I lived 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.
Eventually, I decided to write about the uprising, and met a senior figure in the Baltimore Police Department named Melvin Russell. He is as vivid in my memory as anyone I’ve written about, perhaps because it is rare to see a powerful person be so hugely sad. A Baltimore native and career city cop, Russell led the B.P.D.’s citywide community-policing division, and for him community policing was both a professional program and a creed. He had deployed it in some of the poorest neighborhoods in Baltimore, especially in the Eastern District. He was sure that the officers under his command had managed to narrow the gap between themselves and their community, and that this was at least part of the reason for a decline in violent crime in those neighborhoods, and for an increase in the number of crimes being solved. During that last week of April, as the chaos deepened, Russell noticed that, in many of the most unsettled parts of West Baltimore, cops were nowhere to be found. Russell, who is black, had worked in the Baltimore Police Department for more than thirty years, and he was not naïve about the racism within its ranks: he had six sons and two daughters, and he said that he and his wife had moved to the far suburbs in part because they wanted to keep their children safe from the Baltimore cops. But it still seemed to surprise him, in a deep and unpleasant way, to see the police simply retreat when they were most needed.
The general tragedy of the Freddie Gray riots unfolded from there. From 2008 to 2014, there were between a hundred and ninety-seven and two hundred and forty homicides each year in Baltimore; since Freddie Gray’s killing, there have never been fewer than three hundred. The city’s mayor at the time—a quiet, serious-minded black woman named Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, who had been seen as a rising star in the Democratic Party—eventually chose not to seek reëlection. As I understood it through Melvin Russell, there was a more specific tragedy, concerning the Baltimore Police Department, contained within the larger one: the liberal ethos of community policing had not actually taken hold in the department, at least not as deeply as he had hoped. In an emergency, too many police officers had abandoned it.
The political gap between the liberal mayors who run most big cities and the officers who help police them seems especially pronounced right now, as a cycle of police violence and counter-violence unfolds, in Minneapolis and perhaps beyond, after the killing of George Floyd. As the Black Lives Matter movement matured, from a sequence of protests into a more permanent political orientation, most liberal mayors usually tried hard to keep up, though this pattern seemed to make some police unions more reactionary and outspoken. Meanwhile, visual evidence of police killings, from body cameras or mobile phones, has made the circumstances of those deaths more difficult for anyone to complicate or excuse. A set of written witness statements and investigative reports, reviewed in City Hall, can leave some ambiguity about who is right and who is wrong; a video of a police officer in Minneapolis kneeling for nine minutes on the neck of a man who is not resisting and saying that he can’t breathe, as life drains from him, leaves no room at all. There’s only one honest reaction. The mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, expressed it out loud this week: “Why is the man who killed George Floyd not in jail?”
A whole generation of Democratic mayors have seen their reputations defined by their inability to manage the aftermath of police killings: Rawlings-Blake in Baltimore, Rahm Emanuel in Chicago, Bill de Blasio in New York, Pete Buttigieg in South Bend. (Political pundits often wonder why the “bench” of Democratic Presidential candidates is so thin; looking at that list, it doesn’t seem like such a mystery to me.) One reaction, in some of the most progressive cities, has been to elect new leaders who champion activist causes, especially reform-minded prosecutors: Larry Krasner in Philadelphia; Kim Foxx in Cook County, Illinois; Rachael Rollins in Suffolk County, Massachusetts; Chesa Boudin in San Francisco. This, in turn, has kicked up so much resistance from law enforcement that, in many cases, reforms have been smothered, in a more pitted battle between progressive elected officials and the rank-and-file cops whose behavior they seek to change.
Like so much else in the Trump era, these tensions have been made worse by the President, whose political instincts are to divide and who talks so easily of violence. On Thursday night, after Minneapolis protesters set fire to a precinct station, Trump warned, on Twitter, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” This put everyone in an even more dangerous position: the protesters, who now had more reason to expect violence from law enforcement, and the police officers, who had been described, by the President, as likely to fire into a crowd.
The political authorities in Minnesota have acted decisively: the four officers who were at the scene of Floyd’s death were quickly fired, and, on Friday, the officer who killed him, Derek Chauvin, was charged with third-degree murder. Nonetheless, this Friday evening, things are on a knife’s edge in Minneapolis. Among the many questions is whether the gap between the nation’s liberal politicians and the police will continue to widen, or whether it can be reversed. In Minneapolis, there have been some promising signs: the city’s first black police chief, Medaria Arradondo, apologized to George Floyd’s family. Some police chiefs and police unions around the country have joined him in condemning Floyd’s killing. Even so, Mayor Frey has a difficult path ahead of him, because he has both a public audience, loud and enraged, and a private one composed of the police officers, whose voices are rarely heard by the general public and whose loyalty he needs to maintain order. As protesters surrounded the Minneapolis Third Precinct’s police station last night, Frey instructed the officers inside to evacuate. Soon it would burn. He said, “The symbolism of a building cannot outweigh the importance of a life.”
