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Baltimore Police Cite Presence of Minors in Defending Response to Unrest

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Aftermath of Unrest in Baltimore

Aftermath of Unrest in Baltimore

Ruth Fremson/The New York Times 
BALTIMORE — Addressing questions about the police’s tempered response to unrest on Monday in Baltimore, a police spokesman said Tuesday that officers took a restrained approach early on because most of the people involved seemed to be minors.
A social media campaign that appeared to be goading Baltimore residents into rioting on Monday afternoon was timed to 3 p.m., about when schools were being dismissed, Capt. J. Eric Kowalczyk of the Baltimore Police Department said Tuesday during a news conference.
“When we deployed our officers yesterday, we were deploying for a high school event,” Captain Kowalczyk told reporters. “I don’t think there’s anyone that would expect us to deploy with automatic weapons and armored vehicles for 13- 14- and 15-year-olds.”
But as the afternoon wore on and turned to evening, adults took over, he said. Of more than 200 people arrested, only 34 were juveniles.
“What we saw last night was a group of people take advantage of a situation, a very unfortunate situation, and use that to tear down their own neighborhoods,” he said.

Live Coverage From Baltimore 

Reporters for The New York Times are covering the events. 
Questions of the handling of the riots on Monday have dogged state and city officials, with the mayor defending the city’s response and the governor saying that he agreed to send assistance as soon as he was asked.
The discussion played out as residents of neighborhoods hit by rioting and arson turned out Tuesday morning to begin clearing their streets of debris, and hundreds of rifle-toting National Guard members began deploying here, lining one of the city’s main thoroughfares and taking up posts around a police station in western Baltimore that had been the scene of earlier protests.
At Pennsylvania and West North Avenues, where a CVS drugstore was looted and burned, residents with donated brooms were out in force. State police troopers in riot gear were lined up in a human barrier across the intersections, and a crowd of peaceful residents gathered, singing and chanting.
One of those with a broom was Clarence Cobb, 48, who lives in the neighborhood and came on his bike. “It don’t make no sense,” Mr. Cobb said of the damage by rioters. “It’s comes to a point where you got to take pride in your own neighborhood.”
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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. 
After surveying riot-scarred parts of Baltimore, Gov. Larry Hogan vowed Tuesday that “we’re not going to have another repeat of what happened last night,” promising a much heavier presence from the police and the National Guard.
“Criminal activity will not be tolerated,” Mr. Hogan said at a noon news conference. “We’re going to be sure to bring in whatever resources are necessary.”
In addition to the city’s own 3,000 officers, “we’ve got a couple of thousand” Guard troops and officers from other agencies, including the State Police, the governor said, and “the Guard is calling up another thousand who will be here by tonight.”
The criticism for not having a more aggressive response to a night of arson, rock-throwing and looting came from several source, including residents, who seized on Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake’s comment that in trying to protect those who were acting peacefully, “we also gave those who wished to destroy space to do that as well.”
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No Repeat of Riots, Governor Says

No Repeat of Riots, Governor Says

Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland said Tuesday that more National Guard troops had been called up to restore calm in Baltimore after a night of rioting.
 By AP on  April 28, 2015. Photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images.
While the “armchair quarterbacking and second-guessing” were understandable, Ms. Rawlings-Blake said, she defended the city’s response, saying that it took time to coordinate action. “We weren’t sitting around. We were engaged and working and managing the crisis,” she said.
Mr. Hogan declined to respond to critics who said Baltimore’s police response was not tough enough, or speculation that Ms. Rawlings-Blake was consciously trying to avoid a repeat of the more heavy-handed reaction to protests last year in Ferguson, Mo.
“I didn’t have discussions with her about Ferguson or why she was holding back,” he said. But, he said, city police officers “quite frankly were overwhelmed.”
He said he declared a state of emergency immediately after the mayor requested assistance. “We didn’t think it was appropriate to come in and take over the city without that request,” Mr. Hogan said.
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Scenes From the Unrest in Baltimore

