

The charges include second-degree murder, involuntary manslaughter, manslaughter by vehicle and second-degree assault for the driver of the van, Officer Caesar Goodson. Lesser charges were filed against the five other cops. If convicted, they could face 20 to 60 years in prison.

The sixthree of whom are black and three whitewere released Friday immediately after posting bond, which was set at significantly less than the bond for many Baltimore youth arrested earlier in the week.

The prosecutors action was a highly political decision, made in close consultation with the Obama administration, as protests in the city expanded and a wave of solidarity demonstrations spread across the United States. The decision is aimed at keeping the lid on the explosive social tensions in the city, while delegitimizing any further protests against police violence and social inequality.

Protracted legal proceedings could end up with the lessening of charges or outright exoneration. There are already signs of efforts to throw out the indictments, with charges that Mosby violated the law by releasing too many details from the state investigation.

The Baltimore Fraternal Order of Police union denounced the rush to judgment and said that the actions of the cops were reasonable and in accordance with police training. The FOP called for Mosby to recuse herself and appoint a special independent prosecutor, saying that there was a conflict of interest because her husband, Nick Mosby, is a Baltimore City Council member and she has personal and professional connections to Grays family attorney, former Baltimore Circuit Court Judge William Murphy.

Announcing the charges, Mosby insisted that they were not an indictment of the entire force, adding that she came from a family with five generations of police officers. The actions of these officers, she added, do not and should not in any way damage the important working relationships between police and prosecutors as we continue to fight together to reduce crime in Baltimore. Thank you for your courage, commitment and sacrifice for the betterment of our communities.

Mosby appealed to the citys youth to trust the judicial system, which contrary to their daily experiences, supposedly meted out equal and fair justice to all citizens. To the people of Baltimore and the demonstrators across the United States, she said, 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. In other words, further protests should cease now that the officers had been charged.

For the first time, Mosby outlined the chain of events that led to Freddie Grays horrific injuries and death, which the Baltimore Police Department and city officials have previously sought to conceal. Her description essentially confirmed suspicions that police gave Gray a deliberate rough ride, bouncing the shackled young man around the back of van until he was fatally injured.

Gray was arrested on the morning of April 12 after making eye contact with cops and running. He was chased by Lt. Brian W. Rice, Officer Edward M. Nero and Officer Garrett Miller, captured and handcuffed. Gray told the cops he could not breathe and asked for an inhaler but was not provided with any medical treatment.

A small knife was found on Gray, but Mosby said it was folded and legal under Maryland law, and therefore the police had no probable cause to arrest him. Gray was put on his stomach as he began to flail his legs and scream. Officers put him into a tactical hold called a leg lace and held him down against his will until a police van arrived.

Gray was then put in the police van without being buckled to the seat, in violation of police department rules. After riding for a block, the cops stopped and took Gray out of the van. They then shackled his ankles and wrists and reloaded him into the van, head first and stomach down, Mosby said, once again not belting him into the seat.

A short while later, Officer Goodson stopped the van again to check on Gray. Despite stopping for the purpose of checking on Mr. Grays conditions, at no point did he seek nor did he render any medical assistance to Mr. Gray, Mosby said. He drove on again without buckling him in.

At a third stop, Gray again requested help and said he could not breathe. Officer William Porter asked him if he needed a medic, Mosby said, and Gray said yes three times. This was ignored, and he was put back in the van unbelted again.

At a fourth stop, Goodson picked up another prisoner, Donta Allen. At that point, Goodson, Officer Sgt. Alicia D. White and Officer Porter observed that Gray was unresponsive. Once again, no medical treatment was given, and Goodson drove on another 25 minutes until they reached the Western District Police Station. Only after the second prisoner was unloaded was a medic called to assess Gray, who was no longer breathing at all, Mosby said. The medic determined that Gray was in cardiac arrest and critically and severely injured.

Gray was transported to the University of Marylands shock trauma center where he went into a coma several days later and died a week after, on April 19.

The indictments came as it became clear that the predominantly African American Democratic Party political establishment in Baltimore was unable to mollify social tensions, which are erupting not only against police brutality but decades of chronically high unemployment, poverty, decaying schools and other services and the explosion of social inequality.

Like many other big cities, the political establishment in Baltimore is dominated by a layer of affluent African Americans who have prospered from reactionary, pro-business policies pursued by both corporate-backed parties, even as conditions for the vast majority of the population have declined.

After limiting rioting erupted earlier this week, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake denounced the dispossessed youth as thugs. The New York Times commented that this was a vivid reminder that the presence of a black mayor (and a black police chief as well) does not guarantee an intimate bond or rapport with poor black residents that might help calm a city going through the kind of trauma facing Baltimore.

After the indictments, Rawlings declared she would work relentlessly to ensure everyone is treated equal and there will be justice for Freddie Gray, his family and people of Baltimore. President Obama also spoke saying that justice had been served, and said that he had just met with mayors to discuss how to rebuild trust between the community and the police.

In fact, the epidemic of police brutality and murders is the product of the immense social inequality defended by the entire political establishment. Whatever the outcome of the legal case in Baltimore, the corporate and financial elite will continue to employ police and military violence to defend its wealth and power against the overwhelming majority of society.

The social eruption in Baltimore, Maryland

29 April 2015

The eruption of mass anger in Baltimore, Maryland over the police murder of Freddie Gray, and the subsequent military-police takeover of the city, have once again revealed the reality of social life in America. The United States is a seething cauldron of social discontent, over which a frightened and isolated ruling class rules ever more nakedly through the methods of violence and repression.

Two thousand National Guard troops, many of whom were previously deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, have poured into one of Americas largest cities, only 40 miles from the nations capital. A curfew has been imposed, and anyone found after dark without a drivers license and a document from their employer attesting to the fact that they work after hours will be arrested.

The entire political and media establishment has seized on the rioting and unrest following the funeral of Gray to declare their support for the paramilitary occupation of the city. The gamut of opinion represented on the television news ranges from full support for the crackdown to criticism of Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake for not having called in the National Guard earlier.

