“There were no police around. No police reports. And no stories in the paper. Violence and mayhem among young black people in the Inner Harbor is the new norm,” said McDonough. “And this has to stop.”
McDonough’s comments were echoed by many callers to his talk show on WCMB in Baltimore, and by a New Jersey tourist as well. “My husband and I came to Inner Harbor last month and stayed at a hotel there,” said the visitor to Baltimore who did not wish to be identified. “That night, we looked out our hotel window and saw at least a hundred black people walking down the middle of the street, fighting and acting in a menacing way. The police did not show up for at least an hour. When I got back to New Jersey, I was curious about what happened. Then I learned there were no police reports. No newspaper stories. It was as if it had never happened.”
The Baltimore Sun reported on the same incident:
There is a disconnect sometimes between what police see as normal and routine and what others view as scary.
When Denise Kostka and her husband saw a mob forming outside her downtown hotel, she became frightened.
She didn’t see a lot of police, the young teens were massing at the corners, and all the images of Baltimore that people have -- The Wire, the murder count, the drugs, instantly filled her head.
For the police, it was just another group of kids they had to push out of downtown. They made no arrests, saw no crime, had no reason to make an announcement. There’s not even a report – it’s just something that happens.6
SCAN ME!
VIDEO: Upper Fells Attack
The St. Patrick’s Day riot was just one of several violent events featuring black people in the Inner Harbor.
One mile away from the Inner Harbor, in Upper Fells Point, a group of eight to ten black teens attacked white residents in four separate cases in 2010.7
In April 2011 another large group of black people was streaming through Inner Harbor, fighting and destroying property. “At least 100 teenagers roamed the streets near the Inner Harbor, City Hall, the Convention Center and the First Mariner Arena for more than two hours as police used megaphones to order them to leave.” One of the rioters was stabbed.8
During Fourth of July fireworks in 2011, a child was shot and a tourist was killed among other violent episodes at the holiday celebration.
On March 18, 2012, hundreds of black people streamed into the Inner Harbor, with dozens of fights, a stabbing, threats and other violence that resulted in ten arrests. Police used a Taser on one of the suspects. Baltimore Police Maj. Bill Davis attributed “the rowdiness to the unusually hot weather.”9
To put the April beating in “historical perspective,” The Baltimore Sun reprinted a story from 1995, where large groups of black people created violence during and after an annual Jazz concert.
[In 1993] the Rouse Co. ordered the Harborplace pavilions closed early after about 4,000 young people converged at the Inner Harbor. Although police reported no resulting crime or fighting among the youths, some people expressed fear and discomfort at the size and racial makeup of the crowd, which was largely black, and complained about a lack of security.
Rodney A. Orange, president of the Baltimore chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said black teens have complained to him that “they feel stereotyped. They only want to enjoy their evening, wherever they are going, but very often they’re looked at suspiciously.”10
Not much has changed in a decade, except back then the media at least reported on the race of the mob, even if only to deny racial violence had anything to do with anything.
Back to the present, McDonough’s call for state police to protect the Inner Harbor from “black youths who are terrorizing” the area drew sharp rebuke from local elected officials and the media. Mayor Rawlings-Blake said McDonough’s request was a “racially charged publicity stunt,” A fellow legislator said McDonough was a race baiter.
The Baltimore Sun called on the Maryland legislature to sanction McDonough.
Meanwhile, in neighboring Pennsylvania and Delaware, some were asking what took him so long.
In Philadelphia, after several years of large-scale violent episodes, some involving more than one thousand black people on the streets of South Philadelphia, Mayor Nutter reversed his stand that the riots were “really not much,” had no racial component, and were the fault of “poor reporting.”
Less than a month later, according to the Philadelphia Daily News, he confessed his change of heart in front of a Philadelphia Baptist Church:
“You have damaged your own race,” he said of the rioters. “Take those God-darn hoodies down, especially in the summer,” Mr. Nutter, the city’s second black mayor, said in an angry lecture aimed at black teens. “Pull your pants up and buy a belt ‘cause no one wants to see your underwear or the crack of your butt.”
The head of Philadelphia’s chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, J. Whyatt Mondesire, said it “took courage” for Mr. Nutter to deliver the message. “These are majority African-American youths and they need to be called on it,” Mr. Mondesire said.11
Nutter repeated his comments several times over the next months, and they were widely circulated in the blogoshpere.
In Delaware, violence among black teenagers was so rampant that the Black Elected Officials of New Castle County wrote a similar letter to the governor of Delaware, asking for the National Guard to patrol the streets of Wilmington. Former state Senator Herman Holloway Jr. said the violence was so bad and the police were so powerless that he and his friends might have to form their own vigilante group and go door-to-door in black neighborhoods to get the crime under control.
