On May 1, Maryland State’s Attorney Marilyn J. Mosby filed charges against six Baltimore police officers involved in the death of Freddie Gray, who died of spinal injuries incurred in the course of his arrest and transport in a police van. The Washington Post offers a primer on the Gray case here. Following the indictments and the protest riots that shook Baltimore in response to Gray’s death, the Baltimore police have basically stopped enforcing the law in high-crime districts. Arrests have fallen 50% while murders have increased to the highest level in decades.
The Post, in an otherwise intelligent editorial “Bloody Baltimore“ attributes this dereliction of duty to “peevishness” on the part of the police. I think a better word would be “contempt”—contempt for the City of Baltimore and the people they supposedly serve.
In the film American Sniper (not one of my favorites), the GIs refer to the Iraqis who wish they didn’t have a bunch of ignorant, heavily armed Americans running roughshod over their country as “savages,” which is a step up from terms like “slope” and “gook,” which is what I used to hear in Vietnam, but only a step, because the implication is that this is a war between “civilization” and “barbarism,” like the Old West of American myth. So which side are you on, dude, theirs or ours?
Baltimore cops seem to regard the people they supposedly protect and serve in a similar manner. Okay, maybe Freddie Gray shouldn’t have been slapped around so hard, and thrown in the back of a van. Maybe he was taken for a bit of “shakedown cruise,” to slam him around a little bit and soften him up a little, and maybe he was denied medical assistance when, as it turned out, he was dying. But, hey, he’s one of them! You don’t punish one of us for something that happened to one of them! That’s not how it works!
I’ve recently started a rather ponderous seven-part series on Edward Gibbon and his monumental masterwork The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Well, one of the things I don’t touch on is the Praetorian Guard. The Praetorian Guard was the select body of men who protected the Roman emperor. Since the Romans never figured out a plan of succession for their emperors that actually worked, when the emperor died, the new emperor was the guy who cut the quickest and the bestest deal with the Guard, the price of the imperial purple naturally increasing with each succession. Because nobody likes a stingy emperor.
Thanks to the political popularity of the war on crime, to the power of the police unions, and thanks to a lot of other things, the police departments across the U.S. have taken on the flavor of so many Praetorian Guards, who will only enforce the law as long as they don’t have to obey it. I hope somebody besides the Washington Post notices.
Afterwords
The response of the Baltimore police is ugly. Sadly, the response of some of the poorest and blackest neighborhoods is ugly as well. One of the reasons the police are hated in high-crime areas is that they are necessary. Their presence is a reminder that these are not stable, self-policing communities, that crime, even violent, and even murderous crime, is a way of life for some of the people who live there.
Update
Things are definitely ugly in Baltimore, but the recent meme that hysterical "anti-cop vituperation” has led to a nation-wide crime wave, a notion hysterically fanned by the Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald, turns out to be mere hysteria, as even Mac Donald herself reluctantly—and evasively and bitterly—concedes. Mac Donald’s concession, bearing the not terribly honest title, “Explaining Away the New Crime Wave”, lies behind a Wall Street Journal firewall, but Reason’s Jesse Walker explains things far better than Heather ever could here
