It’s not even the “majority of law-abiding Baltimore families” referenced by politicians. 85% of Baltimore voters came out for Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, who gave the muggers and looters “space to destroy”, and then apologized for calling them thugs, defending them instead as “misguided young people” who “need support”.
Rawlings-Blake was a former City Council speaker who got a promotion when Sheila Dixon, the first black female mayor of Baltimore, was convicted of stealing gift cards intended for the poor. During her time in the City Council, Dixon had become notorious for waving her shoe at white colleagues and shouting, “You’ve been running things for the last 20 years. Now the shoe is on the other foot!”
It was indeed. At least some of the stolen gift cards were used to buy clothes. And the shoe is still on the other foot. Just ask the criminals who smashed and grabbed while the police did nothing.
Dixon had won 87% of the vote. And she wants to get back into politics. After the riots, she popped up to complain that white people were going about with business as usual while black anger grew.
"We have some major inequities in the city," she said. "We have to put more focus in those areas."
There are probably no inequities in Baltimore that can’t be solved by giving Dixon some more gift cards intended for the poor.
What is the difference between Sheila Dixon stealing gift cards to buy an Xbox and thugs smashing up stores to grab saxophones, candy and liquor? Baltimore’s former mayor had climbed high enough to be able to steal without breaking the glass.
While Dixon and Rawlings-Blake didn’t do much for the inner city youth whose plight we never stop hearing about, they did dismantle the tougher policing put in place by Martin O’Malley. Now Baltimore has become one of the few cities whose murder rate keeps rising.
Today it has the fifth highest murder rate in the country. And since Dixon and Rawlings-Blake, the city also has 20,000 fewer people. Baltimore has been bleeding population almost as badly as Detroit. The city has gone from having 900,000 residents in the 70s to the low 600,000s today.
Dixon and Rawlings-Blake made Baltimore a haven for criminals. They switched out crimefighting for community policing. Now we have to listen to sanctimonious speeches about how we need to make Baltimore even more criminal friendly as if the city were a police state, instead of a thug playground whose mayor calls muggers and looters “misguided young people” and gives them space to destroy.
Baltimore does not have a policing crisis. It has a crisis of criminals. And those criminals aren’t just the ones who smash stores. They also run the city.
But Rawlings-Blake can’t even grow Baltimore. The only momentum that Obama’s administration is carrying forward is that of the racist mobs who voted for it.
There are real victims in Baltimore. They are the hundreds of thousands of people who have been forced out by riots, crime and misery. You can see some of the real victims still hanging on, trying to run stores on thin margins, sweeping up broken glass and talking about how they called the police and no one answered.
They, and not Freddie Gray and his fellow criminals, are the real victims.
They’re not just the victims of the thugs threatening their lives and destroying their livelihood. They’re also the victims of wealthy and powerful politicians like Sheila Dixon, Rawlings-Blake and Barack Obama.
The tattered remnants of Baltimore’s middle class are trying to hang on despite a national consensus by Democrats and even some Republicans that instead of fighting crime, we ought to be going easier on criminals, that instead of prisons we need more social workers, and that the real victims are not bleeding baseball fans or hospitalized cops, but mobs of thugs who wanted to act out a movie they saw.
The last thing that Baltimore, or any other place on earth, needs is more community policing, sentencing reform and political pandering to violent mobs. But pro-criminal politicians like Obama want to make Baltimore worse while turning the rest of the country into Baltimore. What would that look like?
If the country had Baltimore’s murder rate, around 120,000 Americans would be murdered every year. Not to mention 2.3 million assaults, 1.8 million robberies and 160,000 rapes by “misguided youth”.
And we can have that country. All we have to do is listen to the voices clamoring for criminal justice reform and America can look like Rawlings-Blake’s “space to destroy” Baltimore.
All we have to do is ignore the fact that the real victims in Baltimore are not the thugs in the streets, they are the people being assaulted by them.
The worst of the Baltimore violence didn’t begin with Freddie Gray’s death. It began with a meme about “The Purge”, a reference to an Anti-American movie which depicts a society where crime has been temporarily legalized, “allowing citizens to roam the streets and vent their rage for a 12-hour stretch, to rob, rape and kill with impunity.”
That should sound familiar. It’s what happened in Baltimore with Rawlings-Blake’s “space to destroy”. It’s what happened in Ferguson. It’s what has been happening around the country as Obama and his associates have targeted police departments on behalf of criminals.
The Obama Purge legalizes crime. It legalizes theft, vandalism and assault. Baltimore, like Ferguson, shows us what that looks like. The solution to crime isn’t less law enforcement, it’s more law enforcement. You don’t make society better by empathizing with criminals. All you do is create more criminals and more crime.
You fill morgues, hospitals and cemeteries. You create a nation under siege by violent criminals. The Democrats and Republicans championing “criminal justice reform” have chosen to ignore the lessons of the sixties and seventies. They have decided that sympathizing with criminals will fix everything. Meanwhile the real victims, the people who work hard, especially the working poor, are disdained because they aren’t rioting in the streets.
The muggers and looters, the thugs and criminals, are not disenfranchised or forgotten, no matter how often the media tells you that. We see their smirks and hear their voices all the time. It’s their victims who are brushed aside and forgotten. We are told to sympathize with criminals and forget their victims.
A moral society doesn’t sympathize with criminals. It sympathizes with their victims. It doesn’t license criminality because it cares about the people who suffer when criminals run wild.
