rev, your reaction as to how things played out this evening on the first night of the curfew. well, i think that so far it has been relatively successful in terms of not having an escalation at all of violence as one that was in ferguson. we re not seeing the police behave in an aggressive manner near that level that we saw in ferguson, though clearly there is military equipment there, as rachel points out, and i think that you have to give a lot of credit to the people in the community. i spent the afternoon in baltimore, spent some time in meetings with the mayor and our local chapter there of national action network, and i think that the efforts that you ve seen that we just heard from one of the community activists have been awesome and i think that you can no way underestimate the impact they ve had because they had the capital in the community.
country and our democracy whenever we see the actual u.s. military in our street. rachel, one of the important notes of tonight is something that we are not saying that we could have spent some portion of the last hour and 20 minutes saying and that is, have they learned nothing from ferguson? it seems to me that all enlightened and semi-enlightened law enforcement officials throughout the country were watching our coverage of ferguson and all of the national television coverage of ferguson and learning lessons every night with what they were seeing on these tv screens. uh-huh, and i mean i think tonight at least especially if you take the word and the judgment of our reporters on the ground who are very close to that one conflagration that we saw today, it seems like the baltimore police have learned those and hardened themselves as a target and they re in these hardened vehicles. they ve got helmets on. they ve got riot shields down in front of their helmets and
more information becomes known about the freddie gray investigation and as people decide on their own terms how they want to react and protest this is going to be this is still a work in progress but tonight it is quiet and heavily armed on the streets of baltimore. it is now about an hour and a half from the worst point in the conflicts that we saw tonight and, rachel, i have to say when that smoke was filling that intersection, it looked like we were in a very difficult situation, and it didn t look like there was going to be an easy or quick way out of this. that s right and it was really terrifying to sit here and watch. it s hard to watch because in part it s our responsibility to explain what s going on and it s very hard to see the trajectories, where they re going to, who might be responsible even with multiple people on the ground what happens in a situation like that and why it does activate a fear response is that it is chaotic. it is a chaotic situation. that wa