On Tuesday, President Obama, who has fully backed the crackdown in Baltimore, weighed in with his own remarks, delivered at a press conference announcing a new military agreement with Japan. Obama took the occasion to denounce youth in Baltimore as criminals and thugs and said that there is no excuse for the kind of violence that we saw yesterday. He added that the violence robs jobs and opportunity from people in that area.

To say that there is no excuse is to say that there is no reason, that the social eruption in Baltimore is simply the product of thugsa term used ubiquitously by the political and media establishment over the past several days. In fact, the cause of the unrest in Baltimore is not hard to locate. It is the product of intense anger over poverty, unemployment, social decay and the unending reign of police violence and murder in Baltimore and cities throughout the United States.

For the youth targeted by the police crackdown, there are no excuses, but for Obama, and the corporate aristocracy and the military-intelligence apparatus that he represents, excuses abound. The United States government is built on a mass of excuses for all the crimes of the ruling class.

Just last week, Obama excused the fact that a drone strike he ordered in January killed two hostages, with the bland declaration, During the fog of war mistakes happen. There is no shortage of excuses for the hundreds of thousands killed as a result of US military operations.

And there are plenty of excuses for the real criminals in Baltimore: the police, armed to the teeth with military gear provided by the Obama administration. The killing of Grayan act that has yet to result in any arrests or chargesis only the latest in a long string of daily harassment, brutality and abuse, in Baltimore and throughout the country. Those responsible are almost never held accountable. Following the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri last year, the Obama administration worked closely with local and state officials and prosecutors to ensure that his killer was exonerated.

As for Obamas claims that the actions of youth in Baltimore robs jobs and opportunity, this comes from the chief representative of a financial aristocracy that has laid havoc to Baltimore and countless other cities.

For decades, the ruling class in America has carried out a policy of deindustrialization, shutting down entire sectors of the economy. Obama himself has presided over the largest transfer of wealth into the pockets of the rich in US history, even as he has overseen the destruction of wages and the decimation of social services. Since Obama came to office, Baltimore has lost 80 percent of its manufacturing jobs, and thousands of children are homeless and tens of thousands live in poverty.

The events in Baltimore reveal starkly the fraud of identity politics, based on the claim that race, not class, is the fundamental social category in America. Obamas denunciation of young people in Baltimore mirrors that of the entire African-American political apparatus in the city, which has responded to the protests with a combination of hatred, rage and fear.

In her press conference Tuesday, Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake repeatedly referred to young people expressing their anger over police violence as thugs in announcing the imposition of a curfew and the calling in of the National Guard. She was flanked by Patrol Chief Darryl De Sousa, the City Council President Bernard C. Jack Young, and City Council member Brandon M. Scott, all of whom were black, with the latter two also calling the demonstrators thugs.

This coming August will mark the 50th Anniversary of the Watts rebellion, a wave of social unrest that engulfed the predominantly African-American neighborhood of Los Angeles in 1965. The Watts rebellion, sparked by an incident of police brutality, was followed in the coming years by a series of uprisings in urban centers throughout the country, including Baltimore.

Two social phenomena characterize the subsequent decades. First, the extraordinary growth of social inequality. The conditions of workers and working-class youth, including African Americans, are worse today than they were a half century ago. Second, the ruling class has integrated into positions of power and privilege a layer of the black upper middle class, which has presided over an economic and cultural catastrophe in city after city.

In its response to the eruption of police violence over the murder of Freddie Gray, the black political establishment, headed by the first African-American president, has shown itself exactly for what it is: corrupt, self-interested and utterly hostile to the interests and aspirations of the poor and workers, black and white.

The fight against police violence is fundamentally a class question. In the methods deployed on the streets of Baltimore, the ruling class is demonstrating what it is prepared to do in response to all opposition to its policies of war and social counterrevolution.

The eruption of anger in Baltimore, however, is the expression of these sentiments in a form that lacks political direction. Police violence, inequality, poverty and unemployment cannot be ended in this way. This requires a political movement of the entire working class, which must come to the defense of the workers and youth of Baltimore.

The fight against police brutality and murder must be connected to a conscious political mobilization of the working class, independent of the Democratic and Republican Parties, and aimed at the overthrow of capitalism and the reorganization of society on a socialist basis.

Andre Damon and Joseph Kishore

The police murder in Baltimore

24 April 2015

On April 12, 25-year-old Freddie Gray made eye contact with a Baltimore police officer; a week later he was dead from an episode of brutality and torture that left three of his vertebrae crushed and his spinal cord mostly severed.

A bystander video, depicting only part of the mans ordeal, shows a stony-faced group of police officers loading Gray, who is visibly injured and crying out in pain, into a small steel cage in the back of a police van. Thirty minutes later, he arrived at a hospital on the edge of death.

Prior to the beginning of the video, bystanders said that police officers subjected Gray to what can only be described as a horrific form of torture in which he was folded up like he was...a piece of origami, with his heels on his back, leaving him praying for medical assistance and unable to walk.

Subsequent press reports have revealed that giving shackled prisoners a rough ride inside small, steel-caged police vans is a form of touchless torture used by police in Baltimore, Philadelphia and other cities.

Baltimore has a long history of police brutality, which has resulted in $5.7 million in payouts to victims since 2011. The Baltimore Sun reported that 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.

The killing of Gray is reminiscent of a 2005 police murder in the city, in which Dondi Johnson had his spine fractured after he was given an intentional rough ride in a police van that arrived at the station in half the time it would have taken if it were driving at the speed limit. His family received a $7.4 million judgment, which was subsequently reduced to $200,000.

In both cases, police were forced to admit that, contrary to protocol, they did not use seat belts to restrain the handcuffed prisoners. The city of Philadelphia has paid more than $2 million to settle lawsuits alleging that rough rides left two people paralyzed.

