Posted on 12/31/2015 10:47:38 PM PST by Altura Ct.
In the summer of 1966, Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach warned that there would be riots by angry, poor minority residents in â30 or 40â American cities if Congress didnât pass President Lyndon Johnsonâs Model Cities antipoverty legislation. In the late 1960s, New York mayor John Lindsay used the fear of such rioting to expand welfare rolls dramatically at a time when the black male unemployment rate was about 4 percent. And in the 1980s, Washington, D.C., mayor Marion Barry articulated an explicitly racial version of collective bargainingâa threat that, without ample federal funds, urban activists would unleash wave after wave of racial violence. âI know for a fact,â Barry explained, âthat white people get scared of the [Black] Panthers, and they might give money to somebody a little more moderate.â
This brand of thinking, which I have called the riot ideology, influenced urban politics for a generation, from the 1960s through the 1980s. Perhaps its model city was Baltimore, which, in 1968, was consumed by race riots so intense that the Baltimore police, 500 Maryland state troopers, and 6,000 National Guardsmen were unable to quell them. The âinsurrectionâ was halted only when nearly 5,000 federal troops requested by Maryland governor Spiro Agnew arrived.
In the years since 1968, Baltimore has proved remarkably adept at procuring state and federal funds and constructed revitalization projects such as the justly famed Camden Yards and a convention center. But Baltimore never really recovered from the riots, and the lawlessness never fully subsided. What began as a grand bargain to avert further racial violence after 1968 descended over the decades into a series of squalid shakedowns. Antipoverty programs that had once promised to repair social and family breakdown became by the 1990s self-justifying and self-perpetuating.
In the wake of the 2014 riots in Ferguson, Missouri, and the 2015 West Baltimore riots, a new riot ideology has taken hold, one similarly intoxicated with violence and willing to excuse it but with a different goal. The first version of the riot ideology assumed that not only cities but also whites could be reformed; the new version assumes that America is inherently racist beyond redemption and that the black inner city needs to segregate itself from the larger society (with the exception of federal welfare funds, which should continue to flow in). This new racial politics is not only coalescing around activists claiming to speak for urban blacksârepresented publically by groups like Black Lives Matterâbut is also expressed in the writings of best-selling author Ta-Nehisi Coates. And Baltimore is once again center stage.
The West Baltimore rioters of 2015 didnât call for more LBJ-style antipoverty projects but for less policing. In a âkeep off our turfâ version of belligerent multiculturalism, the rioters see police as both to blame for black criminality and as an embodiment of bourgeois white values. The old riot ideology referred to mostly white urban police forces as occupying armies; the new version sees even Baltimoreâs integrated police force, under the leadership of the cityâs black mayor and (until recently) a black police chief, as an occupying army. Withdrawing the police from black neighborhoods is the only acceptable solution.
In his memoir The Beautiful Struggle, Coates described how his father, a former Black Panther and full-time conspiracy theorist, drove his son around West Baltimore âtelling me again the story of the black folkâs slide to ruin. He would drive down North Avenue and survey the carry-outs, the wig shops, the liquor stores and note that not one was owned by anyone black.â Whites had âplunderedâ what belonged to blacks, his father explained, as they had done with once-great African kingdoms. Coates, who lived in fear of black street toughs as a teen, sees the police as a greater threat to black well-being than the drug âcrewsâ and gangs roaming the streets of West Baltimore today. His vision, in part, is to free gang-ridden areas from the malign grip of white standards and aggressive policing. Coates has adopted his fatherâs view that âour condition, the worst of this countryâs conditionâpoor, diseased, illiterate, crippled dumbâwas not just a tumor to be burrowed out but proof that the whole body was a tumor, that America was not a victim of a great rot but the rot itself.â Not even a hurricane of violence, says the new riot ideology, justifies a vigorous police presence in black localities.
Baltimore, historian Joseph Arnold wrote, was a city with a Southern culture and a Northern economy âthat retained nineteenth-century airs well into the twentieth.â Like the rural and slaveholding Eastern Shore of Maryland, Baltimore had been strongly Confederate in its sympathies, casting only 3 percent of its vote for Abraham Lincoln in 1860. The first deaths in the Civil War occurred in the Pratt Street Riot of 1861, when pro-Southern Baltimoreans attacked Northern troops moving toward Washington. Fort Sumter had been fired on a week earlier. For a century after the Civil War, the alliance of Baltimore, which imposed a harsh segregation regime in 1911, and the Eastern Shore, where antiblack sentiment had never relented, dominated Maryland politics. Well into the 1960s, Baltimore was a thoroughly segregated city.
