One no longer need venture into the depths of colonial Africa to discover the heart of darkness, or to experience a society so degenerate that it inspires stark exclamations of horror. Contemporary America's own heart of darkness can be found in the physical, moral, and societal ruins of the wretched inner city of Baltimore, Maryland.
Splashing Rocks has previously noted the decline of the city that has been described in more peaceful times as Charm City or, even more absurdly, The Land of Pleasant Living. See The Barbarians of Baltimore, at http://splashingrocks.blogspot.com/2014/09/the-barbarians-of-baltimore.html. That post focused on the deeply deranged fans of the Baltimore Ravens NFL team, who went out of their way to flaunt their enthusiastic support and affection for the violence-prone Ravens running back, Ray Rice, despite (or perhaps because of!) the viral video evidence of Rice brutalizing and dragging the hapless woman who was then his fiance.
But the mindless degeneracy exposed in the Ray Rice episode was relatively mild compared to the depths of degradation to which Baltimore, its leaders, and large elements of its population have descended in the wake of the so-called Freddie Gray incident and the orgy of urban savagery that ensued.
Freddie Gray was a recidivist drug-dealer and multi-purpose criminal who was arrested by Baltimore police in a high-traffic illegal drug market for possession of an illegal switchblade knife in early April. He later died due to injuries that have been attributed to police abuse or negligence during his transport to the station house.
The insidious liberal media (especially CNN and MSNBC) pounced on the incident -- which was otherwise a purely local story -- as another opportunity to cultivate an incendiary narrative of purported police brutality against blameless black suspects. As though on cue, black racial agitators in the Al Sharpton mold pounced to exploit the situation with the kind of inflammatory race-baiting rhetoric that has become de rigueur in these incidents. The predictable result was an extended frenzy of barbaric and violent rioting in the streets of Baltimore.
Anyone who thinks 21st century America embodies an advanced and enlightened civilization should be required to watch the videos of the atavistic pillaging, arson, robbery, and general marauding that laid waste to large portions of Baltimore during the period April 18 to May 3. On the bogus pretext of protesting police misconduct that allegedly caused Gray's death, hordes of African-American thugs burned, vandalized, and robbed hapless Baltimore stores and businesses -- especially pharmacies, from which they made an enormous haul of drugs and narcotics -- and generally reduced Baltimore to a state of stark urban ruin.
Mayor Rawlings-Blake: "There are no thugs in Baltimore."
Both police and innocent citizens were assaulted at will. The police were virtually helpless in the face of the frenzied violence and pillaging because, as we shall see, the city's corrupt leadership was in open sympathy with the rioters, rather than with the police and the interests of law and order. Nothing so aptly illustrates the utter barbarism of the Baltimore riots than the pictures of frenzied feral delinquents stomping on the roofs of ransacked and disabled police cars.
The state of violence in Baltimore became so severe and menacing that even the sacrosanct American ritual of habitual professional sports attendance was violated. In one of the most eerie and dystopian spectacles of recent times, a Baltimore Orioles baseball game was played before an entirely empty stadium at Camden Yards. Neither the city nor the ball club could assure the basic safety of spectators, so the gates were closed. The unprecedented measure was understandable, however, as the violence surrounding the stadium during a previous Orioles game had resulted in fans and players being held hostage in the stadium until a lull in the hostilities allowed their reasonably safe exodus.
Such is the congenial atmosphere surrounding Baltimore's entertainment and civic culture. It might be called Beirut on the Patapsco, but that would be unfair to Beirut.
In this incendiary environment, strong and mature government leadership was needed to quell the criminal insurrection and restore a modicum of order and safety to the city. Instead, the Afro-racist Democrats who have run Baltimore since time immemorial aligned themselves emphatically on the side of the rioters and thugs, whom they perversely portrayed and defended as "civil rights demonstrators."