The homicidal character of the police officers actions underscores a fundamental reality of American life: in working-class neighborhoods throughout the United States, the police function as de facto death squads, treating workers and youth as an occupied population, to be put down with arbitrary violence and even murder.

The antisocial views promoted among the increasingly militarized police were reflected in the revelation this week that the National Guard officers overseeing the crackdown in Ferguson, Missouri referred in official documents to peaceful protestors engaging in their constitutionally protected right to free speech as enemy forces.

These conceptions, and the murderous actions that accompany them, are the expression of a society deeply corrupted by vast levels of poverty and social inequality, in which the police increasingly see themselves as the thin blue line separating the impoverished masses from the financial oligarchy that has enriched itself fabulously at the expense of the population.

Baltimore is emblematic of the enormous decay and deterioration of working-class living standards over the past several decades, leading its population to drop by nearly a third.

Since 1970 the city has lost more than 84 percent of its manufacturing jobs, while the official poverty rate has hit more than 25 percent. The beginning of this year saw the demolition of the towering L Blast Furnace, once the heart of the Bethlehem Steel mill at Sparrows Point, which employed thousands of workers over the course of a century.

Baltimores affluent city center, containing a world-class university and hospital system, is ringed by scenes of abject poverty; whole neighborhoods of burned-out and abandoned row houses, with tens of thousands in poverty.

Conditions of social misery are accompanied by extraordinarily brutal and repressive policies directed against the citys poor. Last year, Baltimore enacted a law fining the parents of children who violate the citys 9:00 PM curfew up to $500. Advocates for the homeless denounced the curfew, which allows police to detain any young person caught outside after hours, saying it will push the citys 2,400 homeless youth farther into the shadows.

In perhaps the most draconian attack on the citys population, the city administration last month announced that it would begin shutting off water to as many as 25,000 poor residents, triggering protests.

These egregious attacks on the social rights of the population take place in a city where the mayor, police commissioner, and the majority of city council members are African American, and which has been run by the Democratic Party for decades, exploding the claim that electing minority candidates of this big-business party is a means to improve the lot of workers.

The mass protests that have erupted following Grays murder are particularly significant in that they express the growing opposition by broad sections of the working class to this affluent black elite, which has racked up its own wealth and power while poverty has soared among minority workers.

The brutality meted out against the population of Baltimore, both by the police and politicians, is a concentrated expression of the assault on the working class that has taken place nationwide, resulting in an enormous collapse in living standards and the effective halving of wages for manufacturing jobs.

The growth of poverty and social inequality has been accompanied by the militarization of the police, which has been coordinated at the highest level of the state by the Obama administration. Even while categorically refusing to even track police killings on the national level, the Obama White House has transferred billions of dollars in military hardware to local police. The White House has repeatedly refused to bring federal charges against killer cops, including former Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson, the killer of unarmed teenager Michael Brown.

Earlier this week, the Washington Post reported that despite its claims of sympathy for the victims of police violence, at the Supreme Court... [the Obama administrations] Justice Department has supported police officers every time an excessive-force case has made its way to arguments.

While thousands of people have been killed at the hands of police over the past decade, only 54 officers have been charged for killing people in the line of duty, of whom only 11 were convicted, receiving mostly wrist-slap sentences.

War, inequality and dictatorship are the inevitable products of the capitalist system. The defense of democratic rights, including freedom from police violence, is inseparable from the struggle to overthrow this corrupt and brutal social order, and establish a genuinely egalitarian form of societysocialism.

Andre Damon

United States: Baltimore Boils OverHow Can We End Police Brutality?

Written by Mark Rahman Tuesday, 28 April 2015 The death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Maryland is just the latest in a string of police killings of black men to hit national headlines. But it seems that it may mark the end of a national ebb in the #BlackLivesMatter movement. As things heat up in the coming months, an important question must be asked: what is the way forward for the movement?

On April 12, Freddie Gray, 25, was pursued, tackled, arrested, and put into a police van after allegedly fleeing unprovoked upon noticing police presence according to court documents. Official police reports say he was arrested without force, and eyewitnesses on the scene corroborate them.

Video was captured of him being put into the police van and of one of the stops the van made. In the first two videos (here and here) of his arrest, Freddie Gray is seen breathing, albeit in agonizing pain and unable to walk, presumably from being tackled to the ground.

It has been admitted by the police that at this point Freddie Gray had requested medical attention, specifically his asthma inhaler. The second video, recording events just minutes later, shows an unresponsive Freddie Gray at the stop where he was reportedly put into leg restraints.

By the time Gray arrived at the hospital thirty minutes later, his spinal cord was 80% severed, 3 vertebrae were fractured, and his voice box crushedinjuries that doctors have said are usually only sustained by those in high-speed automobile accidents.

It has been determined by the Baltimore Police Department that the only wrongdoing of the officerswho have been suspended with paywas not getting Freddie Gray timely medical attention and not buckling him up in the police van, which is official procedure.

There is no way to know for sure what took place in the back of that van when the cameras werent rolling. But, from the point of view of the ruling class, there is little room for contradicting the official version of events as offered by the police. To question the infallibility of any branch of the state would be a very dangerous precedent to set, one they cannot afford under todays conditions. One needs only to look back at the denials of torture and abuse at Abu Ghraibbefore the gruesome photographs were made publicto see the current attitude of the state. It will likely remain a mystery as to how a young man of 25 could sustain such injuries in that short ride to the hospitalinjuries that would put him into a coma and kill him a week later.

In the days following Grays death on the nineteenth, angry protests erupted throughout Baltimore. On Saturday, April 25, thousands of protesters marched through the city holding signs reading, Justice for Freddie, Black Lives Matter, and dozens of other slogans, many referring to others who died at the hands of police across the country and in the Baltimore area in the recent period.

