White Girl Bleed a Lot (23 page)

I guess he was that kind of kid. And at the protest riot at least one politician was egging on the crowd, telling them the police were causing racial violence.

This of course does not count the entire city of Camden all the time.

Baltimore bells the cat.

I
n the first edition of this book, we talked about Baltimore and the Inner Harbor, but not that much.

My bad.

Like Minneapolis, Baltimore is a mess of denial and lawlessness.

In the first edition of this book I talked about how “police spent hours trying to control a mob of teenagers at the Inner Harbor” where one teen was stabbed. The city of Baltimore imposed “a curfew, hoping situations like that one don’t happen again.” When the book came out, I received an email from a Baltimore crime reporter who said because the groups of black people did not say they were racially motivated, then the crimes were not racial.
¹

So dozens of examples of racial crime and violence went unreported. Baltimore—especially the downtown tourist area called the Inner Harbor—has been a hotbed of racial violence with large groups of black people attacking white tourists for several years. But few knew about it.

But that changed in April of 2012 when a video of a black mob beating, stripping, and mocking a white tourist went viral. The police downplayed the incident, insisting for the bazillionth time that the Inner Harbor was safe. Just look at the statistics, they insisted.

Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake called the episode in April a “bar brawl.” And the
Baltimore Sun
suggested that violence at the Inner Harbor was part of an “Easter Tradition” of “kids milling around.”
²

I guess they figure if there are no police reports, there is no crime. And that is what was (and is) happening in Baltimore. Several weeks after the video shocked the world,
The Baltimore Sun
came out with a story that showed that the violence connected to that event was far more violent than the police said. “We had over 500 people come from different sides of town. But they didn’t take over,” said Maj. Dennis Smith, commander of the Central District. All black people, witnesses said. “But the tapes reveal other calls as well. Among them were a fight that left a man unconscious on Redwood Street, guests at the Hyatt Regency Hotel being harassed, and frightened youngsters taking refuge inside a Days Inn to escape an angry mob. … There was a lot of people, fighting, arguing, cursing, fists flying,” he said. “You didn’t know who was fighting who. Police were there and they did their best, to be honest, but it looked like the number of police officers was not enough for that mob. It was scary.”
³

Then came Maryland state legislator Pat McDonough. He belled the cat.

McDonough said mobs of black people are “terrorizing” the
Inner Harbor. He called on the governor to send in the state troopers to make the neighborhood safe. In the meantime, he said Baltimore should be declared a “No-Travel Zone” because of the largely unreported black mob violence.

“[The Inner Harbor] is a dangerous place to visit,” said McDonough. “People, retired police officers, have been calling me telling me this has been going on for a long time and the city and the mayor are covering it up,” McDonough said.
⁴

McDonough’s “aha” moment came two months before when he and his wife were in the area for a charity fundraising dinner. “A mob of nearly 100 people ‘battling’ in the middle of the street. It was a pretty frightening sight.”
⁵

“There were no police around. No police reports. And no stories in the paper. Violence and mayhem among young black people in the Inner Harbor is the new norm,” said McDonough. “And this has to stop.”

McDonough’s comments were echoed by many callers to his talk show on WCMB in Baltimore, and by a New Jersey tourist as well. “My husband and I came to Inner Harbor last month and stayed at a hotel there,” said the visitor to Baltimore who did not wish to be identified. “That night, we looked out our hotel window and saw at least a hundred black people walking down the middle of the street, fighting and acting in a menacing way. The police did not show up for at least an hour. When I got back to New Jersey, I was curious about what happened. Then I learned there were no police reports. No newspaper stories. It was as if it had never happened.”

The Baltimore Sun
reported on the same incident:

There is a disconnect sometimes between what police see as normal and routine and what others view as scary.

When Denise Kostka and her husband saw a mob forming outside her downtown hotel, she became frightened.

She didn’t see a lot of police, the young teens were massing at the corners, and all the images of Baltimore that people have -- The Wire, the murder count, the drugs, instantly filled her head.

For the police, it was just another group of kids they had to push out of downtown. They made no arrests, saw no crime, had no reason to make an announcement. There’s not even a report – it’s just something that happens.
⁶

The St. Patrick’s Day riot was just one of several violent events featuring black people in the Inner Harbor.

One mile away from the Inner Harbor, in Upper Fells Point, a group of eight to ten black teens attacked white residents in four separate cases in 2010.
⁷

In April 2011 another large group of black people was streaming through Inner Harbor, fighting and destroying property. “At least 100 teenagers roamed the streets near the Inner Harbor, City Hall, the Convention Center and the First Mariner Arena for more than two hours as police used megaphones to order them to leave.” One of the rioters was stabbed.
⁸

During Fourth of July fireworks in 2011, a child was shot and a tourist was killed among other violent episodes at the holiday celebration.

