Transcripts For ALJAZ Baltimore Anatomy Of An American City 20240712

How would you say. Hello welcome to rewind im Richelle Carey since Al Jazeera English launched more than a decade ago we have built up an extraordinary archive of Award Winning documentaries here on rewind returning to some of the best of them finding out whats happened in the years sense back in 2009 millions of americans were celebrating a new president in the white house promising radical change and a Better Future president obama inspired the entire nation no more so than in baltimore were over 60 percent are africanamerican and Violent Crime and drug related deaths have been on the rise for decades but what became of all that optimism in the years following obamas election and 2012 aljazeera faultlines went to baltimore to find out heres baltimore anatomy of an American City. Were following a funeral cortege through the outskirts of both to me. Kendall stanton was shot dead at his home in. Baltimore. He was 27. Today his family and friends are bearing him. While the us homicide rate overall is stable. Those involving black youths have risen. Faultlines is in the city of baltimore to try to find out why in the inner city neighborhoods of obamas america. Life for so many young africanamerican men continues to be a fight for survival. Our citys stubborn homicide count which is lowest level since 1977. And we know that these crimes are the ones that gave us a Bad Reputation as a dangerous place and for too long instilled the deep seated fear that drove families away baltimores man Stephanie Rawlings blake is delivering her annual state of the city address its not time to celebrate a combative the population of baltimore the largest city in the state of maryland has been shrinking for decades. Man rowlings blake wants to grow it again by 10000 families within the next 10 years let there be no doubt the state of our city is now better safer and stronger. Reason. For all the talk of the climbing crime rates both or more is still one of the deadliest cities in the United States but still talking about it. Its 1 45 pm and demand to be shot. Just had about another shooting incidents in the city of baltimore so were on our way to the crime scene now were listening to the police got to find out exactly where that place is also messages sent out on twitter by the Baltimore Police department. The. Police photographers forensic officers and detectives work to investigate the scene the bullet casings the marks that. Victim here was shot in the back. Of the barracks cut off him before he was taken away tossed people have been taken away and everything. The pace of violence in baltimore can feel relentless. Almost every day off is up another shooting. Today dismal a couple minutes before the police did come out but. They come running down the street star she and she. Did victim he fell in front of the chinese still. Have to defy him. To state how he did sit in the area but he did say this incident could have been avoided but. This neighborhood is very close to downtown baltimore and there was a shooting incident here west 6 shots were fired and the police are being called out this is the thought of shooting that we heard about in 24 hours and beams in the crime scenes here in the city of baltimore. Today illegal guns drugs in the states that number one target for Law Enforcement. The Baltimore Police department has invited us to walk the streets with them in this area notorious for drugs notorious for drugs. But as many people as you see said now here it is always one person with a gun but you want to stop the drug dealing as well right i do but id rather stop the killing. Not that the drug dealing isnt bad. But the volunteers and most of the arrests you make must be for drug offenses very well at this point now but again thats thats thats not thats not the goal scorer fellas i dont want to be. The man says its the strategy of targeting illegal guns that seem the murder rate dropped to the lowest figures in over 3 decades anybody have id on to try to figure out how they get in the hands of kids or how they get into the hands of bad guys if the number of murders are down in baltimore and i dont know but if they are. That i would not describe ascribe that to a change in program ed burns is the former baltimore detective and School Teacher who went on to write the hit Television Series the wire were not dealing with the root causes. So if you lock up a person with a gun theres a kid coming behind him hes going to pick up that gun its an endless cycle the population in baltimore is way down all right so if the population is down your numbers are down and weve gotten rid reductions and violence at the same time reducing the number of arrests which tells me that are targeted approach of targeting our most violent offenders is what will make the difference but one of the focuses on guns mayor rulings blake says drug crime will continue to be targeted to i dont know were never going to be at a place as long as there are people selling Illegal Drugs on the street whether theyre illicit drugs or prescription drugs you know we will enforce that those laws. You say we want to get rid of class and then once the post is. In combat making them Public Housing they cant get health they cant get the job so how do they live. And you should know a convicted murderer dony used to rob drug dealers for a living. He and his nephew dante whos a former dealer said some of the neighborhoods both kids are growing up in feel like conflict zones this is. One tree the. Shoot out. Thats what it feels like. With the war. Dante got into dealing drugs after an injury ended his hopes of becoming a basketball player you know. What i would. Or would do. So theres always been a recession and right you know weve been in recession this can mean thats why we go we will go to the 1st day we lost the. State easiest quickest thing of. Which you go and you would you go want to add in a slowing animal or defense then. That dante and his friends say the environment name growing up in makes it difficult to imagine another way of life. Thanks to the neighborhood so a lot of the fathers is gone. Nobody had a god to keep so he turned to all the negative things does nobody have got. The blame for that dont tase friends say shouldnt only be attributed to those sucked into the drug business one of the few multimillion Dollar Industries the city still has left most of the government didnt they let and thats just plain so they let him know there was a resounding here are we lucky young black you for the thats the only place is really going. To move wasnt always a city in decline. It was once a shipping powerhouse. One of the largest seaports of the mid atlantic states. And a major center of industrial manufacturing. In the