Baltimore unrest continues into the night

"It better not happen to another one of my brothers...If you don't stand for nothin', you'll fall for anything." Unrest in #Baltimore continues into the night around the death of #FreddieGray. Here's a quick look at some of what our producers saw today, captured on mobile phones. Full coverage can be seen on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ajplus

Posted by AJ+ on Monday, 27 April 2015

Grays death came just weeks after a string of police killings throughout the country made national headlines. On March 1 in Los Angeles, a homeless man, Charly Leundeu Keunang, 43, was shot several times in the back while being restrained and tasered facedown by several officers. The killing, committed in broad daylight and caught on camera, drew an angry crowd of witnesses gathering around the police on the scene, denouncing them.

Just five days later, on March 6, 19-year-old Tony Robinson was killed by police in Madison, Wisconsin, igniting protests amid the attacks on the states labor unions and other cuts to the state budget.

On April 4, in North Charleston, South Carolina another horrific police murder was caught on camera. What seemingly started as a routine traffic stop resulted in Walter Scott, 50, being tasered and shot at 8 times while running away from a police officer.

But the anger in Baltimore isnt merely at what has made national news. In Maryland alone, the ACLU has reported that there have been over 109 people killed in police encounters from 2010 to 2014. 40% of those killed by police were unarmed and 70% were black, while fewer than 2% of these deaths resulted in criminal charges against police officers. The ACLU compiled the report because the State of Maryland has no official records of those killed by police.

It is no wonder there is so much rage and anger being expressed in Baltimore. Echoing their cynical coverage of Occupy protests in 2011 and previous #BlackLivesMatter protests last Fall, the media was quick to latch onto the isolated scenes of protesters clashing with police and breaking windows on police cars towards the end of the largely peaceful protest on April 25.

On the evening of Monday, April 27, after Freddie Grays funeral, news broke of crowds of hundreds of angry young protesters smashing up a lone police car, looting a CVS Pharmacy while two police vehicles burned, and throwing rocks in a standoff against riot police. It was later revealed by eyewitnesses that police had arrived, in full riot gear, before the nearby Fredrick Douglass Highschool had let students out for the day. The police provoked a clash by turning school buses away, closing the nearby subway stop, and stopping other buses to force riders out. Amid these scenes of chaos, Baltimore Police Captain Eric Kowalczyk reassured the public by stating that, We have officers deployed throughout the city, to make sure that we can continue to deliver services to the citizens of Baltimore. Meanwhile, some of the police were recorded (here and here) adding fuel to the fire, as they threw rocks at the protesters.

Much of the media was fixated on scenes of fights between protesters and a number of baseball fans near the Camden Yards baseball field. What is missing from most of the captions is that it was racist drunk bar patrons who instigated the fighting by throwing beer glasses and shouting racist epithets at the protesters.

The excessive response of the police, as reported by members of the press, at Saturdays protest was also notable. A photographer for City Paper (a local Baltimore newspaper), J.M. Giordano was videotaped being tackled and beaten by police before being dragged to safety by protesters. Another photographer for Reuters, who was shooting the incident, was detained and cited for failure to obey orders.

The response of the police in the recent protests reflects a mood of fear and panic. This feeling that their grip on control is extremely fragile must certainly be felt in the upper echelons of power in the US as well. On Monday evening, newly elected Maryland Governor Larry Hogan declared a state of emergency and mobilized the National Guard. A day later, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie agreed to send 150 State Troopers to Baltimore.

Photos and reports emerged over the weekend that rival gangs, the Bloods and Crips, have united to protest the Baltimore police. Baltimore police claimed the following day that they had credible evidence that the Bloods, Crips, and Black Guerrilla Family gangs are joining forces to target police officers, which was later denied in an interview with a number of Bloods and Crips members.

If such a successful or attempted assassination of police officers took place it would be counterproductive in the fight against police brutality and racism. Such an attack would be spun by the state and media to be used against the protesters in the same way that the killings of two NYPD officers in December were used in an attempt to steer public opinion into the arms of the state.

While it is easy to understand the anger and rage that many feel towards the police force, the way forward is through mass action, and not individual terrorist acts, in the fight against racism and police brutality. There are already solidarity protests planned in cities throughout the country, and we see the potential convergence of the #BlackLivesMatter movement and the Fight for $15 movement of low-wage workers in the next period.

This coming May Day, in major US cities, combined rallies of #BlackLivesMatter and Fight for $15, along with trade unionists and immigrant workers, are planned. This is a significant and positive instinct of the forces involved. After all, there is a lot of overlap, as many of the retail and fast food workers fighting for higher wages are also subjected to routine harassment by the police.

Additionally, in a bold example of the potential power of the organized working class, the International Longshore Workers Union, Local 10, called for a work stoppage on May Day to protest police brutality. ILWU, especially Local 10, has long been on the left of the labor movement. In 2008, they called a similar work stoppage to protest the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, most leaders of the labor movement havent been so keen to link arms with the #BlackLivesMatter movement.

Martin Luther King, Jr. once said that a riot is the language of the unheard, and it is evident that our current political system offers only empty rhetoric at best. It should be no surprise that some of the protest at injustices in our society are expressed in the form of rioting and looting, when all other protests have gone unheard.

If a bold lead were given by the labor movement to directly link and unite the struggles for higher wages, benefits, union rights, against police brutality, and against racism, the stage could be set for the formation of a new political party, using the immense resources of the labor movement to run candidates across the country and mobilize millions of workers and youth.

But the struggle wouldnt end there. A political party of the labor movement, while undoubtedly representing a political earthquake in the US and internationally, would be doomed to manage the crisis of capitalism unless it took on a program to fight for the socialist transformation of society by nationalizing the major industries and placing them under democratic, workers control. Only by eradicating the capitalist system, and the artificial scarcity and inhuman conditions it creates, can we begin to fundamentally address racism in our society.

Racism and police violenceand by extension the entire state apparatusare being questioned by millions of workers and youth throughout the country. As the crisis of capitalism wears on, this number will swell, and it will draw more and more people into struggle, not just against racism and police violence, but against the system that gives rise to both: capitalism.

