The killing Mr. Gray while in police custody was sort of the match, if you will, that sort
of lit something that had been fueling for years. Those neighborhoods had been suffering
from inequality, segregation, racially and economically.
They are X’ed out of the labor market. They have insufficient education.
They’ve been sucked out of the communities in large numbers and dropped into the juvenile justice
and criminal justice system. And structurally, they don’t have a way to participate.
They have an expectation of incarceration because they see that happening to all of
their friends and neighbors and siblings. And that creates a real anger and frustration.
You’re beginning to see people express that anger and frustration around these extreme
acts of violence.
Many of the communities within urban America are closed societies.
I think the history of racial inequality in this country has really compromised our ability
to treat people fairly.
Sometimes racism is held by an individual. There’s really individual bias. But more
often than not, it’s a systemic kind of racism—sometimes we call it structural racism.
I don’t think that diversity is the barrier. You’ve got a black mayor, a black police
chief in the city of Baltimore. You’ve really got to deal with the core problems of under-employment
and under-education and a chronic poverty. That’s the way you change a city.
One of the things that this uprising presented was really a police system that is not working.
Where people feel harassed. Where there’s way too many arrests. There’s an
institution here that’s not being held accountable.
We need more communication and transparency to provide the public with consistent, immediate
information about what the police are doing.
That arms advocates and communities to demand that these are the sets of ways in which they
are being policed by their departments.
And empathy is absolutely an indispensable ingredient of true justice.
It’s absolutely unconscionable that when children in urban schools participate
in really minor infractions that we suspend them and we expel them from school and
we set them on a pathway to the criminal justice system as opposed to building within our school
system and keep that child in school.
We spent six billion dollars on jails and prisons in 1980. We spent eighty billion dollars
last year and there’s a lot you can do to help the poor and communities of color recover
not only from lack of jobs and education, from drug dependency and drug use but from
all kinds of structural problems. We could actually really resurrect hope.
I think Ferguson, Freddie Gray, I think these incidents are gonna communicate to people
that the old way of doing things, the old way of policing, the old way of addressing
substance abuse and structural poverty are failures. And so new ways are gonna have to
be undertaken. And I think that’s gonna happen.
We do need to shape the narrative. Yes, there was a night of just absolute chaos, but the
very next morning the community came together and cleaned up. No elected official called
for it and said, “Let us all come together.” The residents
of Baltimore city and the residents of those communities took ownership and responsibility
and they started the cleanup process.
My office is directly across the street from the church where Freddie was laid to rest.
That night, we stayed at the church close to midnight with a group of adult men,
from the gangs and from other walks of life and over the course of that dialogue we began
to see all of us as equals. It has truly invigorated, particularly a younger
cohort of activists who before now were not activists.
That kind of enthusiasm, that kind of hopefulness will actually change what the equation is
for our political leaders and that they themselves will demand, different kinds of programs
and practices so that people really have much more justice and equality.
I like what I see out my window when I’m driving to work. I see hope. I see children
in playgrounds. I see the entire intersection of North and
Pennsylvania singing in unison. And this latest unrest and difficulty actually
bolsters my belief that the city is on the rise.
And so we have to take advantage of this moment and turn it into a movement.