City life has not improved in Baltimore since the indictment of six Baltimore police officers. Some residents have gone on a murder spree targeting other residents. Innocent bystanders have the reasonable fear of getting caught in the crossfire.
Drudge has compiled stories here (Juliet Linderman, AP, Baltimore gets bloodier as arrests have dropped), here (Juliet Linderman again, residents are scared to death), and here (Derek Valcourt, CBS local, mother and 7-year-old son murdered).
Rich Lowry observes: “Baltimore was an obsession of the BlackLivesMatter crowd and of the news media after the death of Freddie Gray from a terrible injury suffered in police custody. But now that 35 people have been murdered in the month of May, the highest in a month since 1999, the response has been muted.” Rich titles his column #SomeBlackLivesDontMatter.
As Marvin Gaye asked back in the day, what’s goin’ on? That’s the question FOX News Channel’s Leland Vittert addressed to Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake at her weekly press conference on Wednesday (video below). The mayor had no answer to the question. She didn’t even appear to be in a condition to answer the question. Her handler [?] interceded to call off Vittert. If it would have been a fight, he would have had to throw in the towel.
Against the shibboleths of the day, Rich Lowry draws the moral of the story:
The implication is clear: More people need to be arrested in Baltimore, not fewer. And more need to be jailed. If black lives truly matter, Baltimore needs more and better policing and incarceration to impose order on communities where a lawless few spread mayhem and death.
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It is wrong for the police to shrink from doing their job, but the last month in Baltimore shows how important that job is. This is especially true in dangerous, overwhelmingly black neighborhoods. They need disproportionate police attention, even if that attention is easily mischaracterized as racism. The alternative is a deadly chaos that destroys and blights the lives of poor blacks.
It is a paradox that a figure who is anathema to the BlackLivesMatter movement, Rudy Giuliani, saved more black lives than any of his critics ever will. He did it by getting the police to establish and maintain basic order in New York’s neighborhoods and defending the cops when the likes of Al Sharpton maligned them.
Now that Mayor Bill de Blasio has pulled back, shootings are trending up in New York City. But it’s OK, as long as nameless young black men are the ones being shot at. For progressives only some black lives matter.
Rush Limbaugh has more here, including a transcript of Vittert’s questioning of the mayor.
Related: “Mosby’s favorites.”
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