Freddie Gray – The Burning Platform

Something Went Wrong In Baltimore

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 01/01/2016 21:00 -0500

It has been a bloody year in Baltimore, that much everyone knows, but as The Economist shows, something changed dramatically after Freddie Gray’s death in April…

On November 14th the police department reported the city’s 300th homicide in 2015, a total not seen since 1999.

The surge in killings in the majority-black city of roughly 623,000 began after the death on April 19th of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man who was fatally injured while in police custody. Since Mr Gray’s death the city has recorded 244 homicides, a 78% increase over the same period in 2014, representing more than 100 additional deaths.

Criminologists and city officials disagree as to the causes:

Some say police have deliberately pulled back from poor, black neighbourhoods, a theory that the police disputes.
Others blame an influx of drugs from pharmacies looted during the April riots.
A third theory is that a decline in trust between the police and the policed has had deadly consequences: fewer residents talk to the police, which leads to fewer murders being solved, which – by lowering the odds of being caught – results in more murders.

Whatever the reason, the killing continues. Just hours after the 300th murder, police reported a shooting in the city’s Westport neighbourhood, the fourth homicide of the day. The total for the year now stands at 305.

Hillary Blames the Cops

Guest Post by Patrick J. Buchanan

Had Freddie Gray been robbed, beaten and left to die in the streets of his Baltimore neighborhood, no one would be mourning him today.

No one would be marching for Freddie. No one would be using Freddie as the new poster child of “Black Lives Matter!”

No one would care, three weeks later, but his family and friends.

It was the manner of his death, suffering a fractured spine in police custody, that makes Freddie matter. For he can now be credibly cast in the victim’s role in the great new narrative against America — that ours is a society of unequal justice where racist cops routinely brutalize black men and boys and are rarely called to account.

In this narrative, the liberal is always the hero.

Hillary Clinton knows the narrative by heart and has rushed forward to cast herself as the champion of black America.

As The Washington Times reports, Hillary declared Wednesday she would help to end a “pattern” of cops killing black men.

“There is something wrong when a third of all black men face the prospect of prison during their lifetimes. And an estimated 1.5 million black men are ‘missing’ from their families and communities because of incarceration and premature death. …

“My heart beaks for these young men and their families. We have to come to terms with some hard truths about race and justice in America.”

We certainly do, Hillary.

She specifically mentioned Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown.

But Trayvon died when he was shot sitting on top of and beating senseless a neighborhood watch guy, “martial arts style,” and banging his head on the sidewalk as he screamed for help.

Michael Brown died of gunshot wounds when, after knocking over a convenience store and throttling the clerk in Ferguson, Missouri, he tried to wrestle a gun from a cop, and, told to halt, charged the officer.

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WHOSE FAULT IS BALTIMORE?

I’ve seen the liberal lying MSM pondering how WE could allow the riots, looting, burning and lawlessness to happen, as if it is our collective fault. Obama stands before his teleprompter and pontificates about the need for us to end the poverty that supposedly led to Purge Night in Charm City. That term cracks me up. The city has so much charm, its football team once snuck out of town overnight and headed to Indianapolis. It has so much charm its baseball team was forced to play a game with no fans in the stands.

I think most people can agree that Freddie Gray, a petty drug dealer, was killed in police custody for the crime of looking suspicious. The policemen who killed him deserve to go to jail for murder. As usual, the powers that be circled the wagons and intended to exonerate the hero first responders. The people of Baltimore had a right to be pissed. They had a right to protest. They didn’t have a right to burn businesses and cars. They didn’t have the right to riot, loot, and injure others.

It is the police department created and controlled for decades by Democratic progressive politicians that has committed the atrocities against the people who have been electing these progressives year after year. Baltimore has a corrupt, reckless, out of control police department enabled by a crooked and incompetent Baltimore politicians. The rap sheet for Baltimore’s finest is long:

Police commissioner Ed Norris was sent to prison on corruption charges (2004)
Two detectives were sentenced to 454 years in prison for dealing drugs (2005)
An officer was dismissed after being videotaped verbally abusing a 14-year-old and then failing to file a report on his use of force against the same teenager (2011)
An officer was been fired for sexually abusing a minor (2014)
The city paid a quarter-million-dollar settlement to a man police illegally arrested for the non-crime of recording them at work with his mobile phone.

The cries of racism and white oppression ring hollow. It’s a tired storyline. Facts are always inconvenient to race baiters with an agenda to extract more money from whites with a guilty conscience and the inability or unwillingness to speak the truth. Let’s examine some facts about good old Charm City, USA.

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BALTIMORE POLICE DEPARTMENT PURPOSELY STRANDED HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS

Via Mother Jones

After Baltimore police and a crowd of teens clashed near the Mondawmin Mall in northwest Baltimore on Monday afternoon, news reports described the violence as a riot triggered by kids who had been itching for a fight all day. But in interviews with Mother Jones and other media outlets, teachers and parents maintain that police actions inflamed a tense-but-stable situation.

The funeral of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man who died in police custody this month, had ended hours earlier at a nearby church. According to the Baltimore Sun, a call to “purge”—a reference to the 2013 dystopian film in which all crime is made legal for one night—circulated on social media among school-aged Baltimoreans that morning. The rumored plan—which was not traced to any specific person or group—was to assemble at the Mondawmin Mall at 3:00 p.m. and proceed down Pennsylvania Avenue toward downtown Baltimore. The Baltimore police department, which was aware of the “purge” call, prepared for the worst. Shortly before noon, the department issued a statement saying it had “received credible information that members of various gangs…have entered into a partnership to ‘take-out’ law enforcement officers.”

When school let out that afternoon, police were in the area equipped with full riot gear. According to eyewitnesses in the Mondawmin neighborhood, the police were stopping busses and forcing riders, including many students who were trying to get home, to disembark. Cops shut down the local subway stop. They also blockaded roads near the Mondawmin Mall and Frederick Douglass High School, which is across the street from the mall, and essentially corralled young people in the area. That is, they did not allow the after-school crowd to disperse.

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