First on the scene was Baltimore's partisan, divisive, and grossly inept mayor, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, who doubles as Secretary of the Democratic National Committee when she is not presiding over the decay and desolation of her city. She promptly made the streets safe for the rioters, but dangerous for everybody else, when she required the police to stand down and refrain from confronting the rampaging criminal mobs.
She then made one of the most infamous expressions of deranged and wrong-headed governance in American history when she stated: "[W]e tried to make sure they [i.e., the rioters] were protected from the cars and the other things that were going on," and "we gave those who wished to destroy space to do that, as well." Incredibly, the mayor thus made it clear that her primary concern was the protection of the rioters, and she made sure that they would be given sufficient "space" to destroy and pillage in safety!
Not content with one infamous statement, she then declared that "there are no thugs in Baltimore," even as thousands of these homegrown "non-thugs" rampaged and ransacked at will within a stones throw from where she made her infamous remarks.
But Rawlings-Blake's deranged alignment with Baltimore's marauders was soon eclipsed by the even more deplorable performance of the now infamous Marilyn Mosby. Mosby is the sneering, callow young attorney who, despite her glaring lack of basic qualifications, is the elected States Attorney -- in effect, the DA -- for the City of Baltimore. It goes without saying that Mosby is black. Virtually the entire power structure of Baltimore's government (including the Chief of Police, Anthony Batts) is dominated by blacks, demonstrating the absurdity of the claims that the city's legions of lawless black males are victims of racially discriminatory law enforcement. In reality, the only racial group likely to face official discrimination in today's Baltimore is any group that is not black.
Ms. Mosby's professional, ethical, and prosecutorial transgressions in response to the Freddie Gray incident and ensuing riots would be sufficient to justify disbarment, removal from office, and general public disgrace in a sane and civilized community. In the deranged netherworld of riot-torn Baltimore, however, Mosby remains an ethnic and ideological heroine to many.
Mosby perpetrated one of the most disgraceful performances in prosecutorial history when she held a ranting, demagogic press conference to announce premature charges against the six beleaguered police officers who tried to perform their difficult jobs in the drug-infested streets where Freddie Gray and his ilk conduct their insidious business.
Mosby brazenly pandered to the urban barbarians when she declared that the patently excessive criminal charges (including murder and manslaughter) were issued in response to their rabid cries of "No justice, no peace!" She violated the most basic principles and rules of prosecutorial discipline and even-handedness when she declared herself the advocate for Freddie Gray, his family, and the vengeful street mobs, rather than the objective representative of the state in pursuing truth and justice, wherever it leads. And her decision to abruptly short-circuit the careful deliberation and consultation that would normally precede the leveling of such serious charges represented a crass abdication of prosecutorial responsibility in favor of race-based political expediency.
The sum effect of Mosby's divisive demagogy was to poison the jury pool against the embattled officers and to place the city's official blessing and imprimatur upon the barbaric street violence of Baltimore's rampaging rioters. The officers' attorneys hardly needed to compose an argument to justify a motion for change of venue, since Mosby's grossly prejudicial public rant wrote their argument for them.
Mosby then descended from ethical malfeasance to almost comical depths of legal and prosecutorial incompetence. Her inept office could not even accurately list the names and addresses of the officers named in the charging documents. As a result, the hapless citizens (a cafeteria worker and a plumber) who were mistakenly named on these public charges were exposed to threats, intimidation, and harassment from aggressive press inquiries.
Next, Mosby apparently erred in basing her false arrest charges on a mistaken assumption that the knife Freddie Gray was carrying was perfectly legal -- when it apparently was an illegal switchblade under Baltimore City's stricter weapons-carrying laws. When the defendants' lawyers demanded access to the critical knife to resolve this issue, Mosby absurdly responded by sniffing that she would not try the case in the media, and that it would be somehow "unethical" for her to reveal information about the knife.