Scenes From the Unrest in Baltimore

A turbulent day in Baltimore ended with rioting by rock-throwing youths and a call to end the violence by religious leaders and the mother of Freddie Gray.
 By Axel Gerdau on  April 28, 2015. 
In his first comments about the situation in Baltimore, President Obama denounced the rioters who took to the streets shortly after the funeral of Freddie Gray, an unarmed 25-year-old black man who died April 19 from injuries sustained while in police custody, but added that the violence pointed to the need for a national discussion about how the police interact with the public.
“We have seen too many instances of what appears to be police officers interacting with individuals, primarily African-American, and often poor, in ways that raise troubling questions,” Mr. Obama said. “This has been a slow-rolling crisis that has been going on a long time”
Mr. Gray was chased and restrained by police officers on bicycles at Gilmor Homes on the morning of April 12; a cellphone video of his arrest showed him being dragged into a police van, seemingly limp and screaming in pain. The police have acknowledged that he should have received medical treatment immediately at the scene of the arrest and have also said that he rode in the van unbuckled.
After his arrival at the police station, medics rushed him to the hospital, where he slipped into a coma and died a week later. His family has said that 80 percent of his spinal cord was severed, and that his larynx had been crushed.
A senior center that burned overnight in Baltimore was smoldering at dawn.Mark Makela/Getty Images 
The guards deployed Tuesday were expected to be joined over the course of the day by thousands of police officers from outside the city as Baltimore struggled to recover from rioting, arson and looting that left 19 police officers injured. City officials said one officer remained at a trauma center.
In all, the mayor office said, 15 buildings and 144 cars were set on fire overnight. The police said that by Tuesday afternoon, 235 people had been arrested, and two were shot, each in the leg, in separate episodes. One victim, a woman, was shot on Fulton Avenue near where some of the worst rioting and looting had occurred hours earlier. The other victim, a man, was shot about two miles west of the Mondawmin Mall, where the rioting began.
Captain Kowalczyk said a victim of one of the fires was in critical condition. He said that at least 20 officers had been injured, but that the number was probably higher, because some officers with minor wounds did not want to leave their posts to seek treatment.
In preparation for Tuesday night, he said, “We’re deploying to critical infrastructure sites, locations that have experienced previous incidents of lawlessness.”

Timeline: Mapping the Clashes Between Baltimore Police and Protesters 

While the rioters largely dispersed during the night, fire engines raced across this city early Tuesday as the Fire Department strained to extinguish blazes. Some firefighters were reported to have had cinder blocks heaved at them as they responded to emergencies. As a result, police officers were deployed overnight alongside weary and harried firefighters to ensure their work was not disrupted by people with “no regard for life,” the Police Department said.
At the mall early Tuesday, a few police cars sat in the parking lot, but the rioters seemed long gone. Both Mr. Hogan and Ms. Rawlings-Blake walked through the mall, which received, the mayor said, “significant damage.” The police said that a flier circulated on social media had called for a period of violence on Monday afternoon to begin at the mall and to move downtown toward City Hall.
Fire engine sirens could still be heard early Tuesday and acrid smoke wafted from some of the areas hardest hit by arsonists who have left the Baltimore Fire Department stretched to its limits. One early-morning fire struck a large pawnshop in a commercial strip on the west side of the city, and several fire companies were called to put out the blaze.
Members of the National Guard began to arrive on the streets just after dawn, wearing tan and earth-green military fatigues and driving sandy-color Humvees. They took up posts around the city’s Western District police station, while more than 100 other guards lined the street in front of Baltimore’s inner harbor.
State and city officials said they hoped that measures scheduled to be put into effect on Tuesday — including the Guard deployment and a curfew from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m.— would reduce the chances of a repeat of Monday’s unrest, where the police acknowledged that, at least early on, they had been outflanked and outnumbered.
By the early hours of Tuesday, it was clear that in addition to the many rioters fueled by fury over the death of Mr. Gray, there were many other residents who, while also upset by Mr. Gray’s death, were troubled by Monday’s violence.
These included members of Mr. Gray’s own family, who said he would not have approved of the rioting. It also included people like Katrina Carter, who grew up near the Mondawmin Mall, a place, she said, “where they had pageants and everything you could do with kids.”
Standing in the mall’s parking lot late Monday night, Ms. Carter said she understood the anger of the teenagers who had thrown rocks and bricks at the police. “I’m 38, but had I been 12, I probably would have been out there,” she said. But she said the teenagers needed to learn a better way to protest.
“They need to understand how to push pens, not people,” she said.
Sheryl Gay Stolberg reported from Baltimore and Richard Pérez-Peña from New York. Richard A. Oppel and Stephen Babcock contributed reporting from Baltimore.