Not one stone will be left on top of another

Fuck Baltimore.

I can't find the post now, but at one point during the resurgent riots after a Missouri prosecutor massaged a grand jury to ensure he had a fig leaf not to charge Darren Wilson, I wrote on one social media or another something to the effect that I was torn, that rioting would only be more ammunition for those who support police in their brutality, but that if I were a young black man in Ferguson, I'd probably be out there overturning cars as well.

I am no longer conflicted.


Baltimore's police have been a disgrace for years, although few outside the market radius of the Baltimore Sun knew it before this week. The casual brutality against citizens, particularly black citizens, generously leavened with racist sneering and violations of constitutional liberties, has been ongoing for years, and as the organization with a monopoly on force in Baltimore, the police department is perfectly position to rebuff any attempt to wrest away that monopoly - as we are seeing them currently demonstrating in the streets.

When a police department is so remiss in its duties as to represent an unquestionable threat to its citizens, there are options for redress. The people could seek redress legislatively. The people could seek assistance from the federal government. They could rely on the courts to bring justice against the perpetrators. And if you click on the links I've posted so far, you will know exactly how far those attempts have gotten for the people of Baltimore. Nowhere.

And now comes the death of Freddie Gray, whose spine mysteriously snapped sometime after he was taken into police custody for the perfectly rational response of running away when he saw them looking at him. Funny how that happens.

And when all recourse has failed, when the executive, legislative and judicial branches have proven impotent in the face of entrenched institutional racism and violence, what is left but violence?

And so I declare a pox on the city of Baltimore, and the thugs who purport to maintain "law and order" therein. May every squad car burn, every precinct be torn brick from brick. And when the rubble has settled, let the lawyers come to feast on the petty tyrants thus exposed, unearthing their every sordid abuse of authority and extracting from the every measure of compensation and humiliation within the reach of the law. And when the lawyers have picked them clean, let the Department of Justice come upon them with consent decrees or a formal dissolution, with nullification of their oh-so-protective contract clauses, that the wheels of justice might grind beneath the earth every trace of that abomination that so styles itself the Baltimore Police Department, in the slim but undying hope that something more worthy of the ideals of this country might grow to take its place.

And may every other police department so entrenched in the oppression of its citizenry take note. That tree of liberty isn't going to grow itself.