But in order to effectively fight the capitalist system, what is required is the patient work of preparing the forces of Marxism in advance of the revolutionary events of the future. Many people have the sense that something big is coming, and they are correct in sensing this. As has been evidenced in the recent period, in todays conditions it merely takes one accidental event to trigger a mass movement. It is not if, but when a major explosion occurs in the United States that draws the broader layers of the working class into struggle.

But the question of whether or not that revolutionary energy can be channeled into a successful victory or not is up to the work Marxists do today. And it is with this perspective that we appeal to all of our readers to consider joining the International Marxist Tendency in the fight against racism, police brutality, and capitalism.

http://socialistworker.org/2015/04/29/the-baltimore-rebellionEditorials

The Baltimore Rebellion

Those denouncing protesters in Baltimore and calling for "nonviolence" ignore the far greater violence that the system inflicts every single day on Black communities.

April 29, 2015

IT TURNED out to be Baltimore.

Ever since the African American residents of Ferguson, Missouri, took to the streets for weeks and months of defiance, the question hasn't been whether their resistance would spread, but when it would, and where it would appear.

Ferguson cast a spotlight on the epidemic of racist police violence [2], committed with impunity, that plagues communities across the country. But the response from government officials in charge of keeping people safe--particularly from the women and men who are supposed to "serve and protect"--has been, at best, all talk and no action.

At worst, the response from the political and media elite has been scapegoating and demonization of the very people suffering the brunt of the abuse and violence.

There has been some talk in Congress about the absurd militarization of police departments [3] that now deploy state-of-the-art military technology distributed from the Pentagon's massive arsenal--but no action to take the tanks away. Barack Obama's Justice Department issued a strongly worded report criticizing the Ferguson Police Department for its bias--but it couldn't be bothered to press charges against the cop who murdered Mike Brown [4].

Thus, the only action to come from officials of the state has been the police--and we know what that has produced. Since the beginning of 2015, law enforcement officers have killed 381 people as of April 28 [5]--a horrifying rate of more than one murder every eight hours.

One of these murders was bound to produce the next social explosion--which, of course, was presented in the media as senseless "rioting."

There were signs in Madison, Wisconsin, where anti-racists responded within hours to the March killing of unarmed 19-year-old Tony Robinson in his friend's apartment [6]--followed by days of demonstrations, often led by high school students after a walkout from classes [7]. The pot continued to simmer a month later when the entire country watched a South Carolina officer fire eight bullets into the back of a fleeing Walter Scott [8].

And then the lid blew off in Baltimore after police chased and tackled Freddie Gray for a 21st century version of a Black Code violation: making eye contact with a cop and then running. Gray was "folded up like origami," in the gruesome words of one eyewitness [9], and by the time he emerged from a police van, he had a nearly severed spinal chord and crushed voice box.

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THOUSANDS OF mostly Black people in Baltimore took to the streets during the week after Gray died. But it was the provocations of the Baltimore police that prodded protesters into physical confrontations that reportedly caused injuries to 15 police officers. (As for how many people the cops "reportedly" injured, we can't say because there is no "reporting" on that.)

The first major clashes started at Mondawmin Mall, the gathering point for a social media call for high school students to protest. The cops showed up in full Robo-cop riot gear, closed the local transit station so the students couldn't get home, and then confronting the youth with mace and Tasers. No surprise that rocks got thrown.

Now there is frantic talk in the national media about "violence" in Baltimore. That was missing for the past five years as Baltimore police killed 109 people, according to the ACLU [10].

Just in the last four years, the Baltimore Police Department paid out $5.7 million in brutality and civil rights settlements [11]. Victims include a 15-year-old boy riding a dirt bike, a 26-year-old pregnant accountant who had witnessed an assault, 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.

In this context, the media's frantic depictions of rock-throwing as an "outbreak of violence" in Baltimore can only be described as obscene. As Atlantic correspondent Ta-Nehisi Coates put it [12]:

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 yet Barack Obama, the first African American president in a country founded on slavery, presented himself as the con artist-in-chief when he denounced protesters as "criminals and thugs." "They're not making a statement. They are stealing," the president chided. "One burning building will be looped on television over and over and over again, and the thousands of demonstrators who did it the right way have been lost in the discussion."

For Obama to join the sanctimonious chorus condemning those who took to the streets in Baltimore is another slap in the face for a community facing the "heaps of violence." The president's words ignore the anger thousands of people who demonstrate in the supposed "right way"--yet still see unaccountable police unleashing violence against Black communities on a daily basis.

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THE ERUPTION in Baltimore is not a repeat of the resistance in Ferguson. It represents an expansion of the struggle, and its evolution onto new terrain.

Baltimore is similar to Ferguson in that both have a majority Black population that suffers abuse and violence at the hands of police, while enduring increasing inequality. The Baltimore metropolitan area has the 19th largest economic output in the U.S., but a Johns Hopkins study found that youth in poor neighborhoods [13] face conditions similar to their counterparts in Nigeria and India. As Dan Diamond wrote for Forbes [14]:

Black infants in Baltimore are almost nine times more likely to die before age 1 than white infants. AIDS cases are nearly five times more common in the African American community..."Only six miles separate the Baltimore neighborhoods of Roland Park and Hollins Market," interim Hopkins provost Jonathan Bagger said last year. "[B]ut there is a 20-year difference in the average life expectancy."

That's how Baltimore is like Ferguson. It is unlike Ferguson in that it is a major urban center in the heart of the Northeast Corridor and an hour's drive from the nation's capital. It is run by a Black political establishment and is, as one SocialistWorker.org contributor wrote on social media, "fully integrated into the post-civil rights landscape--a landscape that includes massive levels of segregation, intense concentrations of poverty and astounding brutality alongside a new Black middle class and political class."

Finally, thanks to shows like The Wire, Baltimore is probably second only to Detroit in its infamy as a city whose Black working class has been decimated by de-industrialization.

