So we are gonna ignore the riot thats happening in Baltimore

That's merely an attempt to re-write history, the riots in Furguson were because the lynch mob that was assembled didn't get the lynching they wanted so they burned the town. It had nothing to do with anything other than the Brown case. The protests leading up to the riot were also about the Brown case, chants of "hands up don't shoot" were clearly Brown case specific even though it turned out they were moronic. Once they found out that the cop in the Brown case acted in a legally justifiable manner and that no crime was committed by the cops I'm sure they felt pretty embarrassed so they changed the narrative to the one you are trying to push right now but it had nothing to do with what went on in Furguson. It was nothing more than a group of simple minded people out for blood.

 

I can see where you are coming from. You are coming from a place where things that happen are not and cannot be couched in history and context. The protests grew out a sense of history and contextin addition to the death of that man. Bobby you have to make the necessary intuitive leap with the rest of us - history and context matters to what has been happening. Even you seem to acknowledge that the history is unsavory, so make the leap. You don't even have to abandon you sense of indignation that in this one occasion people perhaps unjustly blamed the police. You can keep that indignation and still understand that change needs to happen just like you can read a story and acknowledge that there are imperfections, but appreciate the work as a whole.

 

This isn't based in facts, it is based on your desire to fit the facts to your narrative. Interviews done with people at the initial stages of the rioting and protesting in Ferguson talked about how they were reacting to more than just Brown, but rather to long term systematic abuses of power by the police and criminal justice system.

 

Rewriting history?

Here are the comments you were taking offense with:

and

Both posters believe the unrest in Ferguson (btw, it isn't Furguson) wasn't the result of any single action, but the belief that people are not getting a fair deal with law enforcement and justice systems. The unrest in Baltimore also reflects that.

 

I said "probably" so I wasn't giving a definitive answer and I'm sure you have many close Hispanic friends who you have conversations on discrimination they have to deal with

It would change shady practices when police are dealing with civilians and situations like when the cop emptied his clip into a guys back because he feared for his life. But they will still be able to get away with killing someone in the situation you mentioned.

 

Exactly, don't make the perfect the enemy of the good.

 

That is a good phrase, and it quite applicable here -- but we also can't ignore the fact that the "good" often becomes the enemy of the better.

 

Report: Baltimore city jail refused to admit nearly 2,600 injured suspects, casting doubt on police tactics

Records obtained by The Baltimore Sun show that city police often disregard or are oblivious to injuries and illnesses among people they apprehend — in fact, such cases occur by the thousands.

From June 2012 through April 2015, correctional officers at the Baltimore City Detention Center have refused to admit nearly 2,600 detainees who were in police custody, according to state records obtained through a Maryland Public Information Act request.

In those records, intake officers in Central Booking noted a wide variety of injuries, including fractured bones, facial trauma and hypertension. Of the detainees denied entry, 123 had visible head injuries, the third most common medical problem cited by jail officials, records show.

 

????

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Baltimore State's attorney <a href="https://twitter.com/MarilynMosbyEsq">@MarilynMosbyEsq</a> to seek protective order blocking release of <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/FreddieGray?src=hash">#FreddieGray</a> autopsy: <a href="http://t.co/sWnHc0OYc3">http://t.co/sWnHc0OYc3</a></p>&mdash; Kevin Rector (@RectorSun) <a href="https://twitter.com/RectorSun/status/606163186610524160">June 3, 2015</a></blockquote>
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So first they want to convict poor blacks without fair trial, now the same for cops.

The Baltimore leadership is a riot (no pun intended).

 

West Baltimore’s Police Presence Drops, and Murders Soar

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/06/1...resence-drops-and-murders-soar.html?referrer=

By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.
JUNE 12, 2015

BALTIMORE — From the steps of her New Bethlehem Baptist Church, the Rev. Lisa Weah looked down the block to the open-air drug market outside the bodega on the corner a few hundred feet away.

The traffic there had been slowing until the chaos that followed the death of Freddie Gray on April 19, after he was injured in police custody. Now it is back full-bore, and the police are often nowhere to be seen.

A month and a half after six officers were charged in Mr. Gray’s death, policing has dwindled in some of Baltimore’s most dangerous neighborhoods, and murders have risen to levels not seen in four decades. The totals include a 29-year-old man fatally shot on this drug corner last month. Police union officials say that officers are still coming to work, but that some feel a newfound reluctance and are stepping back, questioning whether they will be prosecuted for actions they take on the job.

Around the nation, communities and police departments are struggling to adapt to an era of heightened scrutiny, when every stop can be recorded on a cellphone. But residents, clergy members and neighborhood leaders say the past six weeks have made another reality clear: that as much as many people may legitimately fear and distrust the police, the solution has to be better policing, not a diminished police presence.


