Baltimore’s ‘Broken Relationship’ With Police
For nearly two years, ever since her brother Tyrone West died after a struggle with the police, a 35-year-old preschool teacher named Tawanda Jones has been in the streets here on Wednesday nights, protesting. Her message: “We need killer cops in cellblocks.”
Though the officers involved in Mr. West’s July 2013 death have been cleared of wrongdoing, his case and other police-involved killings here are woven into Baltimore’s psyche, part of what Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake calls the “broken relationship” between residents of this majority black city and a police department with a history of aggressive, sometimes brutal behavior.
That history helps explain the long-simmering anger that boiled over this week with the death on Sunday of Freddie Gray, 25, who suffered a severe spinal cord injury in police custody. Despite efforts by city officials to improve relations — Mayor Rawlings-Blake, alarmed by wrongful-death lawsuits, last year asked for a Justice Department review — thousands have staged protests that are expected to continue through the weekend.