The Intolerable Tension Bet. Cities & Their Police

I li ved in Baltimore during the Freddie Gray protests in April, 2015. My apartment was in a brownstone next to a small park in a pretty neighborhood called Bolton Hill, which sits on the border between downtown and the West Baltimore neighborhoods where the upheaval was centered. A central image of those riots was a burning CVS at Pennsylvania and North Avenues; that store was about ten blocks from my house. My wife and I lived on the third floor of the brownstone, with our toddler daughter and infant son, and on the evening of April 27th, as things escalated, I sat on the stoop for a little while with an architect who lived downstairs, watching our normally quiet block. Car after car drove by, most of them full of young people. Another neighbor said that a grocery store and a pharmacy three blocks from us were being looted, but on our block no one was out of control. People were on their phones texting, they were looking out their windows. Something important was happening, and they were gathering information. Read Full Article »