The New Yorker:

How the mayor of Newark is working to revive his city.

By Kelefa Sanneh

On an August day in 2011, a man stood outside City Hall in Newark, New Jersey, exhorting a crowd through a wireless microphone. “Stop giving love to these psychopaths,” he roared. The “psychopaths” were criminals; a few days earlier, a twenty-nine-year-old teacher named Dawn Reddick had been shot and killed—a seemingly random crime, except that killings in Newark had come to seem dispiritingly unrandom. The city was on its way toward ninety-three murders that year, with a population of two hundred and seventy-seven thousand people—a rate five times that of New York City, which sits less than ten miles east but often feels much farther.

The killing of Dawn Reddick was unsolved then—indeed, it remains unsolved. So the speaker railed against the unknown perpetrators, as well as the systems and circumstances that enabled so much perpetration. “How you get a Chinese-made rifle in the middle of Newark?” he asked. “You can’t even get a decent loaf of bread!” He pictured what might happen if sufficiently assertive citizens found the responsible party: “The police should be trying to drag us off of him. We should be stomping his ass all the way into the precinct.” He didn’t sound like a typical protest leader, and he knew it. “Yeah, I’m talking vigilante talk today,” he said. “I’m talking mob justice.”

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