The uncomfortable truth? Baltimore has problems. And
Democrats are to blame
Zaid Jilani
Trump’s tweets about Baltimore were inflammatory. But the
city’s poverty and crime are real, and liberals should shoulder the blame
Thu 1 Aug 2019 11.00 BST Last modified on Thu 1 Aug 2019
11.03 BST
Donald Trump’s incendiary commentary about the the city of
Baltimore – he called it a “rodent infested mess” – understandably outraged
many, including the editorial board of the Baltimore Sun, which quipped that it
is better for the city to have a few rats than to be one.
There is no doubt that Trump was using the city as a cudgel
to attack representative Elijah Cummings, a Maryland Democrat who is leading
oversight of the administration’s border policies, among other things. Of
course, it’s not entirely fair to blame Cummings for the state of west
Baltimore, the poorer, largely African American portion of the city. Individual
members of Congress do not dictate the social and economic conditions of their
district.
But that doesn’t mean we should ignore the troubled plight
of Baltimore, nor whitewash the culpability of a series of Democratic party
leaders who have failed to combat poverty, crime and disrepair in Charm City.
A few days before Trump issued his caustic tweets, a Muslim
civilian employee of the Baltimore police was walking down the street when
three teenagers knocked off his prayer cap, shoved him to the ground, and
stomped on his head. The man survived the attack, but it was shocking given
that it occurred in broad daylight and was captured by street cameras. Earlier
in the month, Baltimore’s newly minted deputy police commissioner was robbed at
gunpoint with his wife. These brazen acts are signs that potential criminals in
the city do not fear arrest or imprisonment as a result of their crimes. Indeed, clearance rates for violent crimes
are abysmal in Baltimore. More than half of murders go unsolved.
Clearance rates for
violent crimes are abysmal in Baltimore. More than half of murders go unsolved.
The city has been seeing a massive surge of homicides since
the 2015 riots following the death of Freddie Gray in police custody. The city
saw 341 homicides in 2017; to put that into comparison, the city of New York,
which has 14 times the population, had 290 murders the same year.
Unlike the protests and riots that followed the death of
Gray, national media attention about Baltimore’s deteriorating security
situation has been scant. Perhaps this is because the city’s situation does not
fit any convenient political narrative.
Baltimore
overwhelmingly votes for Democrats, meaning Republicans don’t have much
incentive to call attention to its problems and propose solutions. And
because Democrats have been in charge of the city for decades, they can hardly
blame the other political party for its problems. National liberal activists
have been diligent in shining a light on Baltimore’s well-known police
brutality and misconduct – the city’s own gun control taskforce was disbanded
due to corruption – but activists seem less concerned about ordinary homicide,
which takes a far greater number of lives.
When I reported on the city’s homicide wave, I was struck by
how much the police had pulled back from the streets since the 2015 protests.
Baltimore’s police made 39,654 arrests in 2014 but 25,820 arrests in 2016. By
November 2017, gun arrests were down 67% compared with the previous year.
Although there has been no comprehensive study of the cause of the increase in
homicides in the city, many local activists blame the police pullback for the
violence.
“We saw the police department arrest less during a period of
high crime,” the Rev Kinji Scott, a community activist who lost a brother and a
cousin to homicides in other cities, told me. “So what happened is you have a
community of emboldened criminals.”
There's no silver
bullet for solving these problems. It will likely require resources and action
at all levels.
Meanwhile, the economic outlook for much of Baltimore – like
the neighborhood where Freddie Gray lived – remains disastrous. Some of these
areas have double-digit unemployment rates; the combination of economic malaise
and violence is a recipe for suffering. In 2015, Senator Bernie Sanders compared
the poorer parts of Baltimore to the “third world”.
Democrats can blame Trump for his inflammatory rhetoric
about Baltimore, but they deserve the lion’s share of the blame for the state
of the city’s worst-off neighborhoods. The city’s last mayor resigned amid
scandal; a string of Baltimore police commissioners have resigned over the past
four years, and news of another corrupt official resigning is routine. As
police and municipal officials resign left and right, the city’s homicide rate
is the highest among major cities.
There’s no silver bullet for solving these problems.
Bringing down sky-high homicide rates and endemic poverty is a complicated
affair that will require some combination of reducing economic inequality,
increasing police levels and training, and community activism and interventions
based on changing community norms around violence. It will likely require
targeted and focused resources and action at the local, state and federal
levels.
But you can’t
solve a problem you don’t acknowledge exists. The many candidates aspiring to
be the Democratic party’s presidential nominee have said little about west
Baltimore’s sky-high murder rate or deep poverty nor proposed policy
interventions to ameliorate it. It’s no surprise the city has turned into a
political piñata for the president, given the Democratic party’s failings in
governing it and lack of imagination in addressing its problems.
If Democrats
don’t want the president to insult Baltimore, perhaps they could inoculate it
from criticism by turning it into the safe, prosperous city it deserves to be –
where every child has a decent chance to fulfill their potential. After
decades of Democratic rule, it is anything but that.
Zaid Jilani is a Bridging the Divides writing fellow at the
University of California at Berkeley’s Greater Good magazine, and a freelance
journalist
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