McDonough was seemingly unfazed by the whirlwind of criticism facing him for his remarks. “The Good Book says speak the truth and fear not,” he said. “And for everything they are calling me, you will notice they are not saying one thing. No one is saying that what I said is untrue.”12
The Baltimore Sun ran an editorial saying all sorts of bad things about McDonough.13 Even as the newspaper was still on the stands, the racial violence and lawlessness began again:
In May 2012 two groups of high school students left their bus in the Inner Harbor and beat a white person. “The 19-year-old victim was white and the attackers were all juvenile black males,” the paper grudgingly reported.14
In the same month, a melee at a downtown subway station sent two people to the hospital. “It was pandemonium, so you really didn’t know what was going on,” Sharon Allen, an Upton resident who witnessed parts of the fight said. Officials closed the station for three hours.15
A few days later, a crowd of black people flash robbed a downtown 7-Eleven and beat the store manager when he resisted. “It was a lot of kids and they were out of control,” Kesha Chester, who was at the store at the time, said.16
In June 2012 at the nearby University of Maryland, “three female students reported they had their property stolen on the McKeldin Mall … by a group of 10 people, one of whom allegedly grabbed the buttocks of one of the students, police said.”17
The assailants were described as “eight black males and two black females.”
Note to University of Maryland journalism students: I don’t like your chances at MSNBC. You need to refrain from mentioning race and from assuming it was the attacker’s fault in order to be a “big time” reporter. Consider the next story. A Baltimore police reporter was another who took issue with the term race riots. Yes, the rioters were black. Yes, it was a riot. But unless they say it is a race riot, then it is not. No problem.
It gets crazier.
City officials in Baltimore knew exactly what to do when a mob of black people beat John Mason almost to death. They blamed the victim.
The mob assault took place in the summer of 2012 at a downtown bus stop, in front of cameras, in the middle of the day, on a crowded street. According to a witness, Mason was “already knocked unconscious and the guy sat there and held his feet while his homeboy
just started stomping on his head.” Mason is in critical condition and lies in a medically induced coma in a Baltimore hospital.
“At this point, it’s unclear what the motive was,” said Anthony Guglielmi, Baltimore City Police spokesperson. “We’re looking at a variety of possibilities. One of them is an obvious robbery. We’re also looking at the background of the victim, trying to see if there are any disputes that might have resulted in this.”18
Guglielmi has been leading the pack of local officials who deny any of the dozens of cases of black mob violence in the downtown Inner Harbor area are race-related. Guglielmi, along with the mayor of Baltimore, the governor of Maryland, and others, blasted state legislator Pat McDonough earlier this year when he said black people were “terrorizing” the downtown Inner Harbor. “They were not angry because I was wrong,” McDonough said. “They did not like it because I noticed.”19
While Guglielmi continues his investigation into what John Mason did to provoke this treatment, some in Baltimore are wondering what the city is doing to find the predators. “Looks like Gugliemi got the ‘memo,’ said one contributor to a local website. “Always blame the victim if he is white.”
A few blocks away from where Mason almost lost his life, another videotape of a recent Baltimore racial attack is going viral. This one involves students in a downtown high school bullying a teacher while other students recorded it, commented on it, and laughed about it.
The head of Baltimore’s teachers union said it “happens every day.”20
Politicians and public figures in Baltimore want it both ways: First they deny it. Then they explain it with all the reasons we have heard for the last 50 years. Do you really need to hear them again?
We can’t say goodbye to Baltimore without including the Case of the Frightened Ambulance Workers. In April 2013 Baltimore-area paramedics responded to a 911 call in Perryman. They arrived, entered the house, removed the injured person, put her in the van, and then they discovered they were surrounded by an angry mob, fighting and throwing things that hit the ambulance. The paramedics “locked themselves in the unit for their own safety,” Richard Gardiner told the Baltimore Sun.21
So I dutifully called Mr. Gardiner, whose title is Public Information Officer. “How many people were there?” I inquired.
“I don’t know. I wasn’t there,” he said.
“What color was the mob?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t there.”
It went like that for a while. No arrests. No reports. No statistics for nosy people like your humble correspondent. And then we hit the deadline for this book, so we will leave this case hanging for the next edition. If you know something, let me know.
Kansas City, here we come.
17
KANSAS CITY
No one is really sure when large groups of black people started showing up at the upscale Country Club Plaza in downtown Kansas City, Missouri, but by 2010, the crowds were so big and so violent they were getting increasingly difficult for newspapers and public officials to ignore.1
The Business Journal was among the first to bell the cat, maybe because one of its reporters saw the violence first-hand. Steve Vockrodt described one night as an “ugly scene” of one thousand “youngsters” that was “nothing less than a riot.”2
There were assaults, robberies, vandalism, and broken jaws. Nearby businesses closed early, and there was a lot of general mayhem. Shoppers were afraid. When police tried to step in, they were greeted with profanities and disrespect by the juveniles “every time there was an interaction.”
Vockrodt said he was surrounded by fifteen people who tried to steal his bike. It was not the first time these crowds had caused trouble there.3
Back in 2010 then-mayor Mark Funkhouser said the mobs were nothing new, and it happened every spring. Sounds like a recurring meteorological event, much like Haley’s comet.
