Heather Mac Donald: The Truth About Baltimore

Heather Mac Donald, contributing editor of City Journal,
wrote, on April 28, 2015, about the ongoing riot in Baltimore Maryland:

Baltimore in Flames

While the city burns, liberals place blame everywhere but where it belongs: on criminality and on family breakdown.

Mac Donald first covers the litany of well-worn excuses, provided by the talking heads of the Left, for the behavior of the rioters:

Society “refuses to help [young blacks] in a serious fashion.” 

“We’re only there when they riot.” 

“This was an extremely, desperately poor city. This was bound to happen.” 

We were seeing an “uprising of young people against the police,” the result of a “combination of anger and disparity,” 

and, of course, the usual blaming of the drug laws.

To all of the above, Mac Donald declares:

Bunk. What happened last evening in Baltimore was simply a larger and better-covered version of the flash mobs that have beset American cities for the last half-decade, in which black youths gather via social media to steal from stores and assault whites.

She provides examples:

In May 2012, for example, students from Mervo High School in Northeast Baltimore crammed into a 7-Eleven store that was offering free Slurpees as a promotion. The teens grabbed all the merchandise they could get their hands on—$6,000 worth in total—and fled from the store. The manager tried to close the door to prevent the thieves from escaping and was viciously beaten.

On St. Patrick’s Day that same year, a flash mob converged on Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. The Baltimore Sun reported that by the time the rampage ended, “one youth had been stabbed, a tourist had been robbed, beaten and stripped of his clothes, and others had been forced to take refuge inside a hotel lobby to escape an angry mob.

Last April, a bicyclist in Baltimore was attacked by a group of black teens who knocked him off his bike and pummeled him.

She argues further:

Perhaps if the media had not shrunk from reporting on the flash mob phenomenon and the related “knockout game”—in which teenagers tried to knock out unsuspecting bystanders with a single sucker punch—we might have made a modicum of progress in addressing or at least acknowledging the real cause of black violence: the breakdown of the family.  

So the rioting that, as of April 28th, left 24 police officers injured, 19 buildings torched, one of which was a senior center that provided affordable housing, and another the CVS drugstore that serviced the elderly of the community, is being attributed by the Left to justifiable rage.  Mac Donald is right: BUNK!