The Baltimore Curfew Highlighted A Racial Divide Between How Police Dealt With White and Black Protesters
While many of the demonstrators in Baltimore questioned the legality of the Mayor Rawlings-Blake imposed curfew (which began on April 28th), tensions came to a climax on Saturday May 2nd with a city wide action to oppose the questionable mandated curfew issued by the mayor’s office.
There were stark differences in the way white protesters and black protesters were detained on North ave after the curfew began at 10pm. Most people around the country saw the video of Baltimore Police pepper-spraying a black man and slamming him to the ground by his hair in what was the first arrest of the evening at North & Penn. avenues. Immediately after the violent arrest, Kerridwen Henry, a white female supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement, stepped in front of the police and was arrested without use of force.
Meanwhile, across town in a predominantly middle-class white neighborhood in Baltimore, fifty white protesters broke curfew. This group was given three warnings after the commanding officer politely asked the demonstrators to leave. There were no arrests, nor was anyone menaced by the police with chemical weapons or the possibility of having “less than lethal” force used to remove them.
According to a Baltimore Police spokesperson, there were fourty six total arrests on the night of May 2nd, and 486 since the start of the Freddie Gray protests. The following video is a testament to the struggles that lay ahead for the city of Baltimore, and its police, to try to establish better relations with the mostly black population living in the poorest neighborhoods of Baltimore that are frequently the target of racist policing practices.
