The Fulford File | Yes, BALTIMORE SUN, There Is A “Baltimore Riot.” And The Answer (Again) Is Ruthless Coercion

04/27/2015

Gov Hogan: at the request of #BaltimoreCity, I have called in @mdnationalguard pic.twitter.com/o32HA4urto
— Larry Hogan (@LarryHogan) April 28, 2015

Baltimore is burning as I write, the streets are filled with rioters and police. They don’t seem to be “clashing” much, however. Photographs show looters looting, and cops standing around. The

black lady mayor of Baltimore, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, [Email her] made a statement that, in the interests of the demonstrators’ “free speech” rights, she had told the Baltimore PD to “give those who wished to destroy space to do that.” The white Governor of Maryland, Larry Hogan, said as late as 5:30 Monday afternoon there had been no requests for the National Guard.

(But by 8:30 pm he had signed an Executive Order [PDF] declaring a State of Emergency and activating the Maryland National Guard — a promising sign, although at this point I don’t know if they’ll even be issued live ammunition. The lady mayor finally asked for the Guard, and the lady Brigadier General who is head of Maryland’s Army National Guard (Linda Singh, pictured below — despite her last name, the “first African-American” to head the Maryland Guard) stood beside him at a press conference, so they must be getting worried. Gov. Hogan Declares State of Emergency, Activates Md. National Guard, CBS Baltimore, April 27, 2015).

All of this will be news to the notoriously liberal Baltimore Sun. On Monday, it posted an editorial titled No 'Baltimore riots' | Saturday’s violence was deplorable, but it was no “Baltimore riot.” April 27, 2015. Its only reason for insisting that it was “no Baltimore Riot” was that there was much worse rioting in 1968.

"With all sympathies to the police officers who have been injured and the handful of businesses that sustained damage, Baltimore has had riots before, in 1968 after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and we are, thankfully, seeing nothing on that scale."[Cached | Alternate link.]

That version of the editorial has undergone a complete Memory Hole-style rewrite, and is now called Reclaim Freddie Gray.

Maryland Governor Spiro Agnew did call for the National Guard during the Baltimore Riots Of 1968, which lasted from April 6 to 14, and 5800 people were arrested.

This was exactly right. The answer to rioting is to arrest the rioters, using as much force as necessary, and then prosecute them, using the kind of “exemplary sentencing” that the government tends to apply to hate crimes, even crimes that don’t do much harm.

In August of last year, VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow pointed out in The Answer To Race Riots Is Ruthless Coercion. What Is America Waiting For? that what the authorities in Ferguson, MO, were doing

to the usual MSM applause, is the exact opposite of what they should be doing. They should meet any sign of rioting with ruthless coercion:
The time to halt a riot is right at the start, by pinching off the criminal spearhead with precise and overwhelming force. The cops will usually be caught flat-footed (no pun intended) by the initial outbreak. But they need to spring into a pre-arranged mobilization that should always be as ready in every major city as the fire-department or hospital disaster-response program.
That was the late Eugene Methvin…writing in the pre-purge National Review (June 10, 1991).

Methvin argued that

Riots begin when some set of social forces temporarily overwhelms or paralyzes the police, who stand by, their highly visible inaction signaling to the small percentage of teenaged embryonic psychopaths and hardened young adults that a moral holiday is under way.
[A Riot Primer | The importance of using force to control the spread of urban riots, By Eugene H. Methvin, National Review, June 10, 1991]

Methvin was old enough, and historian enough, to include some of the white riots of the Jim Crow era on his list.

“Atlanta in 1906; East St. Louis in 1917; Charleston, Chicago, Washington, Boston, and Knoxville in 1919; Harlem in 1935; Detroit in 1943.”

The same rules apply — but the rioters are outraged about different things. The Atlanta Riots of 1906 started when, according to Wikipedia “Atlanta newspapers reported four sexual assaults on local white women.”

Methvin contrasted the police non-response at the beginning of the Watts, Newark, Detroit, and Washington Riots with the response of the chief of police in Toledo, Ohio, 36 hours after the Detroit Riot started.

