Post-Mortem on the Baltimore Riots
Introduction
The Baltimore riots are over. The burnt wreckage of what had been the homes and businesses and vehicles of innocent human beings has cooled down. Victims of cruel, random and racist beatings by the mob are beginning the long process of recovory from their injuries. Many of the victims' dreams have been destroyed; in some cases the damage done will complete the fall of these people into poverty, despair and death.
What have we learned?
I. It Had Nothing To Do With Freddie Gray
It is important to understand that none of the violence had anything to do with Freddie Gray, the 25-year-old man who died in the custody of the Baltimore Police Department. What happened was that thugs -- beasts in human form, who lusted to loot and burn and destroy -- did so. If any of this has the incidental effect of resulting in justice being done in Freddie Gray's situation, that is incidental; and it is as likely to result in injustice being done in the case (if the prosecution of the police officers be primarly political).
This point must be emphasized. As far as I know, none of the people who suffered the losses of their homes, businesses or vehicles were police officers involved in the death of Freddie Gray. Even if they had been, this is a society in peacetime, and such matters can best be dealt with by the criminal justice system, not by rampaging mobs. Did you like the spectacle of such mobs attacking black suspects in the Old South? No? Then what makes such better here and now?
If one wants to argue that the city of Baltimore was not in peacetime; that this was a war, very well. Then if it was war,why were the mobs not dealt with by airstrikes, mortar and automatic weapons fire? They were, after all, concentrated, unarmored, poor at fieldcraft, and would have made easy targets for such tactics. Atrocity, you say? Well, so it would have been, because it was peacetime. If it were war, they would have been enemy combatants, and hence such their deaths would have been wholly legitimate.
II. Stop Riots Before They Start
A. No Right to Riot
The clear mistake made by the City of Baltimore was in not sending out riot-gear equipped police at the beginning of the riots with orders to confront and disperse any crowds behaving unlawfully, whether or not their unlawful conduct was under the false-flag of "protest." There is and never has been any Constitutional right to riot; only to lawful assembly. To assemble and block public thoroughfares or attack people or destroy property is unlawful.
The content of one's political purpose in such assembly is irrelevant. It must be, if one wishes for a free society. If the state be allowed to deem an assembly (or for that matter, riot) justifiable by virtue of its noble purpose; and another unjustifiable by virtue of its ignoble purpose; then the state is empowered to decide which ideas may or may not be expressed, and to what degree. That way not only lies, but is, tyranny.
B. Mobs and How To Stop Them
The change of a crowd into a mob is a social phase transition. The mob crystallizes around instigators, who tend to be relatively strong-willed and intelligent people who feel hatred and want violence; the bulk of the mob consists of relatively weak-willed and stupid people whose sense of right and wrong is largely governed by perceived group sentiment. When part of the mob, this majority will imagine whatever they do right, no matter how horrible it is, because it goes along with group sentiment.
Once the riot has started, the only way to stop a mob is to exhaust it, panic it, or destroy its leadership. To exhaust a mob requires that one hold it off from its target long enough for the mob to give up. While this is happening, it will wreak random destruction on property and visit random harm on persons within the area it controls.
To panic a mob requires the infliction of fear, pain, injury and perhaps death upon its bulk, especially the leading edge. Since the bulk of the mob is stupid, weak-willed and governed by consensus, they will flee a source of perceived pain. Even if the methods chosen are nonlethal, injury and death to both its members and to victims are quite likely from trampling as the mob routs.
To destroy the leadership of a mob, in a riot, requires at a minimum the use of non-lethal violence to arrest or incapacitate its leaders. The most efficient method is the use of snipers to kill the leadership. This is morally justified under riot conditions -- it is killing the most guilty to spare the more innocent. However, this is very politically unpopular in peacetime.
Stopping a mob from forming in the first place is the most humane method. At the start, very few individuals are willing to engage in violence, because their perceived social norms are still those of civic peace. The instigators try to shift this over by successfully carrying out acts of violence or other violations of order. The best way to prevent the mob from forming is to quickly and efficiently arrest its leaders, hence leaving a crowd of stupid and weak-willed people who can easily be dispersed.
This is both legal (incitement to riot is a criminal offense) and moral (because it prevents serious violence and property damage from occurring). And it is good riot control strategy.
III. The Failure of Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake
The main reason for the Baltimore Riot of 2015 was the feckless, incompetent and indecisive leadership of Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake. She ordered the Baltimore Police Department not to confront the crowds, thus allowing their formation into mobs. Then, after the riots had started, she outright stated that, as part of her deliberate policy, "we also gave those who wished to destroy space to do that as well." Space of which, predictably, "those who wished to destroy" took complete advantage.
