May 11, 2015

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Turning our attention back to the problems caused by liberal Democrat government in Baltimore. Kevin Williamson says one weird trick can make a city more prosperous. He takes us to Philadelphia to show the trick.

I have never understood why West Philadelphia became a slum. There’s certainly nothing wrong with the real estate: Right in the middle of West Philadelphia is an Ivy League university; go eight-tenths of a mile east from the University of Pennsylvania down Walnut Street and you’re in one of the nicest city centers in the Northeast; go four miles northwest down Lancaster Avenue and you’re in Lower Merion, the fifth-highest-income municipality in the country (sandwiched between San Ramon, Calif., and Brookline, Mass.), where you can catch a polo match or a steeplechase race. There is terrific residential architecture, from the Victorian rowhouses on Spruce Street to the stately 19th-century homes spread out on broad lawns as you approach the city limit.

But in between is a lot of blight and some very bad blocks, though less blight and fewer bad blocks than there were 30 years ago. …

… There are many variables in the success and failure of cities, but one stands out. It isn’t race — Philadelphia is a minority-majority city, as is New York. And it isn’t affluence, either: Rank U.S. metros by income and Los Angeles barely cracks the top 50. But each of those cities has enjoyed a measure of success in recent decades by improving the material conditions in poor neighborhoods through the sort of commercial development bitterly denounced as gentrification. The streets of West Philadelphia are not nearly so mean as they used to be. New York City’s transformation in the Giuliani years was dramatic not only for the well-off precincts of Manhattan but in the rest of the city, too, with development even in places such as the South Bronx, once written off as a total urban loss. Los Angeles, which experienced a much worse version of the Freddie Gray riots in 1992, is a different city today. Economic policy is of course a piece of that, though not so big a piece as the economic-policy wonks like to think — does anybody remember what Rudy Giuliani’s tax plan was?

These cities are now safe — that’s the difference. New York City may be backsliding under its new Sandinista regime, but there’s still not much of the old menace there. …

… The real issue is moving people, businesses, and resources into poor neighborhoods — which is not going to happen when the locals are assaulting people, burning down businesses, and destroying resources. Lawlessness and violence convert assets into liabilities — all those boarded-up houses that once were homes are attractive nuisances on a massive scale. Somebody, somewhere, wants to sell things in those abandoned Baltimore storefronts, but no one can, because it is not safe.

And that’s the horrible irony here. If Baltimore wants to get its economic act together, it has to get something else right first: policing.

So far, neither the police department nor the people of Baltimore have shown any particular capacity for keeping the peace.

 

 

 

The UK.s Guardian says Baltimore is going back to its old ways.

Nine shootings were reported in a 24-hour period in Baltimore on Thursday, including at least two that were fatal.

The city has seen roughly three to four shootings a day over the past 10 days. In contrast, throughout the protests in West Baltimore following the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray and the riots on 27 April, there were no casualties. From 28 April to 3 May, 18 shootings were reported in the city. …

 

 

Ron Christie says that after Baltimore’s mess, America is heading “blackwards.”

I’m worried about my country today. I’m worried because a fear I’ve spoken of for several years now is coming to fruition in a way that threatens to rip apart the fabric of our American society.

In 2012 I published Blackwards: How Black Leadership Is Returning America to the Days of Separate But Equal, in which I warned that our country was headed on a dangerous course marked by race and ethnic identification at the expense of the positive attributes we ascribe as being American citizens. In short I wrote: ”I believe this phenomenon is most pervasive in the black, dare I say African American, community. I believe that calls of racism and unequal treatment in the era of Obama has helped create a toxic climate that will spread unless we stop the stain that is spreading through our schools, offices, communities of worship and political discourse.”

The essence of heading blackwards has manifested itself in the events that have unfolded in Baltimore over the past few weeks. We still don’t know what happened to Freddie Gray while in police custody or the tragic events that led to the young man’s death. We’ve been told over and over again on television and on the radio that racism is the culprit at play for Gray’s death. Unfortunately facts no longer matter in our society today—slogans and efforts by those seeking “justice” for wrongs real or imagined are more important than a clearheaded and dispassionate search for the truth.

Consider the statement given by the Baltimore State’s Attorney late last week in charging six police officers with Gray’s death. Rather than disclose facts and assure the people of Baltimore she would proceed with prosecution based on solid evidence, Marilyn Mosby instead offered: “To the people of Baltimore and the demonstrators across America, I heard your call for ‘No justice, no peace,’” she said. “Your peace is seriously needed as I seek to deliver justice to this young man.” “No Justice, No Peace” is a political statement to be used at a rally, not a comment that ought to be made by someone heading an impartial search for evidence to provide the basis for a conviction in a court of law. …

 

 

More from Andrew McCarthy who was a federal prosecutor in New York city. 

An incompetent prosecutor — or worse, a politically driven prosecutor who also happens to be incompetent — can do worse things than blow an important case. The more one scrutinizes the case against six Baltimore police officers said to be implicated in the death of Freddie Gray, the more one worries that the prosecution will cost lives.

I’ve recently explored the incoherent and patently politicized set of charges filed last Friday by Marilyn Mosby, the social-justice activist who doubles as the Maryland state’s attorney for Baltimore City. The prosecutor has alleged a second-degree “depraved heart” murder offense and other homicide charges that contradict her “depraved heart” theory. The complex case was rashly lodged before investigators had come close to completing their witness interviews and other reports. Ms. Mosby admitted, with clueless pride, that she’d filed a murder case because she heard “the call of ‘no justice, no peace’” from demonstrators across the country.

The homicide charges are of immediate danger to the police officers named in them. By contrast, everyone in Baltimore is endangered by Ms. Mosby’s decision to charge police with false imprisonment. …

… If police are now to conclude that they cannot, without fear of being prosecuted, take routine investigative steps based on reasonable suspicion, communities cannot be protected. There can be no security and no commerce. Innocent people will be preyed upon and killed.

The unlawful-imprisonment charges filed by prosecutor Marilyn Mosby are not even social justice, much less justice. They are a death sentence for Baltimore.

 

 

Jack Kelly in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is last today on Baltimore.

… Half a century ago, when black poverty was greater, there was much less violent crime in black communities, notes economist Thomas Sowell, who is black. Half a century ago, Baltimore was prosperous.

Black poverty is a symptom — not a cause — of urban decay. White racism isn’t to blame for it. What’s killing cities are the leftism, corruption and ineptitude of city “leaders.”

Baltimore is fast becoming the next Detroit because its “leaders” — most of whom are black, all of whom are Democrats — kowtow to thugs.

“You cannot take any people, of any color, and exempt them from the requirements of civilization — including work, behavioral standards, personal responsibility and all the other basic things that the clever intelligentsia disdain — without ruinous consequences to them and to society at large,” Mr. Sowell wrote.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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