This is utter nonsense, especially coming from the theatrical prosecutor who all but convicted the officers in her inflammatory press conference. Not only would providing the defendants access to the critical knife be completely "ethical," it would be required under the well-established Brady rule giving defendants' counsel a constitutional right to discovery of potentially exculpatory information.
But Mosby's appalling legal ineptitude and hypocrisy did not end there. The same partisan prosecutor who had seriously compromised the case with her "no justice, no peace" press conference then had the audacity to file a motion for a gag order seeking to prevent public discussion of the case. But with that remarkable incompetence that has been the hallmark of her performance, Mosby erroneously filed her motion in the Circuit Court while the case was still in the jurisdiction of the District Court. The court curtly rejected her mistaken motion, at least sparing all parties the necessity of watching the court demolish Mosby's ridiculous and legally flawed contentions.
Even as this post is written, however, Mosby has persisted in her perversity by re-filing her motion for a broad gag order, now that she has at last discovered the proper court. The radical prosecutor who all but certified the defendants' guilt in a nationally broadcast rant is frantically imploring the court to suppress public discussion of the Freddie Gray case and the potentially critical autopsy -- even after she and her Afro-racist allies have already poisoned public opinion against the officers. With regard to those officers, Mosby appears to have embraced the infamous maxim of the tyrannical Queen of Hearts portrayed in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: "Sentence first, verdict afterwords." And none of this free speech nonsense to allow the officers' side to seek to set the record straight.
The reckless responses of Mayor Rawlings-Blake and States Attorney Mosby to the Freddie Gray incident have since produced dangerous and deadly consequences even beyond the immediate destruction and desolation of the riots. And it bears emphasis that these two women are hardly alone in bearing culpability in this respect.
For months and years preceding the Freddie Gray incident, President Obama, former Attorney General Holder, and current Attorney General Loretta Lynch have stoked the fires of black urban resentment, racism, and violence by endorsing the malicious canard that young black males are unjustly persecuted by a pattern of discriminatory law enforcement. But the complete exoneration of Officer Darren Wilson for the justified self-defense shooting of the violent Michael Brown, after the Obama Administration had joined in the insidious campaign to portray Brown as the innocent victim of police racism, aptly demonstrated that the Administration-stoked narrative of discriminatory law enforcement was and is a fraud.
Yet in Ferguson, Baltimore, and elsewhere, police have been forced into a policy of defensive and diffident law enforcement due to the eagerness of the liberal media, the racial agitators, and pandering leftist politicians -- including Obama and his minions -- to pounce and condemn them whenever there is a confrontation with black perpetrators in the streets. In Baltimore, especially, the consequences have been immediate, palpable, and deadly.
Baltimore police now face the reality that any direct street enforcement action against black suspects will immediately motivate crowds of black sympathizers to surround them, often menacingly, and to start recording their every move with cell-phone cameras. The police now understand that the racial agitators and the media will pounce on any action they take that is even remotely questionable and seek to sensationalize it in the same manner we have seen in the Michael Brown and Freddie Gray cases. The hapless officers targeted in such episodes face the prospect of suspension and loss of their jobs -- not to mention the very real danger of vindictive physical threats and attacks -- merely for doing the dangerous job of protecting the very ingrates who are so keen to condemn them for doing it.
The dangerous and deadly consequences are not surprising. The incidence of murders and shootings in Baltimore has skyrocketed to unprecedented levels in the weeks following the Freddie Gray riots, even while the arrest rate has severely (and understandably) declined. The blame for this depressing state of affairs lays squarely at the feet of Baltimore's corrupt and incompetent leaders; the retrograde segment of the citizenry that is poised to pounce on the police for any enforcement action that offends black sensibilities; and, in a broader sense, the Obama Administration that has done so much to cultivate and sustain the insidious myth of discriminatory law enforcement against young black males.
As long as racially divisive elements in media, government, and politics continue to reinforce and exploit this canard, the destructive experience of Baltimore is apt to be repeated in cities throughout America.
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