Not only did she order the Baltimore police not to confront the crowds, she ensured that they could not effectively do so, because they were sent out in most cases without full riot gear. Initially, long arms and armored fighting vehicles were not made available to them. And she delayed asking for the deployment of the National Guard, even after the mob had begun setting fires. As far as I can tell, she didn't try to stop the riots until she noticed that popular opinion was turning against her leadership.
Only then did she begin to make sane and competent decisions -- or, more likely, turn over the decision-making to someone who was capable of making such decisions. She denounced the rioters as "thugs," and someone apparently gave orders to make holding and prosecuting captured rioters a priority.
Even then, she backpedaled. When the riots were safely over, she apologized for calling the rioters "thugs." And she thanked the Nation of Islam for acting as a go-between with the Crips, Bloods and other deadly gangs to negotiate a peace. In other words, she's willing to treat with street gangs and give them concessions for not breaking the nice city she has there, because it would be a shame if somebody broke it!
Stephanie Rawlings-Blake has proven herself completely incompetent to hold any responsible political office. If she wins re-election, this will clearly be a vote on the part of the City of Baltimore that it wants to decline. Hopefully, this will be the end of her political career.
IV. The Elite Agitators, and Obama's Responsibility
President Obama bears his share of the blame for the riots. He has been spreading lies about increasing police brutality toward blacks; this has been done for blatant political gain on his part, as he wants to portray the Democrats as the only shield for blacks against such police brutality, and the Republicans as proponents of such brutality. (A laughable argument, if one knows the history of the South, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow laws or the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950's and 1960's -- but most people don't know this history at all).
As part of this strategy, he has refused to acknowledge, investigate or prosecute the network of mob agitators which has been growing for a generation. Rich college students and graduates, who because of their wealth have the time and resources to engage in such activities, literally amuse themselves by travelling from city to city in search of riots to start. Their excuse, both to themselves and to others, is that they are left-wingers attempting to start a revolution. The real reason, of course, is that they like hurting people and breaking things.
This is a very elitist game. The riot tourists rarely suffer more than very minor physical injuries, and their own sources of livelihood -- rich parents in safe neighborhoods which the police would never let be sacked by mobs -- are unaffected by unrest, or at least unaffected to any disagree that these rich brats imagine will ever hurt them. They go to the riot, have their fun, and go home laughing while someone else's neighborhood burns behind them.
It is the people who live in the poor neighborhood who are homeless because their houses burned down; destitute because their businesses, the products of a lifetime of effort, were destroyed, ill and in pain because their prescription records were destroyed along with the pharmacy (and some prescriptions, especially opiates, require records or physical medicines on-site even in this computer age). They will suffer or die, but they are emininently dispensible people to the agitators, whose homes and sources of income and medical records remain intact.
It is the job of the Federal Government to crack down on interstate criminals, such as these riot tourists. It is especifically the job of the FBI, which operates under the authority of the Justice Department. But under the racist Eric Holder, cracking down on black supremacist terrorists was the last thing the Justice Department was likely to do. Loretta Lynch is unlikely to do any better. States may cooperate with each other to share information on the agitators, but the Federal Government will continue to be asleep at the switch -- or even act against those state and municipal officials who try to put down the riots. The chaos which will erupt in the inner cities from now until at least 2017 will be part of the price America paid for re-electing Obama in 2012.
V. Gun Control
Baltimore, and the state of Maryland, have some fairly strict gun control laws. As is always the case, this does little to nothing to prevent actual criminals from carrying guns. What this may have done was make it more difficult for the honest citizens to protect their own neighborhoods against the mobs.
Watching the videos from Baltimore, one thing that I noticed was a serious lack of citizen resistance to the mobs. Once upon a time, it would have been difficult for a mob to sack a family-owned store without first acccepting that the first few in would fall to the guns of the defenders. This was not a factor in Baltimore 2015, though some brave citizens apparently defended -- and in some cases beat back -- those attacking their store, by wielding baseball bats and axe handles (or at least this is what they admitted to wielding).
It might be argued that the mob would have had more guns under looser gun-control laws. Perhaps -- but the defenders enjoy the advantage in any firefight where they are holding their ground in a structure, especially against uncoordinated mobs. Usually, what happens is that one or two shots ring out, a thug falls, and the rest of the mob decides to seek easier prey. The morale of a mob is mercurial, and very easily broken by even a little effective resistance.
