Free Republic

Complete Headline: Baltimore Officials: Peaceful Protesters Torched 61 Buildings, Damaged 350 Businesses, Injured 113 Officers The Joys of Democratic Leadership… Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake told reporters after a night of looting and fires that city officials gave the violent Freddie Gray protesters “space” to destroy property. Video of Democrat Mayor announcing her giving looters space to destroyBoy, did she ever! Baltimore officials upped their tally of destroyed and torched businesses this week. ** At least 61 buildings were torched. ** Over 144 vehicles were torched. ** 350 businesses were damaged ** And 113 police officers were injured.

Two correctional officers who work at the Baltimore City jail were suspended without pay Wednesday after video emerged showing them looting a 7-11 store during last month’s riots. Tamika Cobb and Kendra Richard were charged with theft and two counts of burglary, according to a statement released by the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services (DPSCS). Investigators DPSCS and with the Intelligence and Investigative Division responded to a tip that the pair had joined in looting a closed 7-11 convenience store near downtown Baltimore on April 25. That was the first day of major unrest following the April...

BREAKING:Charges will not be filed against MPD Officer Matt Kenny in the shooting death of Tony Robinson Updated: Tue 3:17 PM, May 12, 2015 MADISON, Wis.---BREAKING: DA Ozanne: Charges will not be filed against MPD Officer Matt Kenny in the shooting death of Tony Robinson. UPDATED: Tuesday, May 12, 2015 ---3:17 p.m. MADISON, Wis.---BREAKING: DA Ozanne: Charges will not be filed against MPD Officer Matt Kenny in the shooting death of Tony Robinson. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The American Civil Liberties Union demanded an end to the use of government drone aircraft to “spy” on those looting and burning buildings in Baltimore. “Persons walking the streets should not be faced with such an intrusive violation of their privacy,” declared ACLU spokesman Bertram Petty. “Officials need to present a ‘probable cause’ case to observe a specific individual suspected of a specific crime. They have no authority for a general surveillance of an entire city.” Petty also questioned whether the looting and burning would even qualify as crimes, per se. “The title to the property being removed from the...

A 17-year-old boy has been charged as an adult for his role in beating a 61-year-old alongside a group of approximately 50 other teens in Baltimore, Maryland, on April 22. Richard Fletcher was brutally beaten by the teens after he went outside to ask two girls who were fighting on top of his truck to move along and continue their dispute elsewhere. The mob of teens began to hit and kick Fletcher until he fell to the ground, but the attack didn't end. After the beating last month, Fletcher was left with broken eye sockets, a broken nose, broken ribs...

Education advocates on Monday called on Gov. Larry Hogan and Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake to increase funding for the city's schools, arguing the recent rioting in Baltimore shows the money is desperately needed. Without the funds, city schools will be forced to cut teachers, critical programs and student services, the advocates said. "Baltimore is not getting sufficient education funding to provide for all of our children's needs," said Bebe Verdery, education reform director at the ACLU of Maryland. The coalition includes the city's parent-teacher association and the city's charter schools organization, among other groups.

On May 1, Baltimore prosecutor Marilyn Mosby charged six police officers, including two black male officers and one female black officer, with 28 various charges, including murder and manslaughter over the death of Freddie Gray. Officer Caesar Goodsoon, the black driver of the van Gray rode in, was charged by the 35-year-old state’s attorney for Baltimore City with the most serious offense, “second-degree depraved heart murder,” which means indifference to human life. Baltimore is 64 percent black, and almost half of the Baltimore Police department is black. The officers are accused of arresting and roughing up Gray, who is black,...

Iowa Rep. Steve King took President Obama to task Saturday, blaming him for the conditions that caused civil unrest in Baltimore and Ferguson. “President Obama has consistently driven wedges between people. And he perceives a difference on race, maybe on ethnicity, well yes on ethnicity, sexual orientation—wedge after wedge after wedge. I didn’t really imagine they were going to drive a wedge between the law and law-breakers,” King told reporters at the South Carolina Freedom Summit in Greenville. King cited the example of Obama’s “Beer Summit” early in his first term with Cambridge, Mass., police Sgt. James Crowley and Harvard...

Seventeen people have been arrested following clashes with police during an unplanned anti-austerity protest close to Downing Street, the Met police said. Officers in riot gear clashed with a "minority" of protesters who threw objects during the rally - which came days after the Tory election victory. Four police officers and a police staff member were injured, the Met added. A police investigation is also under way after graffiti referring to "Tory scum" was daubed on a war memorial. The graffiti was sprayed on the Women's War Memorial, in London's Whitehall, which is yards from where a concert to commemorate...