Funkhouser announced he was darn well going to stop it. But by August 2011 Kansas City had a new mayor with the same old problems of black mobs at the plaza. Mayor Sly James was having dinner fifty yards away when three black people were shot during another episode of mob violence.
He vowed it would be different by the next weekend.
The local NBC affiliate said the problem was isolated and expressed confidence the mayor would soon have it under control.4
Two years later they are still waiting. And no one is pretending the problem is isolated anymore.
By 2013 local television stations showed groups of black people at the plaza fighting, running from police, and creating mayhem. “The scenes of teens running and ending up in handcuffs are all too familiar now at the crown jewel of Kanas City, the Plaza” said the Fox affiliate in Kansas City. “Just last week another similar incident.”5
Another media outlet said it was a “perennial problem.”6
Many of the attacks happened in February, prior to the summertime curfew, said the Fox News affiliate in Kansas City.7
A homeless man told police he was beaten by a group of fifteen kids thought to be younger than sixteen years old. The men and women on the streets say it is a common occurrence.
“It’s just unfortunate. I mean I’ve heard stories about people sleeping under the bridges and people come by and hit ’em with bricks and stuff like that,” said Mike Higgins, a Kansas City homeless man.
Another man who calls the streets home, Arthur Scott, told us he was attacked last year by three young teens who asked to use his phone.
By 2013 two years after Mayor Sly James said he would have it taken care of by the weekend, it is clear the problem never really went away. “Fights everywhere,” is how one black woman described it. She was also upset that police chased her and 999 of her closest friends after they told them to leave the plaza, and they refused. More police and tighter curfews have not curbed the violence, said the TV stations.
Now police are sending out “community liaisons” to meet with the black people on the plaza and find out what they need.
“The answer is complicated,” said the reporter. That is a euphemism for “What that person just said does not make any sense.”8
One of the people said Kansas City should open up a place where teens can party. Others said the curfew and more police were not effective, because “teens say they hate being targeted and teens never like being told what to do,” the TV station said.9
At one public meeting the mayor said it was time for a dialogue, but most of the newspapers and electronic media don’t permit comments on the topic of racial violence. However, one local blog does not shy away from talking about the racial component of the violence—and the people in charge of stopping it:
A great many eastside voters might not like (Mayor) Sly James telling their kids to stay away from the country club plaza … So Mayor Elect Sly James is not forced to make a choice between Eastside support that was integral to put him in office or the rest of the city that remains terrified of black teens on the plaza.10
Kansas City? Peoria? Des Moines? We’re not done yet. Ever been to Charlotte? First let’s head down to Texas.
18
TEXAS
The ugly gets uglier.
It doesn’t get much uglier than this: twenty black men were arrested for raping an eleven-year old Latina girl on nearly half a dozen occasions over a three month period in Cleveland, a small Texas town outside of Houston.
Officials found out about the sexual assault when several of the suspects, some still in high school, showed video of the rape on their cell phones. The race of the victim and the perpetrators is all over this story, says the Associated Press:
Also complicating the case was a belief by many in the predominantly black neighborhood where several of the suspects live that the arrests were racially motivated. All of the suspects are black, while the girl is Hispanic.1
Over at The Grio, NBC’s black news site, they posted a different perspective. One that talked about selective prosecution, the KKK, and vicious racial s
tereotypes. The article led off with an account of neighbors saying the girl invited the sexual attacks:
Neighbors said she dressed and acted like a grown woman, that she wore long dark hair and heavy makeup. She “put up” her age, they said, telling the teenage boys she hung out with at a local playground that she was 18. Her Facebook page is riddled with status updates that brag about her sexual exploits, smoky nights fueled with liquor.2
After that, shall we say “unusual description,” The Grio topped it off with an admonition that the “incident should serve as an urgent and tragic reminder of the importance of strong community, positive surroundings, and comprehensive sexuality and life skills education for youth that includes gender sensitivity training and anti-violence components.”
The Grio has reworked their original news story, turning it into an opinion piece, and removing the calls for better life skill training.
If they were in Philly, they could have gotten the Hispanic girl some pamphlets, reminding her not to say anything to antagonize black people.
At publication, nineteen of the twenty pleaded or were found guilty, and one awaits trial.3
Before we put Texas in the rearview mirror, let’s head over to the Big D.
People from Texas love to tell me about how they carry guns and that is why none of that stuff ever happens down there. Really?
In August 2011 a mob of fifty or so black people stormed and robbed a convenience store in Dallas. They also beat the clerk, and it was all caught on video. The blog post said it better than most news articles might, saying this is what happens when a “collection of wastoids just decides to rob and terrorize the locals. It’s happening all over Philadelphia, in Maryland, in Washington D.C., in Milwaukee—it’s a growing trend.”4
Curiously, the headline talks about the “young people” involved, while the video shows lots of old dudes standing around. If not participating, watching. Not doing anything to stop it.
In Dallas in September of 2011, a group of black people beat a clerk at a convenience store. Turns out that was the middle of their spree.
White Girl Bleed A Lot Page 15