Wednesday, April 29, 2015

Curfew Appears to Bring Calm to Baltimore After Days of Unrest - New York Times

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Cleaning Up Baltimore

Cleaning Up Baltimore

After a night of violent clashes with the police, protests, vandalism and arson, Baltimore residents aim to put their city back together.

By A.J. Chavar on April 28, 2015.

BALTIMORE — Aided by wide support from residents, activists, pastors and local leaders, and by thousands of police and National Guard reinforcements, an overnight curfew appeared to quell the unrest that had gripped this city earlier in the week.

The quiet, mostly deserted streets — even in the Penn-North area that was the locus of rioting and looting on Monday — stood in sharp contrast to the blazes that had raged the night before and had strained the city’s Fire Department as engines and crews raced from fire to fire.

Backstopped by 2,000 National Guard members, as well as officers from the state police and other law enforcement departments from outside the city, the Baltimore police appeared to exercise strategic discretion over the course of the night and did not seem particularly eager to aggressively pursue curfew violators if they did not have to.

Initially, after the shutdown began at 10 p.m., the police were in a tense standoff with several hundred recalcitrant demonstrators at Pennsylvania and North Avenues in blighted West Baltimore, where a CVS drugstore had been looted and burned during Monday’s rioting, the same day as the funeral for Freddie Gray. Mr. Gray died after a spinal cord injury he sustained in police custody, and his treatment at the hands of officers has enraged many here.

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Protests in Baltimore

Protests in Baltimore

Robert Stolarik for The New York Times

On Tuesday afternoon, the crowd at the intersection steadily grew to over 500 people. But they were largely peaceful and calm, almost like they were at a block party more than a demonstration.

As the overnight curfew began, however, some demonstrators threw bottles at police, and many refused to leave.

The police stood at the intersection carrying large shields and wearing helmets and other riot gear. But they did not move in. They used smoke and pepper-spray balls to try to disperse crowds, and they took measured stop-and-start movements to advance while maintaining their line.

Close to midnight, the police commissioner, Anthony W. Batts, said that some police officers had been targeted with rocks and glass, and that 10 people had been arrested, mostly for misdemeanor curfew violations.

“We tried to deploy smoke,” Mr. Batts added. “With the winds shifting, it kind of also blinded us at the same time, so we had to hold and let the smoke clear.”

But the strategy seemed to work, and the crowds had begun to steadily dwindle. Mr. Batts appeared to declare victory, at least for one night.

Photographs

On Tuesday, the day after violence erupted across Baltimore, people assembled near a CVS drugstore that was looted the previous evening.

OPEN Photographs

“We do not have a lot of activity or movement throughout the city as a whole, so the curfew is, in fact, working,” he said during a brief news conference. He also described the city as “stable” and said that the authorities “hope to maintain it that way.”

As dawn began to break, only about a dozen police officers in riot gear were still at the intersection, milling in front of a library and other buildings, and no longer fanned out in a line blocking the street. Two armored trucks remained close. Nearby, people were boarding up the CVS that had been looted and burned.

As the night wore on, it also seemed clear that the citywide shutdown appeared to work, in part because of overwhelming support from pastors, community leaders and activists who have been influential during the growing protests over Mr. Gray’s death.

Several celebrities and professional athletes from the region also weighed in. Ray Lewis, the former Baltimore Ravens star linebacker, issued a video urging teenagers to “get off the streets” and saying: “Violence is not the answer. Violence has never been the answer.”

During a rally before sunset, one organizer pleaded with demonstrators who gathered on outdoor basketball courts to “respect the curfew” and even urged them to be at home by 8:30 p.m.

And after dark, community leaders, including Representative Elijah E. Cummings, were among those who asked protesters to leave the streets around the intersection.

OPEN Timeline

Timeline: Mapping the Clashes Between Baltimore Police and Protesters

“Folks, we’ve got to get out of here,” Mr. Cummings, who represents Baltimore, said just after 10 p.m.

A measure of normalcy was to be restored on Wednesday morning, when the city’s public schools were to reopen after being closed on Tuesday. The school system’s chief executive, Gregory E. Thornton, said in an open letter that officials were “planning activities that will help students learn from the past days’ events,” and he defended the decision to close schools for a day.

“I understand that this created difficulty for many families, but it was a necessary decision because of ongoing cleanup in some neighborhoods, lack of transportation through the Mondawmin transit hub and, most important, the need for district staff to plan and make arrangements to ensure the safety of students and staff at school for the remainder of the week,” he wrote.

Even with classes resuming, there were signs of the trauma that has transfixed Baltimore. The Major League Baseball franchise here, the Orioles, will play at home against the Chicago White Sox on Wednesday, but the game at Camden Yards will be closed to the public.

The nightly curfew, which runs from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m., is expected to remain in place. Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake has ordered that it be in effect until May 4, but the city has also acknowledged that the mayor could alter the curfew’s schedule.

Several colleges also resumed classes, including Loyola University Maryland and Johns Hopkins University.


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