They Can't Kill Us All

by Wesley Lowery

  As they got older, Anthony and Walter began growing families of their own, but they never missed watching a Dallas Cowboys game. Even if they weren’t at the same television, Walter would call his brother and the two would provide each other with real-time commentary until the final down, screaming into the phone in response to each big tackle or touchdown toss.

  “‘Did you see that!’ He would be yelling it at the phone,” Anthony told me, leaning back in his chair for a moment of reflection. “Man, I’m really gonna miss that.”

  The family gathered again on Wednesday night, April 8, 2015, in the living room to watch the national news, at times gasping and sighing as the video of Scott’s death flashed on their television. Before long NBC flashed that they had an exclusive interview with Feidin Santana, the young man who had taken the video of Scott’s death.

  Lester Holt, one of the nation’s top anchors—and one of the nation’s most esteemed black journalists—had flown to North Charleston for the interview, which was being conducted on the Scott family’s front lawn.

  “Mr. Scott didn’t deserve this,” Santana said that day, prompting a round of applause from the Scott family, who along with me were watching the interview live from a living room just fifty feet away from where it was being conducted.

  As soon as it had concluded, the family got up and began putting on their coats. I turned to Ryan Julison, who had joined the group to watch the interview, and earnestly asked him where the Scott family could possibly be headed.

  “To finalize Walter’s burial plot,” he responded.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Baltimore: Life Pre-Indictment

  What first caught my eye in Oliver Baines’s office was the fading blue jacket with a bright yellow star patch that declared FRESNO POLICE embroidered on the arm. Baines was an energetic young man when he first joined the police force in 2000 after finishing college. He went into policing to make a difference, and to be the type of officer he wishes he had encountered as a kid.

  “I had a very distorted perspective of police,” he told me during an April 2015 meeting in his office. “I just saw awful things.”

  He grew up near Los Angeles in Windsor Hills, where police were a constant presence and hindrance. He and his friends were stopped, patted down, and questioned as a matter of course. Back in those days, the only good interaction with a police officer was one that Baines managed to avoid. During high school, he worked as a shoe salesman at a department store in the Fox Hills Mall, and nearly every weekend as he commuted to work he would find himself being pulled over to the side of the road by an officer. Usually by white cops, although sometimes it was black officers.

  “They would pull me over, they would pull me out of the car, they would handcuff me, sit me on the curb, and just search my car,” Baines recalled. “The funny thing is I didn’t even realize there was anything odd about that or wrong…the experience of African-Americans and law enforcement, very different than that of whites and law enforcement. I grew up like that thinking it was pretty normal until I got to college and was like ‘Oh, wait a minute, Fourth Amendment rights. So every weekend my rights were violated for no reason?’”

  So, even though he’d spent more than a decade with a gun and a badge, Baines told me he understood the anger in the streets in places like Ferguson and the dozens of cities where protests had broken out in late 2014 and early 2015. Too often, officers were blind to how deeply torn their relationship with the community really was. Many of his fellow officers, especially the white ones, had grown up in a world in which cops were always the good guys, protecting the neighborhood from the thugs and criminals. As a young black man, Baines knew better.

  After college, Baines went to the police academy in November 1998, and he was on the Fresno police force by the following January. While he was still a rookie patrol officer, he joined the department’s newly created community policing unit, charged with building relationships in the Southwest district, a black and Hispanic stretch of town plagued by gang violence. Soon, as part of their efforts, they began hosting block parties to better get to know the residents there.

  After eleven years on the Fresno police force, Baines gave up his badge to enter politics, getting elected to the city council in 2011. By the time I met him four years later, he had ascended to the role of council president. I visited Fresno desperate for an uplifting story after months of writing about death and depression. An old source of mine had given me a tip that the police in this dusty central California city had been holding block parties each weekend for twelve years, and that it had helped spur a drop in gang crime in some of their worst districts. Here, I thought, was a police force doing what they were supposed to do: connecting with the community, using relationships to curb crime.

  One consequence of covering police shooting is being perceived as “antipolice.” It wasn’t just personal: in those early days after Ferguson, anyone who asked questions of police officers or who believed they should be held accountable must be against them. Those criticisms were flawed, but they stung. Journalists are often unyielding optimists cloaked in the costumes of cynics. Often readers assume that with scrutiny comes disdain, but in my experience, many of the reporters who are the most likely to probe institutions—whether government or law enforcement or banks—are those who believe most firmly and fundamentally in their vitality.

  As my few days in Fresno were wrapping up, I began writing an uplifting piece about a community policing program that officials there said worked. I interviewed the mayor, several other council members, and dozens of police officers, in addition to community members, primarily those who had come out to block parties.

  It wasn’t long after the story ran that I started getting reactions along the lines of those of a group of local ministers and activists who were angered at the version of Fresno I portrayed—a tight-knit community where police and former gangbangers cooked hamburgers and hot dogs together. Clearly, the world of friendly relations between the police and the community was not recognizable to all. It was almost as if it didn’t exist. Instead of being accused of being antipolice, I was accused of boosterism, of failing to see that racial profiling, surveillance of activist groups, and allegations of corruption among some of the department’s top officers were the way many Fresno residents knew their police force.

