The rioting in Baltimore is a punch in the gut for a major American city struggling to overcome a history of drugs, crime, police brutality, poverty, population decline and economic hard times.
Once a throbbing Mid-Atlantic seaport and industrial powerhouse, the city of 620,000 by the Chesapeake Bay has been striving for years to reinvent itself as a hub for innovation, higher education and culture.
Bustling bars and trendy shops fill the shiny redeveloped Inner Harbor district, and the hipster-friendly Hampden neighborhood reflects Baltimore's keen embrace of quirkiness.
Benches at bus stops declare Baltimore to be "The Greatest City in America." Others like to call it "Charm City," a nickname dreamed up by advertising executives in the 1970s in the midst -- rather incongruously -- of a garbage strike.
But the grim side of Baltimore is all too easy to find in the run-down east and west sides, flashpoints of Monday's rioting.
There, long-abandoned brick row houses line treeless streets. Joblessness is rife. Opportunity can be as hard to find as a well-stocked grocery store, and everyone has a personal tale of police harassment.
"This is definitely a place where the benefits of progress have not been distributed equally," said Stefanie DeLuca, a sociology professor at Baltimore's world-renowned Johns Hopkins University.
Freddie Gray, the 25-year-old African-American whose death in custody stoked Monday's unrest, hailed from east Baltimore's downtrodden Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood.
There, nearly a third of families live under the poverty line, and one in three houses are vacant and abandoned, according to data from the Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance.
Twenty-three percent are unemployed, 10.4 percent are on probation or parole, and 43.4 percent of high school students are "chronically absent" from class.
So far this year, 68 homicides have been reported in Baltimore, including seven in the past week, after 211 in 2014, 235 the year before and 282 in 2007, according to a Baltimore Sun tally.
While one in 10 people in Maryland live in Baltimore, one in three of the state's prison population comes from the city, the Prison Policy Initiative group has said.
"Spending hundreds of millions of dollars to lock up Baltimore residents, rather than investing in their long-term well-being is reflected in an array of challenges facing Baltimore communities," it said in a report in February.
Blacks in Baltimore have long complained of police harassment and misconduct, in the midst of a ceaseless "war on drugs" that plays out in grim public housing projects that doubled as locations for the TV drama "The Wire."
From 2010 to 2014, 109 people died after encounters with Baltimore police, the American Civil Liberties Union said earlier this year.
Since 2011, the city has paid out $5.7 million to resolve 102 civil suits alleging police misconduct, according to a Baltimore Sun investigation.
Even before it opened an investigation into Gray's death, the US Justice Department was undertaking a root-and-branch review of the Baltimore police department.
Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake is African-American, but she is strongly disliked by many poor Baltimoreans who dismiss her as an out-of-touch member of the city's affluent elite.
Only 12 percent of registered voters turned out in the 2011 election that put her in office -- the lowest turnout ever in Baltimore history, in a city where the Democratic party reigns supreme.
"Every encounter (that poor black Baltimoreans) have had with government is bad," said Lester Spence, a professor of political science and Africana at Johns Hopkins.
"It's not that they have been left behind," he told AFP. "It's that they are stepped on."
Police Commissioner Anthony Batts arrived from California in 2012 with a mandate to put reforms in place, but some consider him an outsider unfamiliar with Baltimore's peculiarities.
David Simon, creator of "The Wire," said the chaos and tension surrounding Gray's death, "as inevitable as it has sometimes seemed, can still, in the end, prove transformational, if not redemptive for our city."
"Changes are necessary," the one-time Baltimore crime reporter wrote on his personal blog, "and voices need to be heard."
The rioting in Baltimore is a punch in the gut for a major American city struggling to overcome a history of drugs, crime, police brutality, poverty, population decline and economic hard times.
Once a throbbing Mid-Atlantic seaport and industrial powerhouse, the city of 620,000 by the Chesapeake Bay has been striving for years to reinvent itself as a hub for innovation, higher education and culture.
Bustling bars and trendy shops fill the shiny redeveloped Inner Harbor district, and the hipster-friendly Hampden neighborhood reflects Baltimore’s keen embrace of quirkiness.
Benches at bus stops declare Baltimore to be “The Greatest City in America.” Others like to call it “Charm City,” a nickname dreamed up by advertising executives in the 1970s in the midst — rather incongruously — of a garbage strike.
But the grim side of Baltimore is all too easy to find in the run-down east and west sides, flashpoints of Monday’s rioting.
There, long-abandoned brick row houses line treeless streets. Joblessness is rife. Opportunity can be as hard to find as a well-stocked grocery store, and everyone has a personal tale of police harassment.
“This is definitely a place where the benefits of progress have not been distributed equally,” said Stefanie DeLuca, a sociology professor at Baltimore’s world-renowned Johns Hopkins University.
Freddie Gray, the 25-year-old African-American whose death in custody stoked Monday’s unrest, hailed from east Baltimore’s downtrodden Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood.
There, nearly a third of families live under the poverty line, and one in three houses are vacant and abandoned, according to data from the Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance.
Twenty-three percent are unemployed, 10.4 percent are on probation or parole, and 43.4 percent of high school students are “chronically absent” from class.
So far this year, 68 homicides have been reported in Baltimore, including seven in the past week, after 211 in 2014, 235 the year before and 282 in 2007, according to a Baltimore Sun tally.
While one in 10 people in Maryland live in Baltimore, one in three of the state’s prison population comes from the city, the Prison Policy Initiative group has said.
“Spending hundreds of millions of dollars to lock up Baltimore residents, rather than investing in their long-term well-being is reflected in an array of challenges facing Baltimore communities,” it said in a report in February.
Blacks in Baltimore have long complained of police harassment and misconduct, in the midst of a ceaseless “war on drugs” that plays out in grim public housing projects that doubled as locations for the TV drama “The Wire.”
From 2010 to 2014, 109 people died after encounters with Baltimore police, the American Civil Liberties Union said earlier this year.
Since 2011, the city has paid out $5.7 million to resolve 102 civil suits alleging police misconduct, according to a Baltimore Sun investigation.
Even before it opened an investigation into Gray’s death, the US Justice Department was undertaking a root-and-branch review of the Baltimore police department.
Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake is African-American, but she is strongly disliked by many poor Baltimoreans who dismiss her as an out-of-touch member of the city’s affluent elite.
Only 12 percent of registered voters turned out in the 2011 election that put her in office — the lowest turnout ever in Baltimore history, in a city where the Democratic party reigns supreme.
“Every encounter (that poor black Baltimoreans) have had with government is bad,” said Lester Spence, a professor of political science and Africana at Johns Hopkins.
“It’s not that they have been left behind,” he told AFP. “It’s that they are stepped on.”
Police Commissioner Anthony Batts arrived from California in 2012 with a mandate to put reforms in place, but some consider him an outsider unfamiliar with Baltimore’s peculiarities.
David Simon, creator of “The Wire,” said the chaos and tension surrounding Gray’s death, “as inevitable as it has sometimes seemed, can still, in the end, prove transformational, if not redemptive for our city.”
“Changes are necessary,” the one-time Baltimore crime reporter wrote on his personal blog, “and voices need to be heard.”