When Jacobin associate editor Shawn Gude described the scene in West Baltimore after a riot [15], he wrote: "[T]he most salient thing wasn't the destruction wrought by protesters--the cop car demolished, the payday loan store smashed up--but by capital: the decrepit, boarded-up row houses, hovels and vacants in a city full of them."

These conditions that form the backdrop to Freddie Gray's murder will force many activists in the Black Lives Matter movement to confront--as Martin Luther King and Malcolm X both did in another era--the intersections of racism and capitalism.

As King said in a speech less than a month before he was assassinated in 1968 [16]--words that were repeated many times on social media over the past week:

I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the [Black] poor has worsened over the last 12 or 15 years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity.

Opponents of injustice today face the task of building on the bitter anger and the desire to fight for change demonstrated by the eruptions in Ferguson, Baltimore and beyond.

We need to challenge the hypocrisy and lies about what happened this week on the streets of Baltimore, to organize toward some measure of justice in the here and now--starting with the indictment of the cops who murdered Freddie Gray, just as surely as if they pulled a trigger--and to put forward the vision of a different world worth fighting for, built on solidarity, democracy and justice.

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Published by the International Socialist Organization.Material on this Web site is licensed by SocialistWorker.org, under a Creative Commons (by-nc-nd 3.0) [17] license, except for articles that are republished with permission. Readers are welcome to share and use material belonging to this site for non-commercial purposes, as long as they are attributed to the author and SocialistWorker.org.

1. [1] http://socialistworker.org/department/Opinion/Editorials2. [2] http://socialistworker.org/2014/09/03/a-fight-for-justice-everywhere3. [3] http://socialistworker.org/2014/12/16/armed-occupation-inside-the-empire4. [4] http://socialistworker.org/2015/03/16/whos-being-attacked-in-ferguson5. [5] http://killedbypolice.net/6. [6] http://socialistworker.org/2015/03/09/protests-erupt-after-police-killing7. [7] http://socialistworker.org/2015/04/16/madison-students-take-to-the-streets8. [8] http://socialistworker.org/2015/04/16/the-epidemic-of-police-murders9. [9] http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/baltimore-city/bs-md-gray-video-moore-20150423-story.html10. [10] http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/crime/blog/bs-md-aclu-police-deaths-20150318-story.html11. [11] http://data.baltimoresun.com/news/police-settlements/12. [12] http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/04/nonviolence-as-compliance/391640/13. [13] http://www.ibtimes.com/youth-poverty-2014-baltimore-teens-worse-children-nigeria-173140414. [14] http://www.forbes.com/sites/dandiamond/2015/04/28/why-baltimore-burned/15. [15] https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/04/baltimore-freddie-gray-unrest-protests/16. [16] http://www.gphistorical.org/mlk/mlkspeech/17. [17] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0http://socialistworker.org/2015/04/29/apartheid-games-in-baltimoreComment: Dave Zirin

Apartheid games in Baltimore

Oriole Park at Camden Yards is a symbol of the inequality that underlies the explosive protests in Baltimore, writes Dave Zirin, in an article published at TheNation.com [1].

April 29, 2015

IF YOU don't understand Oriole Park at Camden Yards, then you can't understand why Baltimore exploded this week. If you don't understand Oriole Park at Camden Yards then you can't understand why what happened in Baltimore can replicate itself in other cities around the United States.

There was a moment at Saturday's protests--two weeks after the police severed the spine of Freddie Gray--when Baltimore PD revealed themselves. I was there and can tell you that for most of the day it was stunning how light the police presence appeared to be. They made the choice to turn the West Baltimore police station, whose officers arrested Freddie Gray, into an armed encampment, while giving the streets over to the march. Yes, helicopters and surveillance drones flew overhead, but police were largely absent. For me, this was not comforting. The only other times I have seen these kinds of security tactics at a demonstration was in Latin America and South Africa, where the appearance of no police would be given, but then you would turn a corner and they would explosively appear, sometimes out of a cloud of tear gas.

This is what happened as the march left the confines of West Baltimore and approached Camden Yards where the Orioles were playing the Boston Red Sox. As Jelani Cobb reported in The New Yorker [2],

There was a comparatively light police presence along the route, but dozens of officers in riot gear blocked the crowd from getting near the stadium, which seemed to confirm the protesters' most damning suspicions. A man near the front shouted, "They only care about the Orioles!"

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CAMDEN YARDS has for twenty-five years been praised not only as the heart of Baltimore's "urban renewal" but also as a template for every city like Baltimore that had seen their manufacturing base disappear and with it, decent paying union jobs. That's why we have seen similar ballparks, big on charm and big on public subsidies, built over the last generation in--to name a just a sampling--Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, Chicago's South Side, and Pittsburgh. All of these cities were at one time synonymous with industry and multiracial labor power. Now they have boarded up factories--or factories that have been transformed into coffee shops or bars--and sports stadiums. These stadiums were all built with the promise of an attendant service economy that could provide jobs and thriving city centers, with restaurants mushrooming around the fun and games. If we didn't know it before, the scene at Camden Yards should carve it permanently into the tablets of history: this sports-centric urban planning has been a failure. It's been an exercise in corporate welfare and false political promises. What the stadiums have become instead are strategic hamlets of gentrification and displacement. They have morphed into cathedrals to economic and racial apartheid, dividing cities between haves and have-nots, between those who go to the game to watch and those who go to the game looking for low-income work.

Ironically, the only person who seems to understand this dynamic among the elites of Baltimore is Orioles COO John Angelos [3].

This is ironic not only because of his social position but because his father, team owner Peter Angelos--a man who grew up working-class and made his fortune in labor law--was involved in a bitter struggle with stadium workers, some who lived in area homeless shelters, over paying them a living wage. I covered this story in 2007 [4] and can still recall the courage, bitterness and sadness of stadium workers who felt like they had no choice but to go on a hunger strike to draw attention to their treatment. During this struggle, the talk about the Orioles in West Baltimore wasn't about whether the team could win the pennant but why the people were being treated with so much contempt.