  “When we heard that you were in Fresno writing about FPD, we community activists got extremely excited. We thought that someone finally saw what was going on here with Fresno PD and City Hall,” one of the more prominent activists in the community wrote me. “We were completely wrong.” While I hadn’t claimed the Fresno police department was perfect, in my search for a counterexample to all the poor policing I had been documenting in Ferguson, Cleveland, Charleston, and elsewhere, I had overreached, committing to print a description of the Fresno police department that was too generous in its handling of the department’s failings and also numb to the very real concerns of the activist community in Fresno. While I had reached out to some of them, I hadn’t spent enough time seeking their critical feedback on the boasts made by the police.

  By this point, I’d come to know distraught mothers and distraught police officers. I wanted the totality of my coverage to be able to reflect the difficult day-to-day reality of police. But in that search for a false balance, I ended up inadvertently lionizing a department that by many accounts was far from the shining example of community policing it aspired to be.

  For more than a year after that piece ran, I still fielded regular complaints online from activists in Fresno. I knew that, to some extent, their qualms were valid. I’d sought a “positive” story on my beat to counterbalance the many critical pieces I had written. Instead, I ended up hurting my own credibility by treating a police department with kid gloves.

  The time to harbor these kinds of regrets wouldn’t come until later. At the moment, I was happy to have found an uplifting angle, a piece not about black death but rather about steps being taken to value bla
ck life and to restore to heavily policed neighborhoods some of the respect that had been lost. Perhaps, I thought, Fresno could be a blueprint for the type of world we want to live in. I wrote my piece, left Fresno for a weekend trip to San Francisco, and then boarded a plane back to Washington.

  As I made my way back to DC, the images flashing across CNN on one of the airport TV screens caught my eye. They were reporting live from Baltimore, where, over the weekend, a man named Freddie Gray had died. Rumor had it that he had been beaten to death by the police, and crowds were starting to gather.

  It was 8:39 a.m. on April 12 when three police officers on bike patrol spotted Freddie Gray on the street near the Gilmor Homes housing project in Baltimore’s Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood—a ten-thousand-person community on the outskirts of West Baltimore that serves as perhaps one of the nation’s most striking examples of urban decay.

  More than a quarter of the buildings here—mixed among the slabs of row houses that fill many of the neighborhoods in Baltimore and Washington, DC—are vacant, with decades-old lead paint still peeling from the aging walls. Those that are occupied are almost exclusively liquor stores and bad takeout places.

  African-Americans in Baltimore are arrested, per capita, at more than three times the rate of residents of other races, according to an analysis conducted by USA Today after the uprising in Ferguson.And many of those black men and women being cuffed were from the blighted blocks of Sandtown-Winchester, which at the time Freddie Gray was killed boasted the complementary honors of having an unemployment rate twice that of the average in the rest of the city and of producing more inmates than any other neighborhood in the state of Maryland.

  Twenty-five-year-old Freddie Gray had a Sandtown résumé—a smattering of drug possession charges, minor crimes, and the court appearances they produce. When he saw the police that morning, he and another man ran.

  The officers gave chase, eventually catching Gray and handcuffing him. They arrested him forcefully and found a switchblade in his pocket. Two bystander videos showed Gray being moved to a police transport van, screaming in pain as officers dragged him toward the vehicle. Once placed inside, Gray was not strapped into a seat. Over the course of the next half hour, the van made at least four stops, and by the time it stopped at the West District police station, Gray was losing responsiveness. By 9:45 a.m., Gray had been taken to a local trauma center. He was in a coma. A week later, on April 19, Freddie Gray died.

  Hundreds took to the streets of West Baltimore, rallying and marching and crying the same insistent slogans heard on the streets of Ferguson and New York and Cleveland and Charleston. Officials with the local police union began comparing the protests to a “lynch mob,” racial rhetoric that only further inflamed tensions. As day gave way to night on Saturday, April 25, the peaceful demonstrations became violent, with residents throwing rocks and setting several small fires. On Monday, the day of Freddie Gray’s funeral, full-scale rioting and looting broke out throughout Sandtown.

  I watched in horror from ninety minutes south in Washington, eager to get there. But unlike most of the incidents of police violence that year, Baltimore wasn’t my story. I was a reporter for the Post’s national desk, so a story in Maryland would fall not to me but to our local desk, which was staffed with a number of veteran reporters with deep sourcing and connections in Charm City. After months of being dispatched on less than a moment’s notice to shooting sites across the country, I was trapped at my desk while an American city just up the road burned.

  In the months and years after the unrest in Ferguson, when the police elsewhere have killed someone, city officials have often been quick to declare “This is no Ferguson” or “We are not Ferguson.” But Ferguson is not some faraway story. In a country where police kill more than a thousand people each year, Ferguson is in all places a local story. We live in a country where police violence is a pervasive fixture of daily life, not a problem plaguing some distant locale.

