To those who don't know, Baltimore was the first city to have its citizens stop supporting its police. At that time, the local black community stated that they didn't like the police and would not support them. Most of us stated at that time that this would be the result. Police not doing "active policing" because they were not being supported. This was an avoidable result of some very bad leadership. Unfortunately, we see that many large cities across the US aren't learning from Baltimore's mistakes...
That's not the issue... the issue is "the economy" and the long term decrepit economic conditions that have had people relying on drugs and crime for means of making it, that created the cut throat environment. Policing has never been able to stop that in the history of America.
What people are saying with regards to police is ..."Change"... stop amplifying the already existing anguish with brutality and murder by police and deal with the myriad of issues including how to deal with mental illness and the other issues that impact people who fall into acts that break the law.
Now... everyone knows whether they admit it or not, if these are the averaged unemployment figures, then the rates in poor black and other areas is spiking at
12% or higher.
Perspectives Matter!!!! Many of these areas are "old" with homes that are more than 60-80 yrs old and over the period unmaintained roads, sidewalks and broken down and run down business areas and many other challenging things.
Facts Matter:
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It is a historical fact, however, that the handful of businesses looted and burned in the eruption of spontaneous and entirely understandable social anger is nothing in comparison to the systematic destruction long wrought by the corporate and financial interests Rawlings-Blake and the rest of the political establishment defend. A review of the systematic destruction of decent-paying jobs and the impoverishment of the large portions of the population—black, white and immigrant—exposes who the real vandals are
Once an industrial hub for steel, ship building, automotive, electronics and chemical manufacturing, the city of 622,000 people today lies in a near-ruined state as idled factories and acre after acre of abandoned industrial wasteland litter the region.
Throughout the twentieth century, Baltimore was synonymous with steel, as the region began producing in 1887. Upon establishing its mill at nearby Sparrows Point in 1917, the Bethlehem Steel Company ordered over 10,000 living units constructed to house the plant’s workforce, eventually employing half the town in its massive steel operations.
The mill would go on to become the largest in the world throughout the middle of the twentieth century, producing hundreds of thousands of tons of steel each year to build the Golden Gate bridge and the tunnels to New York City and much of its skyline. Bethlehem’s shipbuilding operations, started in 1905, manufactured and repaired cruise ships, cargo and other commercial vessels and over 1,100 military ships in World War II alone.
In addition to Bethlehem, which was the eighth largest company in the US, numerous other manufacturing firms, including General Motors, Solo Cup and Huish Detergents (now Sun Products) employed tens of thousands of workers in the city.
“Bethlehem Steel wasn’t even the highest-paying steel job back then; Eastern Stainless cleaned up as far as that was concerned,” said Pete, a former Bethlehem Steel worker who spoke with the
World Socialist Web Site. “Working at the [Bethlehem Steel mill’s] blast furnace department, it was a hard job, but it provided a good workout and the best part was that you worked as a team; everyone, even the guys managing, had to put in work there,” Pete said.
In 2005, General Motors closed a 70-year-old van assembly plant in the city, resulting in over 1,000 job losses.
From 1970 until 2000, Baltimore lost as many as 100,000 manufacturing jobs as companies shuttered plants and moved to areas with a more readily exploitable workforce.
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foxbaltimore.com