This reality of sports-driven apartheid was made even clearer outside the stadium on Saturday, as a familiar scene to Orioles and Ravens fans--one I have seen countless times--entered the same oxygen as the West Baltimore demonstrators.

The panorama is as familiar to me as it is repulsive: almost exclusively young, white fans, from the surrounding suburbs or the city's gentrifying neighborhoods, show up and get absolutely shit-faced drunk and either aggressively hit on random women or fight. I've seen more scuffles outside of sporting events in the last decade than my wife has seen teaching in a DC public high school and it's not even close. On Saturday, these fans acted like they always act, except this time they turned their taunting, frat-house, Tucker Carlson comedy routines outward at the people who had marched the physically short but politically transgressive distance from West Baltimore. Not shockingly, confrontations ensued, although, with much of the cellphone video coming from inside the sports bars, the events have been wildly distorted.

Whenever Black people, out of frustration with police brutality, institutionalized poverty and neglect express this anger, there are endless cable news blatherings about what are called "pathologies" in poor Black communities. The discussion about the "pathologies" of violent, largely white sports fans acting barbarically before and after games is long past due. But CNN's Erin Burnett doesn't hold debates about why it's appropriate to call them "thugs."

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THIS SPEAKS to the stunningly different realities that exist in our cities: who gets policed and who gets to play. A publicly funded stadium is not the root cause of what plagues our cities, but it's a flashing, blaring sign of a set of economic priorities that like sports has created a country that defines people as winners or losers--but, unlike sports, a country where the happenstance of your birth determines on what side of that line you reside. This is not a Baltimore story. It's the United States in 2015.

The latest breaking news is that the Orioles have decided to return to the field this week after canceling several games due to the protests, but will do so in front of an empty stadium--no fans (or workers) allowed inside.

This locking out of spectators has long been done in European soccer leagues as punishment aimed at fan clubs for engaging in coordinated acts of racism or bigotry against either visiting fans or opposing players. That is not why the fans are being locked out in Baltimore, although perhaps that wouldn't be the worst idea in the world for everyone to take a time out.

This decision was clearly made on public safety grounds, but there will be something haunted about the visuals that will ensue. Whenever the Orioles play away from home, the surrounding commercial neighborhood can resemble a ghost town, revealing the inability of sports to act as an economic stimulus. Now the inside of the stadium will be the ghost town. No fans. No workers. No screaming. No cheering. As quiet as Freddie Gray.

First published at TheNation.com [5].

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Published by the International Socialist Organization.Material on this Web site is licensed by SocialistWorker.org, under a Creative Commons (by-nc-nd 3.0) [6] license, except for articles that are republished with permission. Readers are welcome to share and use material belonging to this site for non-commercial purposes, as long as they are attributed to the author and SocialistWorker.org.

1. [1] http://www.thenation.com/blog/205561/apartheid-games-baltimore-urban-america-and-camden-yards2. [2] http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/baltimore-and-the-state-of-american-cities3. [3] http://hardballtalk.nbcsports.com/2015/04/27/orioles-coo-john-angelos-puts-baseball-and-civil-rights-and-protests-in-perspective/4. [4] http://www.thenation.com/article/cleaning-after-orioles5. [5] http://www.thenation.com/blog/205561/apartheid-games-baltimore-urban-america-and-camden-yards6. [6] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0http://socialistworker.org/2015/04/28/sources-of-the-eruption-in-baltimoreComment: Dave Zirin

Sources of the eruption in Baltimore

April 28, 2015

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On Monday night, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan ordered the National Guard to move into Baltimore to quell protests that erupted after the funeral of Freddie Gray, a Black man who died on April 19, one week after his spine was nearly severed and his voice box crushed following his arrest by Baltimore police officers. Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake also ordered schools closed and instituted a 10 p.m. curfew.

After days of demonstrations, inflamed by an increasingly militarized response from police that included deliberate provocations against protesters expressing their frustration and anger at Freddie Gray's death, the protests reached a new stage on April 27. Several stores and police cars were damaged, and police officers were reportedly injured in clashes where bricks and rocks were thrown at them.

Right-wing pundits like Tucker Carlson labeled the protests a "threat to civilization itself," but the media have been less willing to show police provocations, including cops driving armored vehicles onto the sidewalk as a means of "crowd dispersal," [1] and the deliberate closure of portions of Baltimore's transit system, which stranded high school students and forced them into confrontations with heavily armed police as they tried to get home.

In a press conference on Monday, Rawlings-Blake decried "senseless" property damage caused by "thugs." But the anger provoked by Freddie Gray's death has been building for years--the result of entrenched racism and economic inequality, not to mention the long history of police brutality and killings, mainly of African American men.

As Rev. Graylan Hagler, a civil rights activist born in Baltimore and based in Washington, D.C., wrote on social media [2]: "[The] media may call it rioting, but the confrontations are targeted against law enforcement. It is clear that law enforcement has created such animosity and anger among young Black males here in [Baltimore] that the killing of Freddie Gray was the proverbial straw to break the camels back. Also, [Baltimore] political leaders cannot speak with any moral authority because they have presided all these years over increasingly devastated neighborhoods, unemployment and despair."

In an article published earlier on Monday [3], Dave Zirin, sports columnist for The Nation and a participant in last weekend's protests in Baltimore, wrote about the tensions that led to the eruption of anger in the city. Stay tuned to SocialistWorker.org in the coming days for continuing coverage of the struggle for justice.

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I WAS at the Saturday protests in Baltimore aimed at seeking justice for Freddie Gray [4], the young man who died while in police custody, his spine severed and neck broken. This column is about what took place inside Oriole Park at Camden Yards, where fans were told on orders from Baltimore's Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and Police Commissioner Anthony Batts to stay inside the stadium following the Os' extra-innings victory over the Boston Red Sox, rather than risk the "violence" of protesters.