  Finally, on Tuesday morning, I got a note from my editors—get in a car to Baltimore. The local staff was still calling the shots on the story; in fact, I’d only been called in because several of the Post’s top digital editors had an upcoming meeting with Snapchat, a new image-sharing mobile app that, at the moment, news outlets were convinced was the next big thing. The Post wanted to establish a formal news partnership with the company, especially in view of the upcoming presidential election, and saw the unrest in Baltimore as the perfect opportunity to show how we’d use the platform to cover news.

  For months I’d been one of the paper’s guinea pigs when it came to using social media for breaking news coverage. In Ferguson, it had been by using Twitter to document with both words and photos the minute-by-minute details of the protests. In Charleston, I used the newly minted live streaming app Periscope to share video from the ground, conducting a walk-through tour of the place where Walter Scott had been killed. And for the last few months, I’d been dabbling in Snapchat. I’d experimented with using it for news when I had traveled south earlier that year, first to Selma for the fiftieth anniversary of the Bloody Sunday march, and then to Mississippi when I toured the Delta as I wrote about the fiftieth anniversary of the lynching of Emmett Till. Knowing I was frustrated by being elbowed out of the Freddie Gray coverage, a few of the Post’s digital editors asked to send me, if only to help anchor our social media coverage. It was a back door into the story, but it was my way in.

  By the time I arrived on Tuesday afternoon, the streets of West Baltimore were full of familiar faces. Yamiche Alcindor, then with USA Today, and Jon Swaine of the Guardian, both of whom I’d spent weeks competing with in Ferguson, were working the crowds. So were TV One’s Roland Martin and MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, television hosts who had devoted countless hours on their respective shows to chronicling the infancy of the protest movement. Reuniting with others who had tracked this story was both comforting and grating, almost as if we’d become a morbid fraternal order.

  “It shouldn’t take buildings burned for the people here to have a voice,” said Shauley McCray, an eighteen-year-old Baltimore woman who came out early that morning to help clean up West Baltimore after the rioting and then spent most of the day joining the peaceful protests and demonstrations. “Baltimore has been broken, it’s been broken all of my life. I’m not saying that all of our cops are bad, I’m not saying that everyone who was out here at night during the rioting is a criminal. I’m saying that this is a wake-up call.” Moments later, as I leaned against a street sign interviewing a young college woman who had driven six hours to join the protests after seeing photos and videos on Twitter, a spectacle about half a block away caught my eye.

  The first thing I saw was the perfect hair, gliding atop a head a few inches higher than most in the crowd, as the crisply dressed white man made his way through the scrum, the unmistakably familiar smile of a politician taped to his face. I quickly ended the interview and jogged to catch up with the man, now encircled by media cameras and residents alike as he grabbed the phones out of the hands of several and then posed for photos that he himself took.

  “You have to be present when we’re living through the pain,” former Baltimore mayor Martin O’Malley, who also served as Maryland governor from 2007 to 2015, told me and several other reporters as he weaved his way through the blocks that just hours before had seen violence. “Everyone’s needed right now in the city. Everyone needs to step up.”

  O’Malley displayed a wide smile as he shook hands and posed for selfies with residents, while a team of aides worked to keep both reporters and residents from questioning the man whose administration’s aggressive policing policies had led to hundreds of thousands of arrests that many believe disproportionately affected black and low-income residents.

  He only spoke to us reporters for a few minutes, instead working his way up and down the sidewalk and shaking the hands of the Baltimoreans who stood holding protest signs and bottles of water. When he did acknowledge the group of more than a
dozen reporters trailing him, he refused to directly engage the sea of questions being thrown at him about his record on crime and policing while mayor.

  “Every mayor does their very best to strike the right balance, to save as many lives as we possibly can,” O’Malley said. “And every mayor since my time there has tried to do that as well. We’re a safer city than we were, but we still have a lot of work to do, you know?”

  Suddenly, another voice, this one as angry as O’Malley’s practiced speech was soothing, broke through the air.

  “Fuck that, this is his fault!” screamed a man who followed along on a red motorcycle as O’Malley and the mob that surrounded him moved down the street. “Do you know who he is? Why would you shake his hand?” Many of the protesters who have taken to the streets point to O’Malley’s “zero tolerance” policing policy as the root of the community’s distrust of the police. Under the program, arrests skyrocketed, in many cases for minor crime or no crime at all—at one point topping a hundred thousand arrests in a single year.

  O’Malley declined, when asked directly, to discuss the aggressive arrest policy under his mayoral administration.

  “What we had zero tolerance for was police misconduct,” he said. “We worked at it every day. When we had the long hot summer and talked about taking back our open-air drug markets—”

  O’Malley was interrupted as two of his handlers got into a shoving match with a television reporter attempting to keep up with the candidate and the gaggle of other reporters and community members that surrounded him. The cameraman had been chasing after the pack and had stumbled, bumping into one of the aides walking with O’Malley. The two men ended up shouting at each other, then seemed to square up, bracing to fight just inches behind where the fledgling presidential candidate was taking questions. The back-and-forth became so loud that O’Malley couldn’t ignore it any longer, and the former mayor let out an “Oh come on, guys” as he extended his arm between two of his aides and the journalist, breaking up what seemed about to become a fistfight.