{"id":26698,"date":"2021-01-22T19:27:55","date_gmt":"2021-01-22T19:27:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/therealnews.com\/?p=267486"},"modified":"2021-01-22T19:27:55","modified_gmt":"2021-01-22T19:27:55","slug":"battleground-baltimore-jan-22","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/01\/22\/battleground-baltimore-jan-22\/","title":{"rendered":"Battleground Baltimore, Jan. 22"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

One reason why The Real News Network calls Baltimore home is because we know that the struggles the people in this majority-minority city face (unequitable access to resources like education, clean air, and transportation, for example) are the struggles people face all over the globe. This is the third installment of our weekly news roundup from the Baltimore trenches, which we hope will help keep our friends and neighbors abreast of what’s going on in our city, but we also hope these stories will resonate with people united in the struggle everywhere.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/a>\n\n\n\n

The Life and Death of Dante Barksdale <\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

On Sunday morning, violence interrupter Dante Barksdale was shot and killed in East Baltimore. Barksdale was, in many ways, the public face of the Safe Streets program\u2014the Baltimore branch of the international Cure Violence program\u2014for more than a decade.\u00a0 The work of violence interruption is complicated, sometimes dicey, and often thankless\u2014if the work is done effectively and people are not shooting each other, and instead squashing beef more productively, no one outside of Barksdale and those immediately affected by a conflict quite realize the tragedy that was averted. There was really no one else like him. The news that one of the most passionate, gregarious, and just plain real violence interrupters was gunned down was almost impossible to believe (for all of you \u201cThe Wire\u201d fetishists, Barksdale is the nephew of Nathan \u201cBodie\u201d Barksdale, who was the model for Avon Barksdale).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHe embodied healing. His work guided us to choose peace. To choose change no matter where you came from. This loss is devastating,\u201d wrote<\/a> local organizers Good Kids, Mad City Baltimore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhile I am devastated by the loss of my Brother in the fight to save lives in Baltimore, I will not let those who chose to violently take his life dampen the light of his work. The work that Dante did, and the work that so many in Safe Streets and other street-based organizations do to actively interrupt violence, is critical to my priority of reducing violence and making Baltimore\u2019s neighborhoods safer,\u201d wrote<\/a> Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2019, Barksdale published, with co-author Grace Kearney, \u201cGrowing Up Barksdale,\u201d a memoir of his life that reads like he\u2019s talking right at you, contextualizing, philosophizing, empathizing. We\u2019ll end with a brief excerpt from \u201cGrowing Up Barksdale\u201d where Barksdale discusses the demolition of Lafayette Projects, where he grew up:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhen the smoke finally cleared, the ground was flat. The whole thing had taken about twenty seconds. I felt lost all of a sudden, disoriented. My sense of belonging in the world felt shaky for the first time. Where was I gonna hang at now? Where would Leon and them go? Would they be safe in Douglass, or down Perkins, would they be safe over Somerset? And what about the six parties bumping in the projects at any one time? I remembered partying in 131 building, and then going over 200 building and finding a hundred people on the third floor, and a hundred more on the seventh. During the day, it was two thousand of us outside at all times. Go into any housing project and start counting people, it\u2019s two thousand people outside. It might not look like it, but you got twenty people in that pocket, forty over there, twenty more standing around there. In every apartment, you had the tenant and her sister in there, and all their cousins from other neighborhoods visiting. It was always noisy in the projects, like living in a stadium. Where would all the noise go?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n<\/a>\n\n\n\n

Damning ACLU Report on Baltimore Police Released<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

On Tuesday, the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland released a staggering report titled \u201cChasing Justice: Addressing Police Violence and Corruption in Maryland,\u201d which deanonymized and crunched publicly available Internal Affairs data provided by the Baltimore Police Department. What the report reveals is a police department still far from reform more than five years out from the death of Freddie Gray. The report calculated the number of misconduct allegations against Baltimore Police officers and even names the officers with the most allegations. It does the same for use of force incidents and notes, among many other things, that more than 90% of use of force incidents were used against Black Baltimoreans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For The Appeal, Battleground Baltimore co-writer Brandon Soderberg wrote a deep dive into the report, which investigated some of the named officers, and spoke to defense attorneys, who were hardly surprised by the names that appeared. \u201cChasing Justice\u201d author Joe Spielberger\u2014who is ACLU MD\u2019s public policy counsel\u2014spoke to Soderberg about the report, its methodology (which is fascinating and worth reading up on), and what he hoped the report would illustrate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI hope that this report helps reinforce and validate the experiences of Black residents and communities in Baltimore City who have known the names of BPD officers and what they\u2019ve done,\u201d Spielberger said, \u201ceven though internal departmental policies and practices have not held them accountable.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You can read the report here<\/a>. You can read Soderberg\u2019s piece here<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The same week the report was released, the city settled with the victim of Baltimore Police officer Michael O\u2019Sullivan for $100,000. In 2018, O\u2019Sullivan arrested a man named Yusuf Smith claiming he saw Smith drop a handgun. O\u2019Sullivan repeated these claims in court under oath, and Smith was convicted. However, body-worn camera footage later revealed that O\u2019Sullivan did not see Smith drop the handgun. Smith\u2019s charges were dropped\u2014he had already spent 70 days in jail\u2014and O\u2019Sullivan was found guilty of providing false testimony and was sentenced to 15 months. Also this week, Baltimore City\u2019s Fraternal Order of Police tweeted out this baffling image<\/a> in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day. The image shows the Eiffel Tower for some reason along with the quote, \u201cDarkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.\u201d Also, part of the quote is cropped out of the image.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

pic.twitter.com\/rpYDHhKdit<\/a><\/p>— Baltimore City FOP (@FOP3) January 18, 2021<\/a><\/blockquote>