Tuesday, April 28, 2015

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Baltimore Residents Begin Clearing Debris After Night of Riots - New York Times

National Guard troops in downtown Baltimore on Tuesday. Gabriella Demczuk for The New York Times

BALTIMORE — Residents of neighborhoods hit by rioting and arson turned out Tuesday morning to begin clearing their streets of debris as hundreds of rifle-toting National Guard members began deploying here, lining one of the city’s main thoroughfares and taking up posts around a police station in western Baltimore that had been the scene of earlier protests.

At Pennsylvania and West North Avenues, where a CVS drugstore was looted and burned, residents with donated brooms were out in force. State police troopers in riot gear were lined up in a human barrier across the intersections; a pickup truck full of scrap metal was parked nearby.

One of those with a broom was Clarence Cobb, 48, who lives in the neighborhood and came on his bike. “It don’t make no sense,” Mr. Cobb said of the damage by rioters. “It’s comes to a point where you got to take pride in your own neighborhood.”

Joining the residents on the streets were the mayor, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, and the governor, Larry Hogan, who criticized the rioters for the damage and promised a strong response.

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Scenes From the Unrest in Baltimore

Scenes From the Unrest in Baltimore

A turbulent day in Baltimore ended with rioting by rock-throwing youths and a call to end the violence by religious leaders and the mother of Freddie Gray.

By Axel Gerdau on April 28, 2015.

“It’s not going to happen again,” Mr. Hogan said of the violence. While the city was under control at the moment, he said, officials were concerned about what tonight might bring.

Ms. Rawlings-Blake, facing questions about the speed of the police response to the rioting, said the “armchair quarterbacking and second-guessing” were understandable.

But she defended the position, saying that it took time to coordinate a response. “We weren’t sitting around. We were engaged and working and managing the crisis,” she said.

A senior center that burned overnight in Baltimore was smoldering at dawn. Mark Makela/Getty Images

The guards deployed Tuesday were expected to be joined over the course of the day by thousands of police officers from outside the city as Baltimore struggled to recover from rioting, arson and looting that left 19 police officers injured. City officials said one officer remained at a trauma center.

In all, the mayor office said, 15 buildings and 144 cars were set on fire overnight, and more than 200 arrests were made. The police said two people were shot, each in the leg, in separate episodes. One victim, a woman, was shot on Fulton Avenue near where some of the worst rioting and looting had occurred hours earlier. The other victim, a man, was shot about two miles west of the Mondawmin Mall, where the rioting began.

While the rioters largely dispersed during the night, fire engines raced across this city early Tuesday as the Fire Department strained to extinguish blazes. Some firefighters were reported to have had cinder blocks heaved at them as they responded to emergencies. As a result, police officers were deployed overnight alongside weary and harried firefighters to ensure their work was not disrupted by people with “no regard for life,” the Police Department said.

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Violent confrontations between police and youths follow Freddie Gray’s funeral.

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At the mall early Tuesday, a few police cars sat in the parking lot, but the rioters seemed long gone. Both Mr. Hogan and Ms. Rawlings-Blake walked through the mall, which received, the mayor said, “significant damage.” The police said that a flier circulated on social media had called for a period of violence on Monday afternoon to begin at the mall and to move downtown toward City Hall.

Fire engine sirens could still be heard early Tuesday and acrid smoke wafted from some of the areas hardest hit by arsonists who have left the Baltimore Fire Department stretched to its limits. One early-morning fire struck a large pawnshop in a commercial strip on the west side of the city, and several fire companies were called to put out the blaze.

Members of the National Guard began to arrive on the streets just after dawn, wearing tan and earth-green military fatigues and driving sandy-color Humvees. They took up posts around the city’s Western District police station, while more than 100 other guards lined the street in front of Baltimore’s inner harbor.

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Baltimore Youths Clash With Police

Baltimore Youths Clash With Police

Hundreds of young people gathered outside a mall in northwestern Baltimore and confronted the police, throwing rocks and bottles at officers.

