Well, yes, certain of the meeja did use the word "riot". And what kind of riot was it? Why, a "police riot" of course! Those thuggish Baltimore police were just provoking and attacking those poor, downtrodden, innocent "African-American" chillun, as you can see clearly in this picture.
Oh... wait... You don't see any police? Just a mob of black folks running wild, stomping on cars? But there were lots of cops around, dressed in full riot gear, armed with guns, batons, teargas and other WMDs. The police certainly had their work cut out for them. Rioters set police cars and buildings on fire in several neighbourhoods, looted a mall and liquor stores and threw rocks at police, who responded occasionally with pepper spray.
So it was all the cops' fault, right? Errr, not exactly. Seems the cops were targetted by a coalition of black gangs -- Bloods, Crips, and others. Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake (of the coloured persuasion herself) called last night one of her city's "darkest days" ["nights", surely. Ed.], and said these actions of "thugs" had nothing to do with protests. "We cannot allow our city to devolve into chaos because of a small group of criminals that are moving throughout our city."
Right. It's a few "thugs" that are causing all the trouble, not the black folks shown in this picture demonstrating for justice for Freddie Gray.
Yep, fighting for justice... and loot... just like the old joke about the Irish lawyer who said all he wanted for his client was justice... with costs, of course.
Justice for Freddie Gray... Mr. Gray was taken into custody by Baltimore police on April 12th after "making eye contact" with officers -- an offence Walt never heard of until now -- and then running away. He was held down, handcuffed and loaded into a van without a seat belt. Leg cuffs were put on him inside the van when he became irate, for some reason. Less than an hour later, he was dead.
The latest victim of a police killing was not just Gray but black. No surprise there. Police have declined to specify the race(s) of the six officers involved in his arrest, all of whom have been suspended while they are under investigation. With pay, of course.
Mr. Gray's death comes amid a national debate over police use of deadly force following the high-profile deaths of several black men in encounters with police, from the Brown death in Ferguson MO to the deaths of Eric Garner in New York and Walter Scott in North Charleston, SC. Black people are angry. Walt understands that. So does Mayor Rawlings-Blake. "I understand anger, but what we're seeing isn't anger," she said. "It's disruption of a community. The same community they say they care about, they're destroying. You can't have it both ways."
Indeed. What we're seeing in Baltimore is not only the venting of anger and legitimate protest against injustice, but criminal violence, destruction and, yes, looting. Fifty years ago, when such things happened in Watts, Harlem and Detroit, we called them "race riots". But in 2015 that term is no longer politically correct.
UPDATE: The Head Soul Brother, Barack Hussein Obama, says all Americans need to do a lot of soul searching to understand what's been going down in Baltimore. Of course the police are to blame. The Prez said today there have been too many "troubling police interactions with black citizens" in what he called "a slow-rolling crisis."
But, he said, there was no excuse for rioters to engage in senseless violence. In a remarkable moment of clarity, Mr. Obama said those who stole from businesses and burned buildings and cars should be treated as criminals. "There's no excuse for the kind of violence that we saw yesterday," he told a White House press conference. "When individuals get crowbars and start prying open doors to loot, they're not protesting, they're not making a statement. They're stealing."
A man in the street, Leroy "Kwame" Jones, responded, "Excuse? Excuse? Whuffo we needs an excuse?!"
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