The Gore In Baltimore Goes Far Beyond One Casualty of Allegedly "Racist" Police

The anger in Baltimore has been assuaged to a large extent by the announcement that the six "racist" cops (three white, three black, one of them a black woman) were going to be prosecuted for Freddie Gray's death. Were I a resident of that city, however, I'd be a lot angrier--furious, really--about my city's murder rate, which is disturbingly, even shockingly, high.

How high is it? Well, according to the most recent statistics,

Baltimore had the fifth-highest murder rate last year among major U.S. cities — 37.4 per 100,000 people, according to statistics released last week by the FBI. 

Cities with higher rates last year were Detroit, New Orleans, Newark, and St. Louis. Both Detroit and New Orleans saw sharp declines.

The tally, according to the Baltimore Police Department: 233 homicides in one year. (By comparison, Toronto, a city over 3,000,000, has a murder rate of 1.34/100,000.)

So, yeah, it's a pity that Freddie had to die the way he did (although we don't yet know all the details of his death). But given the shocking rate at which Baltimoreans are offing their fellow residents, the cops maybe (or then again, maybe not) offing a single man should probably be amongst the least of their worries.

 

Update: The epitome of stupidity--wearing a T-shirt reading "F--k the Police" in a city with the nation's fifth-highest murder rate.