A "Rough Ride" for Baltimore
Some people protest police brutality in ways that only remind us of why we need police.
That's how I feel about the Baltimore rioters who some news reports described as "protestors."
The label falsely flatters the thugs and hooligans who set fires and attacked police, merchants and journalists after the otherwise respectful funeral on Monday for Freddie Gray, 25, who died under mysterious circumstances in police custody.
"Don't tear up the whole city just for him," said Gray's mother Gloria Darden about the descent of peaceful protests into violent chaos. "That's wrong."
No one denies that plenty of questions surround the young man's death. It was not even clear why Gray was arrested on April 12. He made eye contact with a police officer, according to the city, and took off running -- with police in pursuit.
Gray had minor drug offenses and other scrapes with the law before, according to reports, but he was not wanted at the time of this arrest. He also had a switchblade in his pocket but, as Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake later said, "We know that having a knife is not necessarily a crime."
When he arrived at the police station about a half hour later, he was reportedly unable to talk or breathe, a police official told reporters. He died a week later of a spinal injury.
Was he a victim of what is widely known as a "rough ride," an unlawful practice by which police vans are driven in a way that causes injury or pain to a handcuffed detainee who is not buckled in?
That's how former Baltimore police officer Charles J. Key described such long, slow rides to the police station five years ago in lawsuit by relatives of Dondi Johnson Sr., who was left a paraplegic after a 2005 police van ride and died two weeks later, according to the Baltimore Sun. The family won a $7.4 million verdict.
Others who have won judgments after similarly wild van rides, the Sun reports, included a man who was left paralyzed from the neck down, and a 27-year-old woman who worked as an assistant librarian at the Johns Hopkins University.
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