Have you ever hear of the Toledo Riots? Neither have I. There’s a reason for that:

There, five hundred young men began breaking windows along a six-block stretch. The fourth police cruiser arriving radioed: “Do you want us to observe?” That such a question should even have been asked was damning proof that Americans had let years of extreme court rulings and hysterical “police brutality” propaganda paralyze our last line of defense against criminal anarchy.
Yet in Toledo the answer snapped back steely and clear. Police Chief Tony Bosch happened to be monitoring the radio and he barked: Arrest every lawbreaker you can–and meet illegal force with legal force!”

Just as quickly, Toledo’s mayor requested and Ohio Governor James Rhodes called in five hundred National Guardsmen to stand behind police in reserve, with well-publicized orders to kill if necessary to maintain order. They were never needed. Toledo’s police arrested 22 people (nine for possessing firebombs) in the first three hours. That was almost triple the number Detroit and Newark police arrested in the same period.

The point of arresting people at the start is this — riots aren’t started by outraged citizens. They’re started by the usual thugs who commit the usual crimes. You can have a bunch of outraged citizens on the streets, but it’s the criminals who start breaking windows.

Thus in Toledo,

Chief Bosh laid out for a Senate committee the criminal records, “some as long as your arm,” of the rioters jailed in his city’s three-day eruption. Of the 126 adults a startling 105 had prior arrests, averaging six apiece. Every single one of the 22 young adults jailed in the first three hours had criminal records; they averaged only twenty years old and three prior arrests apiece. The twenty young men jailed on firebomb charges averaged four apiece.
The result of the quick arrest policy: Toledo’s trouble hardly earned the name “riot.” No one died–not one person, looter, policeman, or innocent bystander. The will that Toledo’s civil authorities displayed, like a heavy rain on a kindling forest fire, made the difference between “incident” and “insurrection.” They withdrew the one essential ingredient for a major riot: implied official permission for criminals and rowdies to coalesce and rebel.

My emphasis. “Implied official permission” is what the rioters in Baltimore, Ferguson, and elsewhere have been receiving from the MSM, the local authorities, and the President of the United States (who most recently sent an aide — a black aide — to the funeral of the man who died in police custody.)

In its PC-crazed editorial, The Baltimore Sun wrote:

As terrible as the scenes were Saturday and yesterday, we cannot let them overshadow the legitimate expression of grievances. Looting convenience stores, smashing police car windows and throwing rocks at officers accomplishes nothing but to confirm the ugly stereotypes that underlie the very injustices the demonstrators are trying to protest.

Well, if the stereotypes are true, and they mostly are, why does the Sun they think what the rioters are protesting are “injustices”? A lot of the time, what rioters are rioting about is actually justice.

We know that that, as it turns out, Michael Brown was attacking Darren Wilson, that George Zimmerman acted in self-defense against a potentially lethal attacker, and if you bother to remember that far back, that the LAPD officers were using reasonable force to arrest Rodney King — they proved it in court — and that the man whose arrest sparked the 1965 Watts Riot was guilty of what he was arrested for.

VDARE.com has been watching the decline of Baltimore for some time. Last year, Paul Kersey chronicled the amusing saga of a white liberal lesbian, Tracey Halvorsen, who was the victim of a typical PC pogrom for complaining about rampant crime, apparently not realizing that people would assume (correctly) that the crime was black and thus a Hate Fact. Back in 2011, Baltimore native Eugene Gant wrote presciently “What Will Come Of The Race War That Roils The Streets Of Baltimore?” Sample:

When Baltimore erupted in violence on April 6, 1968, two days after James Earl Ray shot Martin Luther King, my parents wondered whether my older sister, who worked in the city, would come home alive. Her employer was in the middle of the war zone. Even today, whites dare not go near that employer’s headquarters at night.

It remains to be seen whether the black lady mayor, the black lady Brigadier, and the black male Police Commissioner of Baltimore will be willing to use the “ruthless coercion” needed to suppress a riot.

But if they do, their color should protect them from a Loretta Lynch prosecution.

James Fulford is a writer and editor for VDARE.com.

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