A 25-year-old man was shot in the leg last week on this block of North Gilmor Street in Baltimore's Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood. The shooting happened near the Gilmor Homes, where Freddie Gray was arrested in April.
DREW ANGERER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
“Without law enforcement, there is no order,” Pastor Weah said. “In truth, residents want a strong police force, but they also want accountability.” She said that she sympathized with many officers who did their jobs well but were now just as hated as the abusive officers, and that she prayed the spate of killings would be the shock that finally caused change.


“This crisis was bound to happen because of the broken relationship between law enforcement and the people,” she said. “When something gets this infected, you have to break it down and start from new.”

At least 55 people, the highest pace since the early 1970s, have been murdered in Baltimore since May 1, when the state’s attorney for the city, Marilyn J. Mosby, announced the criminal charges against the officers. Victims of shootings have included people involved in criminal activity and young children who were simply in the wrong place.

A 9-year-old boy was shot in the leg over the Memorial Day weekend. Another boy, Kester Browne, 7, a Chinese-language student at an international school in Baltimore, was fatally shot along with his mother, Jennifer Jeffrey-Browne, 31. They were two of the city’s 42 murder victims in May.


Muhammad al-Jibouri, center, owns a bodega on a corner where an open-air drug market is flourishing. Policing has dwindled in the area since the announcement of charges against six Baltimore police officers in Freddie Gray's death.
DREW ANGERER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
At the time of her announcement, Ms. Mosby’s charges were seen as calming the city. But they enraged the police rank and file, who pulled back. The number of arrests plunged, and the murder rate doubled. The reduced police presence gave criminals space to operate, according to community leaders and some law enforcement officials.

The soaring violence has made Baltimore a battleground for political arguments about whether a backlash against police tactics has led to more killings in big cities like New York, St. Louis and Chicago, and whether “de-policing,” as academics call it, can cause crime to rise.

Still, the speed and severity of the police pullback here appear unlike anything that has happened in other major cities. And rather than a clear test case, Baltimore is a reminder of how complicated policing issues are and how hard it can be to draw solid conclusions from a month or two of crime and police response.

For example, police commanders here attribute the spike in violence in large part to a unique factor: a flood of black-market opiates stolen from 27 pharmacies during looting in April, enough for 175,000 doses now illegally available for sale.


Graphic | A Portrait of the Sandtown Neighborhood in Baltimore Freddie Gray lived in Sandtown-Winchester, a crime-ridden Baltimore neighborhood that has been depressed for decades.
They say drug gangs are now oversupplied with inventory from the looting, resulting in a violent battle for market share from a finite base of potential customers. Gangs sell a single OxyContin dose for $30, twice what they get for a dose of heroin, said Gary Tuggle, a former Baltimore police officer who was the head of the city’s Drug Enforcement Administration office until this month.

Police leaders acknowledge, though, that they do not yet know how many of the recent murders were drug-related. Mr. Tuggle also said he took issue with “this idea that the only reason for the rise in violence” is drugs.

“It’s hard to police effectively if you are only concerned about self-preservation,” he said. “If you are not challenging them because of the need for self-preservation, then these folks are likely going to go out and commit these crimes.”


Whether hostility from residents or police slowdowns lead to increases in crime is hotly debated among academics. David A. Harris, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh who studies police accountability, said increases were usually attributable to local circumstances, including the drug trade and gang rivalries.


Stanley Miller with his cousin's son, Carter Anthony Grimes, 3, at a park in Sandtown-Winchester.
DREW ANGERER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Baltimore commanders say that their officers are engaged — making major arrests, conducting raids and taking weapons off the streets — but that basic police work is now more labor intensive. For instance, an officer interviewing witnesses may be surrounded by scores of onlookers with cellphone cameras.

Officials from the western Baltimore neighborhoods hardest hit by the spate of murders — including City Councilman Nick J. Mosby, who is married to Ms. Mosby, the state’s attorney — say commanders have also doubled the number of officers per cruiser for safety reasons.

“The visibility has significantly decreased,” Mr. Mosby said. While many people in his district want a larger police presence, he added, “you talk to others and they don’t even want to see a police officer.”

The crisis has also set the police commissioner — Anthony W. Batts, who took command three years ago after serving as police chief in Oakland and Long Beach, Calif. — between a city angry at the department’s posture toward many residents, and police union officials who suggest he does not fully support rank-and-file officers.


A mural near the Gilmor Homes depicting Freddie Gray. At least 55 people have been murdered in Baltimore since May 1, when charges against six officers were announced in Mr. Gray's death.
DREW ANGERER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Tensions with the police union broke out into the open late last month, when Mr. Batts apologized emotionally to members for not preparing for unrest on the scale of April’s riot, which wounded more than 100 officers.

“I got my guys hurt, and I got to own that, and I stand tall behind that,” he told the union members. “That won’t happen again in this organization.”

Healing the chasm between the police and western Baltimore is the job of a new commander, Capt. Sheree Briscoe, now acting major in charge of the three-square-mile district that sees much of the worst violence. After her appointment late last month, she moved quickly to bring community leaders into the fold, a new approach that has encouraged Pastor Weah and others.

