Thanks to an
infection and the antibiotics taken to rid myself of it, I have had several
days of being able to do little more than watch the news on television, listen
to it on the radio, and reading about it in my daily edition of The Wall Street
Journal. If there was anything else happening in the world, you would not know
it because it was 24-7 Baltimore, Baltimore, Baltimore.
Specifically, it
was about the arrest and death of Freddie Gray, a known drug dealer and user
with an extensive rap sheet. There are different descriptions of the manner of
his death, but the details of the autopsy are still obscure beyond a reference
to having received a blow to his spine. This is attributed to having been
placed in the police van, shackled hand and foot, but not having a safety belt
applied.
The response from a
certain element of Baltimoreans was to begin to loot, vandalize and set fire to
their own neighborhoods by way of protesting alleged police brutality. This
followed his funeral on Monday. The Mayor’s response was to tell the police to
stand down and let the protesters have their way. When that predictably did not
work, the National Guard was called in and a curfew imposed.
Capping these
events was the indictment of the six arresting officers by the State’s Attorney
General, Marilyn Mosby that included charges of second-degree murder and
involuntary manslaughter. That seemed to appease the mob that passes for
Baltimore’s citizens.
I wish I could say
I have sympathy for Freddie Gray and his family, but I don’t. I wish I could
say that I feel sorry that Baltimore has been a state of decline and decay
since the last riots in 1968, but no one asks why the trillions of dollars
poured in comparable cities since the days of Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty”
hasn’t demonstrated any results.
I wish I could say
that the connecting factor between Baltimore, Detroit, and other Democrat-controlled
cities was the primary reason that their citizens suffer unemployment, why
their children attend schools that fail to teach them even fundamental skills,
but what has evolved in these distressed cities is a culture that does not
emphasize the traditional family, demand better education, and replaces the
work ethic with the “entitlement” check. The Baltimore mother who chastised her
son to keep him from participating in the riot is single and has five other
children.
These cities are
daily crime scenes. The riot was a crime scene.
And who is accused
of Freddie Gray’s death? Members of the Baltimore Police Force who initially
spotted Gray, a 25 year old with a criminal record, and went to investigate
what they had observed. He ran. They ran after him. That’s what we want and
expect our police to do.
The indictment, a purely political act intended
to quell the angry mood of those Baltimoreans who protested by committing
crimes, is an attack on every police officer in America. Most are good men and
women, but like any other profession, there are some bad ones. The legion of
police who protect us do not go around murdering suspects indiscriminately.
Tell that to State Attorney Mosby. Then consider that
Freddie Gray’s attorney, William H. Murphy, Jr. donated $5,000 to her campaign.
Consider that her husband, Nick Mosby, is a Baltimore city councilman with lots
of reason to see the riots quelled.
What these cities
and the decades reaching back to the 1960s all represent is a vocal resentment
of police authority. Back then they were called “pigs.” America has been
drifting away from the traditional respect and regard we have had for our
police.
The problem isn’t
the police.
It’s liberal notion
that raising taxes and heavily regulating businesses large and small will
somehow attract them to our cities. It doesn’t work that way. Our cities have
become great dumping grounds for people who interest the Democratic Party only
around election time.
And that is a
problem for the police. It will be a growing problem for everyone if we cannot
return to a decent respect for our police.
So, for now, a pox
on Baltimore and on all the politicians from the President on down who keep
telling us the police are the problem, not the world of Freddie Gray’s roaming
our city’s streets.
© Alan Caruba, 2015
No comments:
Post a Comment