Back in the days of the Civil Rights movement, there were cases where black neighborhood defense organizations successfully beat back organized Ku Klux Klan attacks with gunfire from the houses. And in the LA Riots of 1992, vicious mobs of rioters were beaten back by a few gallant Koreans who took to their rooftops with rifles. The fact that thugs in both cases who went out in the expectation of having a little fun instead coughed out their lives without benefit of morphine, lying and dying in a dirty street is but icing upon the cake, deterring the next lot of riot tourists.
That could have happened in Baltimore. It didn't, because of gun control. Thank you, Governor O'Malley. Many thugs who are still alive and breathing also thank you, though their future victims would not thank you as profusely if they understood the connections.
V. The Price For Baltimore
When major rioting erupts in a city, especially when the rioters destroy businesses, and especially when they are permitted to do so with impunity by the municipal government, that government sends a signal to businesses. The signal is "You will not be protected; you are not safe here." Businesses respond by moving out of the neighborhood, and new businesses by not moving into the neighborhood. The cities (or in the case of larger cities) neighborhoods damaged by the race riots of the 1960's have for the most part still not recovered.
Whether Baltimore as a whole will accelerate its decline, or only the neighborhoods in which actual destruction was wrought, is as yet unknown. What is certain is that those areas affected will be affected for decades, no matter what funds are brought to bear to rebuild them. The people of those neighborhoods have spoken -- whether by rioting or by failing to take to the rooftops and windows with rifles and gun down the rioters. They did not care, and those who make the mistake of continuing to live in those neighborhoods will pay the price for decades to come.
The smart ones will move elsewhere.
As for the riot tourists, they are going home to their well-appointed apartments and rich homes, smiles of smug, sadistic satisfaction on their faces at the memory of a devastated looking shopkeeper, or some father beaten bloody to the ground before the eyes of his children. They feel big and powerful today.
The Mayor of Baltimore did nothing to stop them. And the President of the United States is doing nothing to track them down or punish them.
Such is justice in Obama's America.
Conclusion
In the next two years, there will be more race riots in American cities, almost all taking the form of racist black mobs attacking people of other races. Whether or not these riots will be put down promptly will be up to state and local officials; the Federal government will generally either not intervene, or try to exacerbate the situation.
Elect a Democratic mayor, and you increase the chance of this happening in your city or neighborhood. Elect a Democraticc President, and you increase the chance of this happening to city or neighborhoods all over the country.
Do you want less rioting, and more punishment for rioters?
Then vote Republican in 2016.
The Baltimore riots are over. The burnt wreckage of what had been the homes and businesses and vehicles of innocent human beings has cooled down. Victims of cruel, random and racist beatings by the mob are beginning the long process of recovory from their injuries. Many of the victims' dreams have been destroyed; in some cases the damage done will complete the fall of these people into poverty, despair and death.
What have we learned?
I. It Had Nothing To Do With Freddie Gray
It is important to understand that none of the violence had anything to do with Freddie Gray, the 25-year-old man who died in the custody of the Baltimore Police Department. What happened was that thugs -- beasts in human form, who lusted to loot and burn and destroy -- did so. If any of this has the incidental effect of resulting in justice being done in Freddie Gray's situation, that is incidental; and it is as likely to result in injustice being done in the case (if the prosecution of the police officers be primarly political).
This point must be emphasized. As far as I know, none of the people who suffered the losses of their homes, businesses or vehicles were police officers involved in the death of Freddie Gray. Even if they had been, this is a society in peacetime, and such matters can best be dealt with by the criminal justice system, not by rampaging mobs. Did you like the spectacle of such mobs attacking black suspects in the Old South? No? Then what makes such better here and now?
If one wants to argue that the city of Baltimore was not in peacetime; that this was a war, very well. Then if it was war,why were the mobs not dealt with by airstrikes, mortar and automatic weapons fire? They were, after all, concentrated, unarmored, poor at fieldcraft, and would have made easy targets for such tactics. Atrocity, you say? Well, so it would have been, because it was peacetime. If it were war, they would have been enemy combatants, and hence such their deaths would have been wholly legitimate.
II. Stop Riots Before They Start
A. No Right to Riot
The clear mistake made by the City of Baltimore was in not sending out riot-gear equipped police at the beginning of the riots with orders to confront and disperse any crowds behaving unlawfully, whether or not their unlawful conduct was under the false-flag of "protest." There is and never has been any Constitutional right to riot; only to lawful assembly. To assemble and block public thoroughfares or attack people or destroy property is unlawful.
The content of one's political purpose in such assembly is irrelevant. It must be, if one wishes for a free society. If the state be allowed to deem an assembly (or for that matter, riot) justifiable by virtue of its noble purpose; and another unjustifiable by virtue of its ignoble purpose; then the state is empowered to decide which ideas may or may not be expressed, and to what degree. That way not only lies, but is, tyranny.