The cityâs dominant political figure post-1968 was the colorful William Donald Schaefer. A meld of old-style machine pol and new-style harvester of federal funds, Schaefer served as mayor from 1970 to 1987 and then as a two-term Maryland governor. Under Schaeferâs mayoral leadershipâand with the help of Senators Paul Sarbanes and Barbara MikulskiâBaltimore became, in effect, a second Federal City, cadging a disproportionate share of federal subventions that produced numerous but invariably ineffectual antipoverty efforts. âBureaucrats lived well off the anti-poverty programs,â explains Baltimore writer Van Smith, âwithout enhancing the lives of the poor.â
Schaefer knew his city intimately. He never tried to reform the culture of police corruption. His machine counted on characters like Irv Kovens, who sold furniture, sometimes on credit, to poor families. Kovens employed 35 collectors who visited those behind on their payments. Come election time, the collectors proved valuable as sources of political information and as canvassers for Schaefer. African-Americans got their cut of patronage via the school system, which was largely turned over to their oversight. While eventually coming around on segregation, Schaefer tolerated the views of some politicians from the cityâs white districts who opposed civil rights because, he explained, âthey never had any black people down there. They had an old-time prejudice.â
In 1987, the city elected its first African-American mayor, Kurt Schmoke, a Baltimore-bred, Ivy Leagueâeducated former federal prosecutor who campaigned on continuing Schaeferâs crony-capitalist policies of âbringing business into governmentâ via federal funding. Schmoke won 65 percent of the white vote against his Republican opponent. While the transition to an African-American mayor occurred without serious acrimony, city councilwoman and future mayor Sheila Dixon foreshadowed racial problems to come in 1991, when she lost her cool during a redistricting debate and waved a shoe at her white colleagues. âYouâve been running things for the last 20 years,â Dixon barked. âNow the shoe is on the other foot. See how you like it on the other foot.â
The pace and scale of subsidized governmental experimentation accelerated during the first eight of Schmokeâs 12 years in office. Trying to achieve an antipoverty breakthrough in the West Side neighborhood of Sandtown-Winchester, Schmoke worked with the cityâs leading developer, James Rouse, former president Jimmy Carter, and a group of private philanthropies. (Sandtown is where Freddie Gray, whose death in police custody set off the 2015 Baltimore riots, was born in 1990.) Rouse pushed for Sandtownâs transformation with new housing, employment programs, and prenatal care. âThis is going to be the most important thing I do in my life,â said Rouse, a man of numerous achievements. But the cityâs political and social pathologies swamped the developerâs efforts.
During the Schmoke era (1987â99), Baltimore repelled small businesses unable to cut deals with city hall. Baltimore imposed property taxes double those of surrounding areas, in part because it maintained a government workforce 50 percent larger than those of comparable-size cities. Baltimoreâs murder rate was five times that of Boston. âCharm Cityâ also suffered the highest rate of syphilis in the countryâ18 times the national average. Schmoke, who tried to hire Nation of Islam foot soldiers to patrol the cityâs housing projects, decided that drugs were a public health problem, not a matter of criminal justice. Funded in part by billionaire investor George Sorosâwho would later bankroll key groups in the Black Lives Matter movementâa Schmoke administration initiative distributed clean needles to heroin addicts. Baltimore became the most addiction-ridden metro area in the country. President Bill Clintonâs drug-policy office described Baltimore as a city where âheroin is readily available with city dealers moving into suburbs and high schools; cocaine is plentiful in both crack and powder forms.â The cityâs 60,000 drug addictsânearly one in ten Baltimoreansâoverwhelmed hospitals with cocaine-induced emergencies.