But before we go to the baseball field, let's make one thing clear: Most everything the media reported about the Baltimore protests has skirted the line between the highly sensationalistic and the libelous. Every headline and photo has focused on property damage, allegedly done by those protesting for Freddie Gray. Played down or ignored is the Baltimore I saw: a place where more than 2,000 people--including families and children--marched resolutely while helicopters and visible surveillance drones flew overhead.

This is not to say people are not enraged with a city police department that, beyond Freddie Gray, has a proven record of seeing Black lives as expendable [5]. A young woman named Tracey who told me she grew up in the same apartment complex as Freddie Gray said that she was marching because "[t]he police aren't going to stop making us afraid unless we show them that we're not scared. Not one more sister or brother should die at their hands."

That story, the one where a portion of the city--the Black, economically ignored portion--lives in dread of police violence and was marching not just for Freddie Gray but against the history of the Baltimore Police Department, was not the story the media chose to tell. Instead, they chose headlines like this [6] to tingle the synapses of those who have little to fear from police, poverty or street crime, but never seem to feel more alive than when they feel afraid. It's unconscionable, just as it was unconscionable for the Baltimore police union to call protesters "a lynch mob," [7] just as it was unconscionable for the city to take the actions it did at Camden Yards.

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ON SATURDAY, after the Baltimore chief of police and mayor ordered the fans to stay inside Camden Yards, the Orioles faithful were "given instructions of areas [of the city] to avoid." This detaining of thousands of fans for their own "protection" only lasted a few minutes, but its effects have been far-reaching. Whether intentional or not, it was more than just an overly cautious overreaction. It was a message sent out across the country that this protest was not only unlawful, but something to be feared.

Camden Yards morphed from a field into a fortress. It became a stadium dividing a city between haves and have-nots: a barrier erected on the foundations of racial and economic inequality, dressed in the trappings of spectacle and sports. That it was built with the tax dollars of those on both sides of the divide just makes the situation all the more dismal.

Camden Yards is universally recognized as a terrific place to watch a baseball game. It was also the first of a wave of publicly funded urban old-timey ballparks that sprouted in cities throughout the 1990s. These extremely lucrative stadiums were aimed at aligning baseball commercially with nostalgia for the glorious past of the sport. As baseball fanatic Chris Rock recently pointed out [8], Major League Baseball's fetishizing of its history over the last 30 years has paralleled a steep decline in popularity within the Black community, and this is more than incidental. As Rock said, "Every team is building up bullshit fake antique stadiums that are supposed to remind you of the good old days. You know the good old days. Ruth, DiMaggio...Emmett Till."

As much as Major League Baseball likes to slather itself in the memory of Jackie Robinson and the idea that it has been a force for community cohesion, the reality is that it has done more to partition communities where the only way some residents can get into stadiums they are subsidizing with their tax dollars and cable bills is if they're serving beers.

One could imagine a situation where people inside Camden Yards would have to confront with their own eyes the reality that a young man, who did not look all that different from some of the people they were cheering on the field, was killed a short Uber ride away. They could confront the fact that the same police officers protecting them have a frightening history [9] that is being dragged out into public view since the death of Freddie Gray. They could confront the bracing defense of the protesters that has actually come from Baltimore Orioles COO John Angelos, who took to Twitter in a series of messages and said, in part [10]:

We need to keep in mind people are suffering and dying around the U.S., and while we are thankful no one was injured at Camden Yards, there is a far bigger picture for poor Americans in Baltimore and everywhere who don't have jobs and are losing economic civil and legal rights, and this makes inconvenience at a ballgame irrelevant in light of the needless suffering government is inflicting upon ordinary Americans.

Instead, on the mayor's orders they were locked in, a message sent not only to those inside but the world that the real enemies of civic peace are the ones looking for justice.

First published at TheNation.com [11].

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Published by the International Socialist Organization.Material on this Web site is licensed by SocialistWorker.org, under a Creative Commons (by-nc-nd 3.0) [12] license, except for articles that are republished with permission. Readers are welcome to share and use material belonging to this site for non-commercial purposes, as long as they are attributed to the author and SocialistWorker.org.

1. [1] https://www.facebook.com/wjlatv/videos/10153285484733734/?fref=nf2. [2] https://www.facebook.com/gshagler/posts/10205856035615691?pnref=story3. [3] http://www.thenation.com/blog/205377/camden-yards-and-baltimore-protests-freddie-gray4. [4] http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/04/the-mysterious-death-of-freddie-gray/391119/5. [5] http://mappingpoliceviolence.org/cities6. [6] http://www.wibw.com/home/headlines/Protestors-Turn-Violent-As-Crowds%E2%80%94301335781.html7. [7] http://gawker.com/baltimore-police-union-compares-freddie-gray-protests-t-16997226098. [8] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFFQkQ6Va3A9. [9] http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/04/23/baltimore-has-a-history-of-accidentally-killing-its-perps.html10. [10] http://ftw.usatoday.com/2015/04/orioles-john-angelos-baltimore-protests-mlb11. [11] http://www.thenation.com/blog/205377/camden-yards-and-baltimore-protests-freddie-gray12. [12] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0http://socialistworker.org/2015/04/27/in-the-streets-for-freddieComment: Alana Davenport

We have a right to be in the streets for Freddie

Alana Davenport reports on the escalating protests against the murder of Freddie Gray.

April 27, 2015

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 [1].

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" [2]--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 [3]--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."

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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.

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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" [4]--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."

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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 [5] 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.

Ben Blake contributed to this article.

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1. [1] http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/04/the-mysterious-death-of-freddie-gray/391119/2. [2] http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/police-responsible-death-freddie-gray/3. [3] http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/police-seatbelt-policy-freddie-gray-305345884. [4] http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/politics/bs-md-freddie-gray-march-pressers-20150425-story.html5. [5] http://bmoreunited.org/6. [6] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0