B. Mobs and How To Stop Them
The change of a crowd into a mob is a social phase transition. The mob crystallizes around instigators, who tend to be relatively strong-willed and intelligent people who feel hatred and want violence; the bulk of the mob consists of relatively weak-willed and stupid people whose sense of right and wrong is largely governed by perceived group sentiment. When part of the mob, this majority will imagine whatever they do right, no matter how horrible it is, because it goes along with group sentiment.
Once the riot has started, the only way to stop a mob is to exhaust it, panic it, or destroy its leadership. To exhaust a mob requires that one hold it off from its target long enough for the mob to give up. While this is happening, it will wreak random destruction on property and visit random harm on persons within the area it controls.
To panic a mob requires the infliction of fear, pain, injury and perhaps death upon its bulk, especially the leading edge. Since the bulk of the mob is stupid, weak-willed and governed by consensus, they will flee a source of perceived pain. Even if the methods chosen are nonlethal, injury and death to both its members and to victims are quite likely from trampling as the mob routs.
To destroy the leadership of a mob, in a riot, requires at a minimum the use of non-lethal violence to arrest or incapacitate its leaders. The most efficient method is the use of snipers to kill the leadership. This is morally justified under riot conditions -- it is killing the most guilty to spare the more innocent. However, this is very politically unpopular in peacetime.
Stopping a mob from forming in the first place is the most humane method. At the start, very few individuals are willing to engage in violence, because their perceived social norms are still those of civic peace. The instigators try to shift this over by successfully carrying out acts of violence or other violations of order. The best way to prevent the mob from forming is to quickly and efficiently arrest its leaders, hence leaving a crowd of stupid and weak-willed people who can easily be dispersed.
This is both legal (incitement to riot is a criminal offense) and moral (because it prevents serious violence and property damage from occurring). And it is good riot control strategy.
III. The Failure of Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake
The main reason for the Baltimore Riot of 2015 was the feckless, incompetent and indecisive leadership of Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake. She ordered the Baltimore Police Department not to confront the crowds, thus allowing their formation into mobs. Then, after the riots had started, she outright stated that, as part of her deliberate policy, "we also gave those who wished to destroy space to do that as well." Space of which, predictably, "those who wished to destroy" took complete advantage.
Not only did she order the Baltimore police not to confront the crowds, she ensured that they could not effectively do so, because they were sent out in most cases without full riot gear. Initially, long arms and armored fighting vehicles were not made available to them. And she delayed asking for the deployment of the National Guard, even after the mob had begun setting fires. As far as I can tell, she didn't try to stop the riots until she noticed that popular opinion was turning against her leadership.
Only then did she begin to make sane and competent decisions -- or, more likely, turn over the decision-making to someone who was capable of making such decisions. She denounced the rioters as "thugs," and someone apparently gave orders to make holding and prosecuting captured rioters a priority.
Even then, she backpedaled. When the riots were safely over, she apologized for calling the rioters "thugs." And she thanked the Nation of Islam for acting as a go-between with the Crips, Bloods and other deadly gangs to negotiate a peace. In other words, she's willing to treat with street gangs and give them concessions for not breaking the nice city she has there, because it would be a shame if somebody broke it!
Stephanie Rawlings-Blake has proven herself completely incompetent to hold any responsible political office. If she wins re-election, this will clearly be a vote on the part of the City of Baltimore that it wants to decline. Hopefully, this will be the end of her political career.
IV. The Elite Agitators, and Obama's Responsibility
President Obama bears his share of the blame for the riots. He has been spreading lies about increasing police brutality toward blacks; this has been done for blatant political gain on his part, as he wants to portray the Democrats as the only shield for blacks against such police brutality, and the Republicans as proponents of such brutality. (A laughable argument, if one knows the history of the South, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow laws or the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950's and 1960's -- but most people don't know this history at all).
As part of this strategy, he has refused to acknowledge, investigate or prosecute the network of mob agitators which has been growing for a generation. Rich college students and graduates, who because of their wealth have the time and resources to engage in such activities, literally amuse themselves by travelling from city to city in search of riots to start. Their excuse, both to themselves and to others, is that they are left-wingers attempting to start a revolution. The real reason, of course, is that they like hurting people and breaking things.
This is a very elitist game. The riot tourists rarely suffer more than very minor physical injuries, and their own sources of livelihood -- rich parents in safe neighborhoods which the police would never let be sacked by mobs -- are unaffected by unrest, or at least unaffected to any disagree that these rich brats imagine will ever hurt them. They go to the riot, have their fun, and go home laughing while someone else's neighborhood burns behind them.
