Why Baltimore Burned

By Todd Richissin

Just more than 15 years ago, I spent the better part of a year chasing down juvenile delinquents in West Baltimore. That neighborhood was the epicenter of the violence, flames, passion and stupidity that on Monday cost Baltimore dearly and will continue to take its toll long after the violent get bored, the fires smolder to ash and the passion, as it will, finally dies.

Then it will be back to normal.

And while normal beats a neighborhood ablaze, normal, for this place, is not good.

I was not a cop or a probation officer during my time in West Baltimore. I was a visitor as a reporter for The Baltimore Sun. For more than a year the photographer Andre Chung and I worked on a series called Charlie Squad, which chronicled the lives of 14 seriously troubled kids, first while they were locked up and then when they returned to what passed for homes.

Many of them returned here.

I feel obligated — because the role of race in this continuing drama cannot (and should not) be ignored — to mention that I am a white man, college educated, suburban raised and recipient of a paycheck every two weeks. (Andre is a black guy who had dreads at the time; when staking out corners waiting for these kids to interview, we looked like history’s worst undercover cop team.)

Maybe being who I am makes it tougher to understand West Baltimore. Maybe, though, in a way, it makes its troubles more obvious. Andre and I spent many hours on many days with those kids, many hours talking to them and many hours just hanging around letting them do what they do, which, aside from their crimes, turned out to be not much.

Did you notice the age of most of the rioters?

The kids I followed were 14 to 17, the same age as many of those rioters.

And though it’s now 15 years later, these rioting kids are the same kids I followed, really, kids with the same anger, the same boredom, the same hopelessness, the same unwillingness to listen to, you know, things will get better, just you pray and mind your schooling and respect your elders and stay off the drugs and, you know, you know, things will get better.

Not true. Not yet. And these kids know it. Which I believe was as responsible as anything for Baltimore burning.

I base that on what these kids knew about their odds 15 years ago and how nothing in that neighborhood has changed, except maybe for the worse. Many kids from West Baltimore -- from 15 years ago and today -- have gone years, their entire short lives, looking at the ruins of their neighborhood, the scores of boarded-up houses, the obvious lack of jobs, even lousy ones.

Wrap that economic situation with too little supervision, too little hope, too many drugs and a generation of despair.

Light it with police brutality and you have Baltimore 2015.

And, sadly, until the city has schools that work and work that pays, we’ll see it all again.

Something positive needs to happen there, and it has to be more than talk.

What passed for stability in West Baltimore 15 years ago required the efforts almost exclusively of strong black women, usually the grandmothers of the family because the drug culture that tends to seize the idle unemployed had already claimed many of the young, black mothers of the day. It was just beginning to seize the grandmothers. Fifteen years later, many of those women are gone.

In Charlie Squad, I noted that not one of the kids I was following came from an intact family: “Almost all have been left to survive on their own. Death, drugs, jail and indifference have claimed so many of their parents. They are the offspring of the crack and heroin culture that has overtaken large patches of the state.”

Baltimore schools were a tragedy, with no real learning going on in most of them. In West Baltimore, graduating did not mean college and, in fact, counted little toward a good job. And any good job within reach of even a desperate grasp would be outside the neighborhood because there just were none in West Baltimore to be had.

For many years, Baltimore itself had more murders per capita than any city in the country, including New York and Detroit, and buckets of that blood were spilled here. Because of the heroin trade, more people died from AIDS in Baltimore than anywhere else in the country. Guess what neighborhood had all the needles.

In his excellent piece for The Washington Post, Michael A. Fletcher provides statistic after statistic (along with even more valuable context) that shows the misery continues in Freddie Gray’s Sandtown section of West Baltimore. Murder, drug addiction, drop-out rates, home vacancies and unemployment levels continue to hover well above the same numbers for Baltimore as a whole. The only number that’s lower: income.

Nothing has changed. It needs to. Drug treatment is not a liberal cause; it’s necessary here to fix families. Economic development shouldn’t be limited to places like the tourist-trapping Inner Harbor and Fells Point or just the mostly white enclaves of Federal Hill and Canton.

A willingness to let West Baltimore become its own, downtrodden country is what caused this awful mess. “Police brutality” is merely the slogan that sums up a more complex battle cry.

If you don’t believe that, please examine the hollowness of kids setting a CVS afire for the sake, as too many people would have you believe, of the life and death of Freddie Gray, the 25-year-old black man who died after being injured in police custody.

Examine the reasoning behind torching a church because these kids are so upset about police brutality. There is no reason here. They will protest police brutality when they get older. They are not protesting it now.

They know little aside from this: their lives are pretty bad and not likely to get much better.

And, in the end, while kids burning down whole buildings in their neighborhood was an intolerable display of recklessness, so, too, has been the state of West Baltimore for a very long time, long before the first rock was thrown Monday.

Todd Richissin is Patch’s national editor. He and photographer Andre Chung were awarded the prestigious George Polk Award for excellence in journalism and the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for their series, Charlie Squad, on inner city youth in Baltimore. The series was published in the Baltimore Sun.

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