Schmokeâs exhortations far exceeded his achievements. During his three terms, Baltimoreâendowed with multiple federal programs to incentivize business developmentâlost 56,000 jobs and became a city of transfer payments fueled by nonprofits and government. Schmoke produced perhaps the greatest gap between image and reality in any American city. For example, he had city cars and trucks painted with his campaign sloganââThe City That Readsââbut his cuts in library funding reduced opportunities to read. While the hyperactive Schaefer had proved spasmodically effective, Schmokeâs stylistic trademark wasâspeeches and slogans asideâpassivity in the face of the cityâs problems. âItâs out of our controlâ was his favorite refrain, and this attitude reverberated through city government. Calls to city agencies were commonly answeredâafter many attemptsâwith a snarling, âYeah?â
Without major accomplishments to run on, Schmoke sought a third term in 1995 on a Black Power platform. Schaefer was by then Marylandâs governor, and Schmoke mocked the $100 million convention center being built in downtown Baltimore as âcosmetic.â Schmoke was right, but his own record offered no constructive alternativeâmiddle-class blacks and whites continued to flee for the safety and lower taxes of the suburbs. Schmoke touted his close ties with the Clinton administration, whose Department of Housing and Urban Development provided growing support for the cityâs failed social programs, including a $100 million empowerment-zone grant intended to spur job creation. The jobs didnât come, but both the empowerment zone and the Rouse-led Sandtown-Winchester Development Corporation have been favorite stops for touring HUD officials. Twenty years later, Sandtown still lacks the ordinary amenities and local shopping associated with minimally functioning neighborhoods.
In the wake of the 1968 riots, Baltimore was Marylandâs most heavily populated jurisdiction. But having shrunk from 906,000 residents in the early 1970s to 656,000 today, the city has fallen behind Baltimore County (which no longer includes the City of Baltimore) and the suburban counties of Washington, D.C. Administratively, the city has increasingly dissolved into the state. One in every four city budget dollars comes from Maryland, and Annapolis officials play a central role in administering several city agencies. The state now controls formerly city-run institutions such as Baltimore-Washington International airport, the community colleges, the jails, and most of the public school system. The cityâs two sports stadiums, Oriole Park at Camden Yards and PSINet Stadium, are run by the Maryland Stadium Authority.
The 1990s urban revival associated with mayors Rudolph Giuliani in New York, Stephen Goldsmith in Indianapolis, John Norquist in Milwaukee, and Richard M. Daley in Chicago bypassed Baltimore. While crime began dropping in other cities in that decade, and particularly in New York, Bâlmer, as natives sometimes pronounce it, suffered through nine straight years of more than 300 murders. Schmoke left the city with a demoralized police force, riven by racial suspicions that produced a flight of veteran cops to surrounding jurisdictions. The city lost more than 120,000 residents during the 1990s; tens of thousands of homes were simply abandoned, and parts of the city seemed degraded beyond hope of repair.
These desperate circumstances led a number of black leaders (including the father of future mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake) to back a white city councilman, virtually unknown outside his home territory in Northeast Baltimore, to succeed Schmoke as mayor. When 36-year-old Martin OâMalley, a former state prosecutor, announced his candidacy in June 1999, he didnât even make the front page of the Baltimore Sun. OâMalley had built his council reputation by calling for tougher crime-fighting strategies. He promised that making the streets safer would âattract jobs, improve schools and halt the exodus of 1,000 city residents a month,â the Sun observed. He faced long oddsâeight black candidates were already running in the Democratic primary. âThe only thing he has going for him is heâs white,â said one key campaign consultant dismissively.
Felony convictions disqualified some of OâMalleyâs African-American mayoral opponents, but city council president Lawrence Bell had strong public-sector union support, and former city council member Carl Stokes eloquently opposed the tax breaks handed out to downtown hotels. Yet even Bell had been recently sued for failing to pay his personal debts, and his car had been repossessed, while Stokes gave an unconvincing explanation for why his driverâs license had been suspended and then lied about whether he had graduated from college. While his rivals foundered, OâMalley began city council meetings with a roll call of recent murder victims. At the candidateâs first public forum, âOâMalley silenced the hall with a passionate pledge to end the exodus of city residents by wiping out open-air drug markets,â the Sun reported. Striking at Schmokeâs legacy, OâMalley declared that Baltimore would never lure new companies to enterprise zones until it secured drug-free zones. âPeople are tired of the crimeâtired,â said one middle-aged black woman who plunked for OâMalley.
Elected with a cross-racial coalition, OâMalley initially brought energy and optimism to the executive office. While Schmoke had insisted that New Yorkâs policing success was ânonsenseâ and âa license to hunt minorities,â OâMalley brought in Ed Norris from Giulianiâs NYPD as police commissioner and directed the police to crack down on quality-of-life offenses. Norris introduced a version of Gothamâs highly successful CompStat system for tracking crime. Further, OâMalley tried to apply CompStat techniques to a range of city services. For a time, his innovative CitiStat, which applied rapid data-gathering and analysis to all city agencies, brought a degree of transparency and accountability to Bâlmerâs sleepy, self-serving bureaucracy.