late sixtys baltimore had Industries Like bethlehem steel huge ship building and a very active port meal franklin is a retired police major who spent 34 years in Law Enforcement has seen the decay firsthand late sixties early seventies mainly jobs started leaving baltimore industry started leaving going overseas were ever it ended up it just wasnt here in baltimore anymore but it was also around that time that Richard Nixon decided that he was going to start a war. Against public enemy number one drugs but it was president Ronald Reagan who turned that rhetorical war into a literal one you have to show they do have a criminal problem so how do you do that through arrest at a time when drug crime was actually on the decline not on the rise we went crazy arresting people for crack cocaine because of this. Socalled epidemic that we were at incarceration rates began to just saw off the charts and we just put tons of black people in prison from our inner city. Unguardedly no. More arrests meant more federal money. Its a system that still exists today in the form of federal stimulus and other Us Department of justice grants for crime control community policing. Its not a war on drugs dont ever think its wrong. Its a war on the blacks it started as a war on the blacks and has now spread to hispanics and poor whites with alicia was a war blocks and. It was designed basically to take that energy it was coming out of the Civil Rights Movement and destroy it we have all would 10000000. 00 people reckon it. Makes 10 years we have 10 more me and i knew more maybe i mean come on then we got to stop at some point say you know what you know people saying then we had to fight for rehabilitation for chances for people saying for opportunity. According to a 2003 report from the bureau of justice if currency conservation rates remain unchanged one in 3 black men can expect to go to prison in their lifetime even in the age of obama something akin to a caste system is alive and well and. Other mass incarceration of poor people of color is tantamount to a newcastle stone one specifically designed to address the social political and economic challenges of our time Michelle Alexander is a law professor who says that the disproportionate numbers of black people in prison in America Today is akin to a new system of social control comparable to slavery. She says that while president obama has made some positive steps like signing legislation that reduced sentencing disparities between crack and powder cocaine where it really counts obama has not broken from the past but the reality is that obama has drug control budget looks much like the Bush Administrations the ratio of funding invested in enforcement as opposed to prevention or drug treatment is about the same as the Bush Administration this is where its not his real name hes agreed to talk to us if we disguise his identity. Has been a drug dealer and a gang member hes currently awaiting trial charged with attempted murder. And gruesome. Might be a man walking the streets before its in murders in russia. Drug operation is on hold while hes out of jail on pretrial supervision one way that maryland has dealt with overcrowding of the prison system is the reason he deals is simple and he does it because he says its the only way he knows to support his family and guns just a tool of the trade its on is amusing to me because this isnt the name it was out probably 60 years ago so i was amused with incentives if you live in a mining town you would go into the coal mines this is all you know and this is all they know so theyre going into this where they know the danger is there you know but what they what they have is no choice. And the way the game is rigged they cant win i mean the number of guys that actually survive the corner. To get into midlevel drug dealers so they can get away from the corner theyre few and far between hopefully i could be in the position of either position one of those. Something positive i have nothing to do on my own it was what i know. When i was. Growing up in a poor neighborhood in baltimore means the olds a stacked against you. And so we have a school to prison pipeline operating in baltimore and in other cities across the nation where young people believe with some good reason that their destiny lies behind bars and they too will become members at the end or cast the most probably their having children who will most children remain children but i would accuse you of being a peculiar. Is there was a. Mom oh was that sal was you had you know. A moment tell me she hated me. You know in the get out of the source you kill me. Ted and. No ones thinking about like lets look at these these infants lets help these instance out lets help these mothers out so that these kids are raised in a healthy environment lets lets put the money there rather than put it into. The back you know 25000. 00 per prisoner per year in the federal system is probably 30 some 1000 per year thats what were putting our money a lot of drug war will be ruined for. Me with remove from the gun of. Figures. Streets with no partly for. The we dont have that Family Foundation people you know definitely dont have. These kids are just chewed up and spit out and theyre broken they get the criminal record they cant get jobs you know they go to prison they come home same thing repeats itself until they find their bodies ventura breakdown it was gonna come in for them because when we 1st come then. By all adults i did this on a. Bad. Bad experience. Located in the very heart of the city the Baltimore City Detention Center is one of the largest pretrial detention facilities in the United States. I would think. Its intended for adults but on the harsh get tougher laws passed in maryland and some other states juveniles charged as adults also help a 15 to a room they held indoors for about 23 hours a day. And to be thomas and was just 16 years old when he was arrested for the robbery and charged as an adult. He was ultimately cleared of charges but while waiting 5 months for trial he wasnt attending school he was in Baltimore City Detention Center. People. Some people you just go crazy i have people i know that you know once they got in there they wanted it more stuff and they would all want to. Ban adults and that adults are gone and. I kind of thing is what youre supposed to do by it kind of get it back to. The u. S. Department of justice agrees that spending nearly whole for years in a crumbling adult facility can violate anthonys constitutional rights. But the states proposed solution is a brand new 100000000. 