The kind of leadership that could have guided Baltimore’s protestors away from criminal behavior and ruining hundreds of small businesses during rioting is not what manifested itself when the city’s mayor publicly announced she gave those who want to “destroy” room to do so.Criminally inclined adults and wayward juveniles in Baltimore battled law enforcement, broke into and looted stores and torched buildings on April 27, just hours after the funeral for 25-year-old Freddie Gray, who sustained a severe spine injury on April 12 prior to arriving at a police station while under arrest before he died from the trauma seven...

Baltimore is awesome! Watch the Orioles! Watch the Ravens! Take a boat tour in the harbor and then dine in one of the fabulous restaurants with a view. Visit the aquarium! You will love Baltimore! Link to revised economic development / Chamber of Commerce video)

Enjoy it while you can, Baltimore. The riots haven’t ended, they’ve merely been postponed.We are told that things are getting back to normal in Baltimore. This is not an unmixed blessing. Yes, the rioters have put down their bricks, their Molotov cocktails, and all their many other implements of destruction (at least for the time being), and when one compares the present state of the city to the chaos seen last week, one can say things have improved. But after the great collective sigh of relief goes out, Baltimoreans must now reckon with the meaning of the word “normal” as...

<p>WHEN BALTIMORE’S STATE attorney Marilyn Mosby announced charges last week against six officers in the death of Freddie Gray and proclaimed to the city that “I heard your call for ‘no justice, no peace,’” it’s possible that her decisions were based, at least in part, on the understandable goal of preventing further riots. This goal is commendable, but the mean selected to achieve it — hearing the call of demonstrators — raises fundamental questions regarding the due process right of those charged with serious crimes.</p>

Before professors everywhere seize upon the Baltimore riots as a “teachable moment,” we’d like to offer a few simple pieces of recent history to cogitate over. Expect your local professor to echo the president’s claim that Baltimoreans, and some out-of-towners rioted because the federal government has not dumped enough money into the Charm City. As it happens, on May 4, 2015, Elizabeth Harrigan reported in the Washington Free Beacon, “The city of Baltimore received over $1.8 billion from President Barack Obama’s stimulus law, including $467.1 million to invest in education and $26.5 million for crime prevention.” Harrigan and her peers...

When the cops chasing Freddie Gray caught up with him, they had a problem: He had not done anything illegal. They solved that problem the way cops often do: They plucked a charge out of thin air. The cops probably would not have gotten into trouble for making an illegal arrest if Gray had not died due to a spinal injury he suffered in the back of a police van. Gray's death has shined a light on the way police officers abuse their arrest powers to impose arbitrary punishment, a practice that helps explain the anger on display in Baltimore...

Are you ready for rioting, looting and mindless violence in major U.S. cities all summer long? According to a brand new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, 96 percent of all Americans believe that there will be more civil unrest in America this summer. That leaves only 4 percent of people that believe that everything will be just fine. In this day and age, it is virtually impossible to get 96 percent of Americans to agree on anything. So the fact that just about everyone agrees that we are going to see more civil unrest should really tell you something. The...

Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake on Wednesday asked the U.S. Department of Justice to probe city police practices and said officers will have body cameras by 2016. Rawlings-Blake, in a morning news conference, noted that complaints of police brutality have been down, and highlighted other improvements by the department. "We have seen results from these efforts," she said. But she said more efforts must be made to build on reforms that have already been put into place. "We have to get it right. Failure is not an option," she said. The mayor said the department of Justice will investigate what "systemic...

It is already clear that Marilyn Mosby, the state’s attorney who is prosecuting the Baltimore Six is not up to the responsibilities of her job. The only questions are: 1. how deeply incompetent?; and 2. what consequences will result from her bungling? The second question is the more important one, for Mosby has set up her prosecution as a response to the “No justice, no peace” movement. If and when she fails to secure a conviction through her ineptitude, then by the standard of the mob to which she is catering, more riots will be justifiable, and therefore the likely...

The guy who started the entire “Hands Up Don’t Shoot” lie is now trying to cash in on the death of his friend Mike Brown, because why not? Beats workin’. From ABC News: A witness to a police officer’s fatal shooting of Michael Brown last summer in Ferguson, Missouri, has filed a lawsuit alleging that he was wrongly stopped and fired on during the encounter on a city street. The lawsuit, filed last week by Dorian Johnson, claims that the officer, Darren Wilson, fired at him and Brown as they ran away from him on Aug. 9. The lawsuit claims...

Riots work. The Baltimore riots achieved a number of goals for the political left, which is why the left defended the riots as a quasi-legitimate outgrowth of fully justified anti-police, anti-white feeling – in a majority black city with a majority black police force and a majority black city council, in a country with a black president and a black attorney general.