The New Yorker:

I lived in Baltimore during the Freddie Gray protests in April, 2015. My apartment was in a brownstone next to a small park in a pretty neighborhood called Bolton Hill, which sits on the border between downtown and the West Baltimore neighborhoods where the upheaval was centered. A central image of those riots was a burning CVS at Pennsylvania and North Avenues; that store was about ten blocks from my house. My wife and I lived on the third floor of the brownstone, with our toddler daughter and infant son, and on the evening of April 27th, as things escalated, I sat on the stoop for a little while with an architect who lived downstairs, watching our normally quiet block. Car after car drove by, most of them full of young people. Another neighbor said that a grocery store and a pharmacy three blocks from us were being looted, but on our block no one was out of control. People were on their phones texting, they were looking out their windows. Something important was happening, and they were gathering information.

Eventually, I decided to write about the uprising, and met a senior figure in the Baltimore Police Department named Melvin Russell. He is as vivid in my memory as anyone I’ve written about, perhaps because it is rare to see a powerful person be so hugely sad. A Baltimore native and career city cop, Russell led the B.P.D.’s citywide community-policing division, and for him community policing was both a professional program and a creed. He had deployed it in some of the poorest neighborhoods in Baltimore, especially in the Eastern District. He was sure that the officers under his command had managed to narrow the gap between themselves and their community, and that this was at least part of the reason for a decline in violent crime in those neighborhoods, and for an increase in the number of crimes being solved. During that last week of April, as the chaos deepened, Russell noticed that, in many of the most unsettled parts of West Baltimore, cops were nowhere to be found. Russell, who is black, had worked in the Baltimore Police Department for more than thirty years, and he was not naïve about the racism within its ranks: he had six sons and two daughters, and he said that he and his wife had moved to the far suburbs in part because they wanted to keep their children safe from the Baltimore cops. But it still seemed to surprise him, in a deep and unpleasant way, to see the police simply retreat when they were most needed.

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