National magazines lauded OâMalley as an up-and-coming star in the Democratic Party, and the telegenic mayor won a featured speaking slot at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. But despite OâMalleyâs efforts, the city remained in dire shape. Its industrial-age infrastructure continued to crumble. More than 100,000 of Baltimoreâs schoolchildren were functionally illiterate, in part because the schools were, in effect, âownedâ by the teachersâ union, led by African-Americans who, in the words of Schaefer biographer C. Fraser Smith, viewed them âas their inviolate pool of patronage.â OâMalley struggled mightily but, at best, made only a dent in the cityâs rampant crime. Commissioner Norris tried to professionalize the cityâs police culture, but OâMalley resented the plaudits that came his way, and Norris was shown the door after two years. Even OâMalleyâs limited anticrime measures produced a backlash. He cut back on quality-of-life arrests in his second term, when he began eyeing a run for governor.
OâMalleyâs reforms ended with his administration. He was succeeded by Sheila Dixon, the city council president and onetime shoe-waver. She campaigned against quality-of-life policing, by then undercut by an ACLU lawsuit. Dixon seemed more interested in revenge than results. Elected with a record-low 28 percent turnout in the Democratic primary, she had to resign three years into her term, after being convicted of petty embezzlement and perjury. Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, who succeeded Dixon first as city council president and then as mayor, continued the campaign against active policing. By the time the city erupted in the Freddie Gray riots, Baltimore had already returned to the pathological slough from which OâMalley had only partially rescued it. The tragedy of West Baltimore was that its churchgoing pockets of rectitude found themselves caught between criminal crews, on the one hand, and corrupt cops, on the other.
Sandtown itself, though emblematic of Great Societyâinspired efforts at urban reform, made a somewhat atypical urban slum. To the west and south is Gwynnâs Falls Park; to the north are Hanlon and Druid Hills Parks and, slightly to the east, Green Mount Cemetery. West Baltimore also includes Baltimore Community College and the historically black Coppin State University. Surrounded by greenery, showered with federal, state, and local money, Sandtown nevertheless became an endogenous transmitter of poverty and violence. After a half-century of federal efforts, and despite the traditional Christian preaching of its ministers, West Baltimore remains largely bereftâpeopled, in the words of New Jersey pastor Buster Soares, by numerous caterpillars who will never molt into butterflies without a transformation of values.
The riot ideology of the 1960s had been about cadging federal funds under threat of violence; the riot ideology of 2015 is about the smoldering resentment that led the underclass and its media and political enablers to argue that racist cops produced depraved urban behavior. David Simon, the idiot-savant creator of HBOâs award-winning The Wire, which glamorized Baltimoreâs black drug âcrews,â blamed the legacy of OâMalleyâs quality-of-life policing for the riots. Simon described Baltimore police officers as âan army of occupation.â He unintentionally had a point. The police, despite their vices, impose a modicum of conventional values on a polity where the culture of gangsta rap projects the illusion of a revolutionary alternative to âbourgeois white values.â An MSNBC host plausibly compared inner-city Baltimore with the Gaza Strip, where the failure of repeated self-destructive assaults on Israel hasnât diminished the illusion that the Jewish state is but a passing phenomenon of settler-colonialism.
After the Ferguson riots of 2014, disdain on the street for Baltimoreâs integrated but often less than professional police department became combustible, and Grayâs death lit the powder keg. Economically marginal residentsâin a city home to Johns Hopkins University and financial firms Legg Mason and T. Rowe Priceâperpetrated Baltimoreâs spring 2015 riots, which destroyed 200 businesses and injured 98 cops. The trouble began at the James Rouseâconstructed Mondawmin Mall. Students, angry at the way they were âdisrespectedâ and inspired by the sci-fi movie The Purge, which described a day of seemingly emancipatory anarchy, gathered outside the mallâs transportation hub. Flyers called for the Crips, the Bloods, the Black Guerrilla Family, and the Nation of Islam to unite and join the action. Students cornered by cops reportedly began taunting police, who had gone on alert after receiving what the department called âcredible informationâ that a coalition of gangs wanted to âtake outâ law-enforcement officers. Rioting ensued.
Reporters took little notice of these gang elements, since the liberal media operated on the principle of âimplied sufferingââthat is, people acting badly is de facto proof that they have been mistreated. The persistence of poverty in West Baltimore supposedly demonstrated pervasive white racism and black powerlessness. Yet the same Black Guerrilla Family was powerful enough to have run the Baltimore City Detention Center until Maryland governor Larry Hogan shut it down.
