Police on the streets of Baltimore. Demotix/Aidan Walsh. All rights reserved.The city of Baltimore is making national and international headlines as peaceful protests over the death of Freddie Gray by police have escalated into full scale rioting.
As images of destruction stream across the world, there is a rising demand to end the violence by any means necessary. In response, city and state authorities have declared a “state of emergency”. Republican governor Larry Hogan deployed the national guard to enforce martial law while beleaguered Democratic mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake instituted a city-wide curfew for all citizens.
These authoritarian approaches, while temporarily understandable, mask a far more worrying set of politics. Rather than solve the underlying causes of these problems, authorities both before and after these events have sought merely to treat its most visible symptoms.