00 jail for minors chaunged as adults which the city plans to build on the sites. I mean the stress is just as out there in that i go out there every day and just think about how last time that you can get people an hour in about that life band on the way like their entire lives and if you grow up in. Thats where it is going to keep going back so i dont think it is right for a kid to be in that situation. As we are preparing to leave baltimore we hear of yet another shooting. Nobody this time. But the blood on the pavement is proof of the continuing cycle of violence. Baltimore is a city thats still on the front line of the war on drugs when you walk through neighborhoods like this its hard not to feel a bit legacy of the war these communities have been living through is so beyond the rhetoric anything short of radical change one solve the problem. Feels like it simply could take decades for these communities to recover. Baltimore anatomy of an American City from 2012 since that film was made the level of Violent Crime in baltimore has continued to rise and 2015 police and National Guard were deployed on the streets after a young black man freddie gray died in Police Custody his death sparked violent protests and 2017 alone 343 people were murdered making baltimore the most dangerous city in america so rewind returned recently to a snowy baltimore to find out how the people on the frontline are addressing the citys drug and crime problem. Ernest shaw i am 48 years old. Im an artist nearly as an educator in both. Baltimore at one time as the hair would happen to the country i was born on the tail end of that and lived as a teenager through the eightys which was the credit at the dinner with this very day it was full. Its are we call the on. 43 years old. Friend who. Created the issue so. I learned that i was right so this was given to me by a no shoes all followed its basically the details of that. Because this i will survive i can assure you i was there with my spine on the return on 3 different cases. The top one here see the one in the middle and theres one down the bottom you know this is a little bit of. This this world record in the book will be cure world is with my for but now i do good ok well very very nice face to face but it is. That this time i was already turned i was to courage to guns now i had a 57 and 23 wall so this is me just turn it forward seeing as a drug dealer this is my life my work. Probably shot about skimpy. Close friends who did not graduate from high school who are no longer with us were lost to the streets 2 weeks so my father went to prison he did 15 years straight i met him when i went to prison at 15 with 15 years to say the least from 4 to 11 experience watching my mother shoot her and shoot cocaine you know all of my media family aunts all. And. So a lot of people a lot of people get shot so a lot of chrism so a lot of bad a lot of life loss can remember that were good of anything that us. I think the war or pennsylvania north is the most meaningful shows Billie Holiday because Billie Holiday dealt with addiction she had her deed and she was still in my successful in dealing while i was painting ill be ill be fully transparent. Never seen in open a drug market like the drug market on that corner and its a major 3rd of. The it is obama was in the white house how did things change and was bold. They did so however long trumps going to be there how are things going to change in west baltimore now get im talking about specific communities im not talking about every people get sick and tired of being sick and what happened in 2015 was an uprising with a small portion of new. Right after already great coda 17 troops i mean nobody but for 7 days there was no black or black shoot you real powers where you tell people not to shoot not we get people shot but youve got to have power to tell 5 different games where the not going to shoot at me listening because no one knows any of these activist groups or any of these companies can look me in my eyes and tell me to kill it like me and me did it like me and they sold like me and a good 18 years in prison like my father. You have a large contingency in the community does disenchanted with politics they dont even Pay Attention to because their day to day lives im not impacted by i believe obama did what he could i didnt have any evidence they had expectations of the 1st socalled black president but those folks wont really catch it now catch all regardless of the press for this city to get better it starts were asked start again i have that only key because they all know where youre maybe more i dont rant they know i have their best interests they know from the streets they know i did exactly what they did i dont see peace i dont say stop the violence i dont see none of it i say if you really want it you decide where we use not to shoot. You decide would areas have suffered enough you decide whatever your little girl got shot and then neighborhood traumatized so now put up no shoot so even deal with it where youre going to get dealt with and they listen im a painter the support has got to what i do so i have to deal with the reality of life i can literally see the future of baltimore to the ass of my students and it does not look. Thats it from this weeks rewind they want to catch up with the rest of the films in the series you can find them on the rewind page on the aljazeera website but for now until next time good bye thanks for watching. Rewind returns. Ran some vast amount is a documentary but compelling with onion done by the hong kong. Rewind to games with magazine city under siege for sick of. These young people over discussion was a good one never shot 6 times on aljazeera. The latest news as it breaks the only warning on evacuation same draft prevented many deaths and now people face the struggle to rebuild their lives with detailed coverage hong kong finds itself killed in the middle of a deepening cold war between china and the United States from around the world where the government close to bankruptcy many say such initiatives will not be enough to deal with what the Prime Minister has done death warrants could be a major food crisis. Frank assessments tourism income stream is dead in the water whats been the result seen poaching go up quite significantly informed opinions there has been a very aggressive political rhetoric that has become very normal and it really is indepth analysis of the dates global headlines its time for new policy a country i think not only seem to grady but hes written in this stability or we all continue inside story on aljazeera. This is aljazeera. And of their own nic like this is the news hour live from doha coming up in the next 60 minutes coronavirus cases surge in south asia with india and pakistan reporting the highest ever infection numbers will be live in islamabad. China races to stop an outbreak in the Capital Beijing which centers around a huge fresh food mark. For European Countries sign a deal to source any potential