As the violence unfolded, Mayor Rawlings-Blake told police to stand down. âIâve made it very clear that I work with the police and instructed them to do everything that they could to make sure that the protesters were able to exercise their right to free speech,â she explained. âItâs a very delicate balancing act, because while we tried to make sure that they were protected from the cars and the other things that were going on, we also gave those who wished to destroy space to do that as well.â And, she said, âwe worked very hard to keep that balance and to put ourselves in the best position to deescalate, and thatâs what you saw.â
Baltimore is a city of many Freddie Grays. The 25-year-old Sandtown resident, a petty drug dealer who had been arrested 18 times, might have seemed like a flawed martyr. His death appeared to be the result of police negligenceâhe wasnât fastened into a seat belt for the 45-minute ride to the police station and suffered a severe spinal-cord injuryârather than intentional malice. But in a city where one in ten residents is a drug addict, and in a state where ex-felons can vote, Gray represented a significant constituency. Showing, she said, that âno one is above the law,â stateâs attorney Marilyn Mosby brought murder charges against the police less than two weeks after Grayâs death. âTo the people of Baltimore and the demonstrators across America: I heard your call for âNo justice, no peace,â â she said. âYour peace is sincerely needed as I work to deliver justice on behalf of this young man.â
Mosbyâs husband, a city councilman representing West Baltimore who has mayoral ambitions, gently described his rioting constituents as engaged in âa cry for help.â The rioting and looting had ânothing to do with West Baltimore or this particular corner in Baltimore,â Nick Mosby told a reporter. But Leland Vittert of Fox News stood with Mosby outside a West Baltimore liquor store as it was being looted, and the councilman refused to criticize the thieves. Looting, Mosby said, is âyoung folks of the community showing decades-old anger, frustration, for a system thatâs failed them. I mean, itâs bigger than Freddie Gray. This is about the social economics of poor urban America.â Itâs also about drugs and the unprecedented mass theft of opiates by many of the cityâs gangs. According to the Associated Press, federal drug-enforcement agents said that Baltimore gangs targeted 32 of the cityâs pharmacies during the riot, stealing roughly 300,000 doses of opiates such as oxycodone. âThe ones doing the violence,â said a 55-year-old West Baltimore woman, were âeating Percocet like candy and theyâre not thinking about consequences.â
âJustice for Freddie Grayâ produced a withdrawal of law and order. The âarmy of occupationâ retreated, murders surged, and thugs roamed the streets largely unhindered. The protest culture of the sixties ruled the day but without the hope once engendered, albeit mistakenly, by the incidents of that era. Great Societyâinspired social programs failed to reduce poverty but succeeded in creating self-serving political machines that blame white conspiracies for the degradation of West Baltimore and other urban areas.
Mayor Rawlings-Blake called in Al Sharpton and fired police chief Anthony Batts, who had tried to upgrade the police department but became the fall guy for the mayorâs failings. Baltimore today is demarcated by white enclaves and by those African-American areas defined by the gangsta rap culture where, in a parody of the segregated South, honor is all and disrespect requires the âsatisfactionâ of personally delivered revenge. But while the streets have been ceded to thugs in those neighborhoods, itâs not politically acceptable in Baltimore to describe rioters in such terms. At the height of the protests, when the mayor announced that the National Guard would be deployed and a citywide curfew imposed, she also referred to the rioters as âthugs.â She was then forced to apologize for her candor, reclassifying the miscreants as âmisguided young people.â
For Ta-Nehisi Coates, the crews and the gangsta rappers singing about the need to âFuck the Policeâ are preferable to the cops. The cops, complains Coates, âlord overâ young black men with âthe moral authority of a protection racket.â There is a touch of truth in this. But, Coates goes on, the problem with the police âis not that they are fascist pigs but that our country is ruled by majoritarian pigs.â The solution, he implies, is a black population released from the ideals of the American dream and from the âfalse moralityâ of white Americans. For Coates, blacks can only be freed from racism after whites have been emancipated from capitalism.
A man, a city, a movement, and a moment have met: West Baltimore has, for the time being, been liberated from American morality. Letâs judge Coatesâs vision on how that plays out.
They have their mob rule now.
The article is a good overview of the situation.
The sad state of affairs in Bawlamer. A half-century of leftist big gubmint welfare state epic level failure.
PBS is running ads for an upcoming Black Panthers special to be aired in February.
Whitewashing the Black Panthers (Daily Beast)
“http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/07/25/whitewashing-the-black-panthers.html"
Documentary on Black Panthers Is A Must-Watch (Newsweek)
“http://www.newsweek.com/black-panthers-documentary-must-watch-369196"
The World Channel (a PBS sub channel of over the air broadcasting) should have a plethora of Black programming in February.