It is the people who live in the poor neighborhood who are homeless because their houses burned down; destitute because their businesses, the products of a lifetime of effort, were destroyed, ill and in pain because their prescription records were destroyed along with the pharmacy (and some prescriptions, especially opiates, require records or physical medicines on-site even in this computer age). They will suffer or die, but they are emininently dispensible people to the agitators, whose homes and sources of income and medical records remain intact.
It is the job of the Federal Government to crack down on interstate criminals, such as these riot tourists. It is especifically the job of the FBI, which operates under the authority of the Justice Department. But under the racist Eric Holder, cracking down on black supremacist terrorists was the last thing the Justice Department was likely to do. Loretta Lynch is unlikely to do any better. States may cooperate with each other to share information on the agitators, but the Federal Government will continue to be asleep at the switch -- or even act against those state and municipal officials who try to put down the riots. The chaos which will erupt in the inner cities from now until at least 2017 will be part of the price America paid for re-electing Obama in 2012.
V. Gun Control
Baltimore, and the state of Maryland, have some fairly strict gun control laws. As is always the case, this does little to nothing to prevent actual criminals from carrying guns. What this may have done was make it more difficult for the honest citizens to protect their own neighborhoods against the mobs.
Watching the videos from Baltimore, one thing that I noticed was a serious lack of citizen resistance to the mobs. Once upon a time, it would have been difficult for a mob to sack a family-owned store without first acccepting that the first few in would fall to the guns of the defenders. This was not a factor in Baltimore 2015, though some brave citizens apparently defended -- and in some cases beat back -- those attacking their store, by wielding baseball bats and axe handles (or at least this is what they admitted to wielding).
It might be argued that the mob would have had more guns under looser gun-control laws. Perhaps -- but the defenders enjoy the advantage in any firefight where they are holding their ground in a structure, especially against uncoordinated mobs. Usually, what happens is that one or two shots ring out, a thug falls, and the rest of the mob decides to seek easier prey. The morale of a mob is mercurial, and very easily broken by even a little effective resistance.
Back in the days of the Civil Rights movement, there were cases where black neighborhood defense organizations successfully beat back organized Ku Klux Klan attacks with gunfire from the houses. And in the LA Riots of 1992, vicious mobs of rioters were beaten back by a few gallant Koreans who took to their rooftops with rifles. The fact that thugs in both cases who went out in the expectation of having a little fun instead coughed out their lives without benefit of morphine, lying and dying in a dirty street is but icing upon the cake, deterring the next lot of riot tourists.
That could have happened in Baltimore. It didn't, because of gun control. Thank you, Governor O'Malley. Many thugs who are still alive and breathing also thank you, though their future victims would not thank you as profusely if they understood the connections.
V. The Price For Baltimore
When major rioting erupts in a city, especially when the rioters destroy businesses, and especially when they are permitted to do so with impunity by the municipal government, that government sends a signal to businesses. The signal is "You will not be protected; you are not safe here." Businesses respond by moving out of the neighborhood, and new businesses by not moving into the neighborhood. The cities (or in the case of larger cities) neighborhoods damaged by the race riots of the 1960's have for the most part still not recovered.
Whether Baltimore as a whole will accelerate its decline, or only the neighborhoods in which actual destruction was wrought, is as yet unknown. What is certain is that those areas affected will be affected for decades, no matter what funds are brought to bear to rebuild them. The people of those neighborhoods have spoken -- whether by rioting or by failing to take to the rooftops and windows with rifles and gun down the rioters. They did not care, and those who make the mistake of continuing to live in those neighborhoods will pay the price for decades to come.
The smart ones will move elsewhere.
As for the riot tourists, they are going home to their well-appointed apartments and rich homes, smiles of smug, sadistic satisfaction on their faces at the memory of a devastated looking shopkeeper, or some father beaten bloody to the ground before the eyes of his children. They feel big and powerful today.
The Mayor of Baltimore did nothing to stop them. And the President of the United States is doing nothing to track them down or punish them.
Such is justice in Obama's America.
Conclusion
In the next two years, there will be more race riots in American cities, almost all taking the form of racist black mobs attacking people of other races. Whether or not these riots will be put down promptly will be up to state and local officials; the Federal government will generally either not intervene, or try to exacerbate the situation.
Elect a Democratic mayor, and you increase the chance of this happening in your city or neighborhood. Elect a Democraticc President, and you increase the chance of this happening to city or neighborhoods all over the country.
Do you want less rioting, and more punishment for rioters?
Then vote Republican in 2016.