Monday, May 04, 2015

BROKEN JUSTICE - Baltimore and Beyond

"Perception of the police depends on your Baltimore zip code" PBS NewsHour 4/30/2015

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  Two neighborhoods in Baltimore are less than a mile apart, but have vastly different relations with the police.  Hari Sreenivasan looks at how residents of the two communities are dealing with the recent unrest.

GWEN IFILL (NewsHour):  As we’ve been reporting, Wednesday night in Baltimore was calm, in part because of the continuing beefed-up enforcement and in part because most residents are complying with the curfew.

NewsHour senior correspondent Hari Sreenivasan spent time in Baltimore, reporting on how two vastly different neighborhoods coexist.

HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour):  In the Sandtown neighborhood of Baltimore, a woman named Marilyn on Appleton street takes pride in the garden she’s tending on her front porch…

Pride in the tiny corner of the city she’s been able to clean up in the house that has been in her husband’s family since 1959.

But she is also scared. Scared to give us her last name because of the troublemakers in Sandtown.  An element she suspects is behind the recent riots and looting….

She fears retaliation from them for speaking her mind.

MARILYN:  We have drug dealers trying to come on our block down the corner, or whatever, we call the police, they do come, sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t.

They should have buried that man peacefully, like his family asked, what they did, I think they did because I think they just wanted to steal, they wanted to take.

HARI SREENIVASAN:  The past two days have been stressful for Marilyn, and her blood pressure has gone up, looters destroyed the CVS where she filled her prescriptions.

MARILYN:  I don’t have my blood pressure medicine, I don’t have my medicine, period.  Now I gotta find another CVS that didn’t get broken in or burnt down

HARI SREENIVASAN:  For her cousin, Gregg Lee, a block captain in Sandtown the recent violence and distrust are symptoms of a larger change in policing.

GREGG LEE:  You don’t see an officer walking around, only time you see an officer is, they in the car, they on the way they… woosh flying.  When I was coming up as a kid, you had foot patrol.



"Do Baltimore’s charges against police signal a change?" PBS NewsHour 5/1/2015

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  To learn more about the charges against six officers in the death of Freddie Gray, Judy Woodruff talks to David Harris of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law and former Baltimore prosecutor Debbie Hines.



"Criminal justice is so broken, Democrats and Republicans are working together to fix it" PBS NewsHour 4/30/2015

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  The U.S. accounts for just 5 percent of the world’s population, but it houses more than 20 percent of its prisoners.  Now groups on opposite sides of the political spectrum are working together to overhaul the country’s criminal justice system.  Judy Woodruff learns more about the Coalition for Public Safety from Neera Tanden of the Center for American Progress and Mark Holden of Koch Industries.

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