I was there when the Detroit riot of 1967 happened. It’s known as the 12th Street Riot. A fight in a bar resulted in large portions of the city being burned to the ground. It was the beginning of the end and 48 years later Detroit is legally dead. Sadly, Baltimore will be the same. When criminals take over a city, good people leave. It’s not a racial thing, it’s a moral thing. As the waves of crime moved out from the center city of Detroit, law abiding citizens moved to the burbs leaving the city to the criminals. Criminals don’t pay taxes. Hence, the infrastructure can’t be maintained. When it takes 45 minutes to get a cop to your door, like Detroit, you don’t stay.
The mayor of Baltimore, who seems like a nice version of Ray Nagin, the mayor of New Orleans during Katrina, is in an impossible situation. She seems to be trying to keep the peace and hold back the flood of evacuations which will follow the riots. This is her speech:
Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake took a tour of the looted Mondawmin Mall on Sunday, calling it a “great day” and thanking “all of the vendors who are here,” including a company called General Growth.
“You know, they want to stay here. They want to continue their investment. And I think this was a smart — it’s certainly a smart investment because this is a growing community.”
“I’ve been coming here since I was a child, taking my Christmas pictures with Santa, I think the Easter bunny,” the mayor explained. “You can come up, General Growth, if you want to come up. Come on,” she encouraged the representative of the mall’s management company. “You sure?” she asked, when the representative (whose name she did not use) declined her offer to stand with her.
“And this is just a great day for this community to have the mall reopened. Just a wonderful day,” the mayor continued.
“I was proud to support the investment that — I think it was the Baltimore Development Corporation — made into this mall to do the major renovations and to see it bounce back so quickly. It gives me a lot of optimism about what’s possible in the rebuilding. I’ll open it up. I don’t know if BDC wanted to say anything –”
Businesspeople, like the person from General Growth, who refused to come stand with the mayor, simply don’t buy what she’s selling. Why try to do business where you can’t be safe, get insurance, or keep employees? What do you do, gouge the public to cover the excessive cost of doing business there?
Sorry, mayor, the residents of the section of Baltimore that rioted will travel further to get their day-to-day needs. You used the cops to stop the riots but threw them under the bus in the process. Cops, who must control the out-of-control crime that’s destroying your city will be slower to help when help is needed. More crime means more people leaving.
You, our president, and all the politicians who run the high-crime cities of America say it’s about money. But, the very areas of Baltimore that rioted got nearly $2 billion in stimulus money. Did it help?
It’s a chicken and egg issue. What comes first the jobs and poverty, or the crime? I don’t profess to know the answer to that, but what I do know from Detroit in 1967, what follows a riot is evacuations. People who work and pay taxes don’t have to live where their neighbors threaten them. Businesses don’t stay. Madame Mayor, words don’t work. You had better find a way to make peace with your policemen since they are the only way you can save your city.