On March 18, 2012, hundreds of black people streamed into the Inner Harbor, with dozens of fights, a stabbing, threats and other violence that resulted in ten arrests. Police used a Taser on one of the suspects. Baltimore Police Maj. Bill Davis attributed “the rowdiness to the unusually hot weather.”
⁹

To put the April beating in “historical perspective,”
The Baltimore Sun
reprinted a story from 1995, where large groups of black people created violence during and after an annual Jazz concert.

[In 1993] the Rouse Co. ordered the Harborplace pavilions closed early after about 4,000 young people converged at the Inner Harbor. Although police reported no resulting crime or fighting among the youths, some people expressed fear and discomfort at the size and racial makeup of the crowd, which was largely black, and complained about a lack of security.

Rodney A. Orange, president of the Baltimore chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said black teens have complained to him that “they feel stereotyped. They only want to enjoy their evening, wherever they are going, but very often they’re looked at suspiciously.”
¹⁰

Not much has changed in a decade, except back then the media at least reported on the race of the mob, even if only to deny racial violence had anything to do with anything.

Back to the present, McDonough’s call for state police to protect the Inner Harbor from “black youths who are terrorizing” the area drew sharp rebuke from local elected officials and the media. Mayor Rawlings-Blake said McDonough’s request was a “racially charged publicity stunt,” A fellow legislator said McDonough was a race baiter.

The Baltimore Sun
called on the Maryland legislature to sanction McDonough.

Meanwhile, in neighboring Pennsylvania and Delaware, some were asking what took him so long.

In Philadelphia, after several years of large-scale violent episodes, some involving more than one thousand black people on the streets of South Philadelphia, Mayor Nutter reversed his stand that the riots were “really not much,” had no racial component, and were the fault of “poor reporting.”

Less than a month later, according to the
Philadelphia Daily News
, he confessed his change of heart in front of a Philadelphia Baptist Church:

“You have damaged your own race,” he said of the rioters. “Take those God-darn hoodies down, especially in the summer,” Mr. Nutter, the city’s second black mayor, said in an angry lecture aimed at black teens. “Pull your pants up and buy a belt ‘cause no one wants to see your underwear or the crack of your butt.”

The head of Philadelphia’s chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, J. Whyatt Mondesire, said it “took courage” for Mr. Nutter to deliver the message. “These are majority African-American youths and they need to be called on it,” Mr. Mondesire said.
¹¹

Nutter repeated his comments several times over the next months, and they were widely circulated in the blogoshpere.

In Delaware, violence among black teenagers was so rampant that the Black Elected Officials of New Castle County wrote a similar letter to the governor of Delaware, asking for the National Guard to patrol the streets of Wilmington. Former state Senator Herman Holloway Jr. said the violence was so bad and the police were so powerless that he and his friends might have to form their own vigilante group and go door-to-door in black neighborhoods to get the crime under control.

McDonough was seemingly unfazed by the whirlwind of criticism facing him for his remarks. “The Good Book says speak the truth and fear not,” he said. “And for everything they are calling me, you will notice they are not saying one thing. No one is saying that what I said is untrue.”
¹²

The Baltimore Sun
ran an editorial saying all sorts of bad things about McDonough.
¹³
Even as the newspaper was still on the stands, the racial violence and lawlessness began again:

In May 2012 two groups of high school students left their bus in the Inner Harbor and beat a white person. “The 19-year-old victim was white and the attackers were all juvenile black males,” the paper grudgingly reported.
¹⁴

In the same month, a melee at a downtown subway station sent two people to the hospital. “It was pandemonium, so you really didn’t know what was going on,” Sharon Allen, an Upton resident who witnessed parts of the fight said. Officials closed the station for three hours.
¹⁵

A few days later, a crowd of black people flash robbed a downtown 7-Eleven and beat the store manager when he resisted. “It was a lot of kids and they were out of control,” Kesha Chester, who was at the store at the time, said.
¹⁶

In June 2012 at the nearby University of Maryland, “three female students reported they had their property stolen on the McKeldin Mall … by a group of 10 people, one of whom allegedly grabbed the buttocks of one of the students, police said.”
¹⁷

The assailants were described as “eight black males and two black females.”

Note to University of Maryland journalism students: I don’t like your chances at MSNBC. You need to refrain from mentioning race and from assuming it was the attacker’s fault in order to be a “big time” reporter. Consider the next story. A Baltimore police reporter was another who took issue with the term race riots. Yes, the rioters were black. Yes, it was a riot. But unless they say it is a race riot, then it is not. No problem.

It gets crazier.

City officials in Baltimore knew exactly what to do when a mob of black people beat John Mason almost to death. They blamed the victim.

The mob assault took place in the summer of 2012 at a downtown bus stop, in front of cameras, in the middle of the
day, on a crowded street. According to a witness, Mason was “already knocked unconscious and the guy sat there and held his feet while his homeboy just started stomping on his head.” Mason is in critical condition and lies in a medically induced coma in a Baltimore hospital.