By WJZ-TV CBS Baltimore via Associated Press on April 27, 2015. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

State and city officials said they hoped that measures scheduled to be put into effect on Tuesday — including the Guard deployment and a curfew from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m.— would reduce the chances of a repeat of Monday’s unrest, where the police acknowledged that, at least early on, they had been outflanked and outnumbered.

By the early hours of Tuesday, it was clear that in addition to the many rioters fueled by fury over the death of Freddie Gray — who died of a spinal cord injury sustained while in police custody — there were many other residents who, while also upset by Mr. Gray’s death, were troubled by Monday’s violence.

These included members of Mr. Gray’s own family, who said he would not have approved of the rioting. It also included people like Katrina Carter, who grew up near the Mondawmin Mall, a place, she said, “where they had pageants and everything you could do with kids.”

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Timeline: Mapping the Clashes Between Baltimore Police and Protesters

Standing in the mall’s parking lot late Monday night, Ms. Carter said she understood the anger of the teenagers who had thrown rocks and bricks at the police. “I’m 38, but had I been 12, I probably would have been out there,” she said. But she said the teenagers needed to learn a better way to protest.

“They need to understand how to push pens, not people,” she said.

Mr. Gray’s death on April 19 has opened a deep wound in this majority-black city, where the mayor, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, and the Baltimore police commissioner, Anthony W. Batts — both of whom are black — have struggled to overhaul a police department that has a history of aggressive, sometimes brutal, treatment of black men.

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Funeral After a Death in Police Custody

Funeral After a Death in Police Custody

A funeral was held in Baltimore for Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man whose death from spinal injuries sustained while in police custody led to protests.

By Associated Press on April 27, 2015. Photo by Matt Roth for The New York Times.

Mr. Gray was chased and restrained by police officers on bicycles at Gilmor Homes on the morning of April 12; a cellphone video of his arrest showed him being dragged into a police van, seemingly limp and screaming in pain. The police have acknowledged that he should have received medical treatment immediately at the scene of the arrest and have also said that he rode in the van unbuckled.

After his arrival at the police station, medics rushed him to the hospital, where he slipped into a coma and died. His family has said that 80 percent of his spinal cord was severed, and that his larynx had been crushed.

The death spawned a week of protests that had been largely peaceful until Saturday night, when demonstrators — who had spent the afternoon marching through the city — scuffled with officers in riot gear outside Camden Yards, the baseball park.

The authorities attributed the scattered violence that night to outsiders who, Ms. Rawlings-Blake said, “were inciting,” with “ ‘go out there and shut this city down’ kind of messaging.”

But the violence on Monday was much more devastating and profound, a blow for a city whose leaders had been hoping Mr. Gray’s funeral would show its more peaceful side. At the New Shiloh Baptist Church, Mr. Gray lay in an open white coffin in a white shirt and tie. There was a pillow bearing a picture of him in a red T-shirt, against a backdrop of a blue sky and doves, with the message “Peace y’all.”

The service was more than a celebration of Mr. Gray’s short life; it was a call for peace and justice — and for residents of Baltimore to help lead the nationwide movement for better police treatment of black men that emerged last August after the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.

The Rev. Jamal Bryant, who delivered Mr. Gray’s eulogy, insisted that Mr. Gray’s death would not “be in vain.” He vowed that Baltimore residents would “keep demanding justice,” but he also issued a pointed rebuke to the congregation, telling members that black people must take control of their lives and force the government and the police to change.

Mr. Bryant came back to the neighborhood after the burial on Monday afternoon to appeal for calm.

“This is not what the family asked for, today of all days,” Mr. Bryant said. “For us to come out of the burial and walk into this is absolutely inexcusable.” He said he was “asking every young person to go back home,” adding, “it’s frustration, anger and it’s disrespect for the family.”

Sheryl Gay Stolberg contributed reporting from Baltimore, and Richard Pérez-Peña from New York.




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