Captain Briscoe promised that this was only the beginning of changes. “You cannot just attack the drug trade” alone, she said, citing deep-rooted social and economic challenges, and problems with things like trash, lighting and vacant homes, that needed to be “holistically” addressed.

Just as many community leaders say they need the police back, Captain Briscoe says residents need to be more involved with police planning. She said she intended to share more information and to include residents of the district in deciding police priorities.


“The direction that we’re going in now, the community is more a part of it,” she said. “They are going to be more a part of the process, as opposed to affected by the process.”

For now, the clergy members who fill much of the leadership vacuum in the city’s toughest neighborhoods have been the police’s main avenue to try to reconnect with angry and alienated residents.

But the problems in western Baltimore existed long before Mr. Gray’s death, and many of them go well beyond policing.

In Sandtown-Winchester, the nearly all-black district where Mr. Gray took his last steps a few blocks from Pastor Weah’s church, one in four children age 10 to 17 were arrested from 2005 to 2009, according to a report by the city’s Health Department. The neighborhood had twice as much poverty and unemployment as the rest of Baltimore, which is itself one of the nation’s poorest major cities.

Longtime residents say the recreation centers they remember going to after class have closed, creating more risk that young people will come under the sway of drug dealers.

“We emulated the guys who were best in pool, best in Ping-Pong, best in basketball,” said George Butler, 40, sitting in his barbershop near the scene of the worst rioting and looting in April. “And that counteracted the other guys we looked up to” — drug dealers.

Mr. Butler went to prison a decade ago for distributing heroin with a feared drug organization. But he wants the police back on the job.

With the force diminished, he said, criminals think, “I don’t have to worry about the police coming, so why not?”

Police assertiveness “is a gift and a curse,” Mr. Butler added. “To some extent, it keeps the violence down. But when they become overaggressive or abusive or combative to the citizens, then it causes them to be in an uproar.”

Just how much the Police Department changes may depend on the outcome of a Justice Department investigation into whether the force has used abusive patterns and practices against residents.

That inquiry may take a year or more, two Justice Department officials told about 20 residents who gathered last week at Sharon Baptist Church in Sandtown. At the meeting, residents described frustrations that ranged from the difficulty of finding affordable housing to humiliating police practices like strip- and cavity-searching men in full view of bystanders.

The police say there were 13 homicides in the first 11 days of June. One teenager outside the booming open-air drug market down the block from Pastor Weah’s church was not optimistic that the pace would slow.

“Summertime,” he said. “That’s when they do all the killing.”

 

Baltimore reaches $6.4 million settlement with Freddie Gray family

 

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Just now. Jurors at the trial of the first Balt police officer tried in the Freddie Gray case say they're deadlocked, judge sends them back</p>&mdash; Charlie Kaye (@CharlieKayeCBS) <a href="https://twitter.com/CharlieKayeCBS/status/676865051785998336">December 15, 2015</a></blockquote>
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Well, that should defer the incineration of the City of Baltimore until at least tomorrow, giving the Republicans time to complete their debate tonight without it being drown out by the media coverage of the riots and mayhem.

 

Verdict: Mistrial. The Mayor of Baltimore calls for calm.

So does everyone remember back right after Freddie Gray's death and the subsequent Baltimore riots, looting and arson? The Baltimore State's Attorney was widely accused by those people who looked closely at the charges of exaggerating these charges for political purposes.

Of course that was all very popular with the knee-jerk supporters of the rioters when she prematurely filed these charges. But now it appears that these charges did not pass muster with the jury for Officer Porter and that is likely to be the case with some of the others as well.

These officers should be held accountable for any wrongdoing they committed. Unfortunately, a grandstanding, politically motivated state's attorney may undermined any hopes of seeing that happen.

So, what is the cost of that? Any guesses? More riots, looting and arsons, perhaps?

 

Oh for sure, they are like little children when they don't get their way, the city of Baltimore very likely burns tonight.....not that it really matters, that place is a dump anyway.

 

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">WATCH: Video shows officers taking down <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/FreddieGray?src=hash">#FreddieGray</a> protester after mistrial declared <a href="https://t.co/GoVWL41G54">https://t.co/GoVWL41G54</a> <a href="https://t.co/QJ614VaL3h">https://t.co/QJ614VaL3h</a></p>&mdash; CBS News (@CBSNews) <a href="https://twitter.com/CBSNews/status/677243677882900484">December 16, 2015</a></blockquote> <script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

 

Wow. That is exactly the opposite of what happened last time. Perhaps now that Mayor Stephanie Rawlings Blake is not running again, she feels she is free to allow the police to do her job, even though she may have to flee the city in the end.

I suspect the protesters are not going to appreciate this more aggressive posture of the police at all. This could impede the regularly scheduled looting activities for this evening.

 

It's just sad that authorities have to take pains to beg the black citizenry not to riot.

Whites, Latinos, and Asians in this country suffer their shares of injustices too, and you don't see them rioting.

This does not reflect well on the black population in general.

 

You can't make this **** up.