The Biggest Problem Isn’t the Police

National Guard troops are being withdrawn from Baltimore, the city of 620,000 less than an hour drive north of the nation’s capital. The media teams have left, the nightly curfew has been lifted, and the broken glass has been swept up. Several days after the rioting brought on by the death of a young African-American man in police custody, normality is returning. Now the healing process can begin, according to Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, Baltimore’s mayor.

But there are doubts. This wasn’t due to police brutality alone: Bitterness remains in Baltimore due to blatant social inequality and poverty. Neighborhoods like Sandtown, for example, where victim Freddie Gray lived, are just a mile or two away from opulence and fine dining. In poor districts, life expectancy is in the mid-60s, whereas in wealthier areas it is in the mid-80s. More than 50 percent of the population in poorer areas is unemployed. One in three has no high school diploma, and nearly all of the residents in this dysfunctional area are black. This misery is not the result of a natural disaster, nor can it be ascribed solely to racism or other deficiencies inherent in poor people, as some media commentators suggest when they describe people “mindlessly destroying” their own neighborhoods.

Mindless destruction looks much different. According to Baltimore government sources, 16,000 Baltimore houses stand abandoned and vacant, but not because of Molotov cocktails: Politicians refused for decades to try to arrest the decline of Baltimore’s neighborhoods, which might have been done had they funded economic development and social programs.

And the role of racism? More than 60 percent of city residents are African-American. Until well into the first half of the 20th century, Baltimore had strict de facto racial segregation, whereby urban planners isolated the black community. Thereafter, the lending policies of banks in concert with “public housing” practices further isolated the African-American community.

What conclusions can be drawn from those facts? Social conflicts are only containable via heightened police presence — a political indictment of the Democratic Party. The only Democratic politician in Baltimore is the mayor.

Credit for pacification in Baltimore belongs to the district attorney, who brought charges against the six police officers who had Freddie Gray in custody: five male and one female officer, three white and three black. The indictments essentially satisfy the demands of the demonstrators and rioters. The governor of Maryland has declared Sunday a day of peace, prayer and reflection.

The president said, “If our society really wanted to solve the problem, we could. It’s just that it would require everybody to say: this is important.” On that point, he is absolutely correct. During the six years of his presidency, no one got the impression that he was especially disturbed by the glaring economic inequalities. Those in the lower ranks of his party scarcely have anything to say on policy matters. The Baltimore riots may have attracted attention, but the root causes remain unchanged across the nation. Poverty has increased considerably during the Obama era.