One is that of the poor blacks whose neighborhoods you don't want to be in. Any of us.
They (not all obviously) don't work and burn down their own neighborhoods, they gun down their own kind with little thought about it.
Then there are those neighborhoods whose homeowners are young professionals, many whites. who the city needs to pay those high taxes. Crime is very low in those neighborhoods. I know some of them.
South of the inner Harbor near 95 so they can get to work easily.
When they get older they will move out, but they are having fun now.
Melisa Harris Perry bitches about this. Its so unfair to have those who pay taxes in the city.
Ravens fans
I’ve been there a few times since 1985. Fells Point is a beautiful neighborhood for one. I remember walking up from the Inner Harbor just a few blocks to City Hall (this was under Kurt Schmoke) and they were openly dealing drugs on the plaza in front. Just appalling.
Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s it was blue collar.
Every Friday and Saturday night (white) college kids would flood Fells Point looking for fun. Many came down 83 from Towson State.
Every bar would be full.
No fights or shootings.
And those white women were hot, beautiful, pretty or just plain cute.
“Melisa Harris Perry bitches about this. Its so unfair to have those who pay taxes in the city.”
I avoid Balti-Mordor like the plague. DC too. 2015 was “this year” for retirement. 2016 is going to be “this year” to unass Maryland for Texas. Then the whole thing can collapse into chaos.
I recall driving from Bragg to Fort Hollabird,MD in late summer 69 as I was going to the MI officers course TDY while my GSW’s healed more. I rented in the Dundalk area and that was blue collar then. A Major and I got a 3 BR apartment in Bear Creek and an ADA CPT came along, too. Well that area was not black then and the locals crowded bars after work. I almost bought a 69 XKE in Baltimore but the dealer could not adjust the carbs on two test drives. I recall almost two years earlier in late 67-early 68 doing riot training in the 3rd Group. We stood by as the 82nd was called up and went to Detroit after the Newark riots. LBJ damn sure used the NG and 82nd. The 82nd used 50 cal. machine guns on punks shooting at troops.
My father was living in Newark when the $hit hit the fan. He wrote at the time he was taking a stroll past a housing project and one of the local “yoots” pitched a tv out the window - aimed at his head, which narrowly missed. Had it been successful, he (and I) would not be here today.
The situation is getting worse every year. It will finally erupt in violence beyond any government’s ability to contain.
It isn’t just Obama’s incessant calls for more gun control in the wake of every mass shooting event that are driving record gun sales. People see events like Ferguson, Baltimore, the Knockout Game stories, and continuing high crime rates in urban black culture, and they buy guns in response. No one talks about those disparate crime rates between black and white areas explicitly, but people see who the perps are on the local TV news every night, and connect the dots on their own.
Here in the ATL area, there are 6-8 big nice gun ranges that didn’t exist 15 years ago. People aren’t just buying and putting their new guns in their safes, they are learning to use them and practicing. Additionally, about 5% of the adult population in GA have a Georgia Weapons Carry License, which is really an extraordinary figure when you think about it. This in a state where you don’t even need a carry license to have a gun in your glove box or console.
The point is, people outside the areas like West Baltimore have observed what is going on more than you might think, are preparing accordingly, and will not react well to these behaviors leaving the ‘hood.
I meant to ping you to my previous. The means of containment in such a situation is outlined.
Gov Romney in Mich did not screw around when Detroit started the crap. He called up the NG plus asked LBJ for federal troops. The 101st Airborne (What was left at Campbell) and the 82nd came fast. They had tanks blasting jerks firing out windows. That is how you stop a riot and the free shopper thieves.
Fort Campbell & the 101st isn’t that far from me. I’m in Nashville.
Hermitage and the damn inner city has come here under Dean. I am selling.
Yeah, I thought you were in the state. I got the “inner city” over two decades ago under Pharaoh Phil (as Mayor, not Guv). Probably could’ve sold the property and house for more in 1990 than today in actual dollars. If this property and acreage were elsewhere in the county, it would be worth 5 times more. “Die-versity” is such a treasure. Too bad rich Communists like Dean and the newly elected *untwagon wouldn’t dare have that “die-versity” in their own neighborhoods.
Much the same problem as found in Chicago - as long as the inner city residents hate the police more than they hate the gangs, the feral conditions that make the ghetto unlivable will only increase in their toxicity.
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