Baltimore: Reflections on Inner City Violence in America

The inner city riots in Baltimore evoke considerable sadness and frustration. Why were there large-scale riots in the inner city, destroying the infrastructure of the rioters’ own neighborhoods? All this in a city where the mayor, police commissioner, and three of the six police officers who were suspended and charged with crimes were African-Americans, as was the district attorney who charged them. This in a country with an African-American president.

Could the struggle in some places between inner city youth and the police not be mostly about race? If the struggle is not primarily about race, does that mean that those pressuring the leadership of Baltimore, Ferguson, Philadelphia, and other cities to greatly increase the representation of minorities in police departments are missing some vital points about the causes of rioting? Is the issue much more about class, economic opportunity, family structure, minority attitudes to authority, and unconscious needs rather

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than race? If so, shouldn’t society’s focus be on how to improve the economics, change the psychology of the American urban underclass, and break the cycle of hostility between urban youth and public safety officers far more than race?

I (Paul Elovitz, hereafter PHE) come to these issues from my own life experience. In my early years, I lived in the inner city of an industrial city where children normally and automatically listened to what a policeman said to do, and treated him (then always a him) with respect and fear. When I was in my early 20’s walking suburban streets with reddened eyes in the middle of the night following the burial of my mother, the police stopped me, asked for my identification and reasons for being out at that unusual time. Hearing about my loss, they said I should go home, which I did. We treated each other respectfully.

I (Neil Wilson, hereafter NW) am concerned about today’s attitudes to the police. I grew up in Brooklyn and later became a member of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). When arrested during the Mississippi summer of registering blacks in 1964, I did exactly what the police told me to do. In New York, it was out of respect for what the police represented more than for their night sticks. In the South, it was out of my inclinations and CORE’s advice that I would suffer serious bodily harm or death if I failed to abide by the orders of the law officers who took me to jail on false pretenses. How have we reached this point where many police, regardless of their race, feel that they are in a war with the younger inhabitants of the ghetto?

To what extent is the defiance of police by young African-Americans and the subsequent riots when there is a well-publicized case of police shooting in their community self-destructive? An unconscious motivation for a rash of suicides in schools is to be remembered and talked about the way previous suicidal people have been. An outpouring of love and attention is offered to the suicidal dead. For decades we have been talking about “death by cop” in cases of suicidal men who want to end their lives in what they imagine to be a “blaze of glory” by provoking the police into killing them or their killing themselves because they have done something so heinous that they see no other way out. There is an impulse to die (with the eyes of the world on them, to be remembered by others).

Fighting and defying the police is clearly “asking for it”—it

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can be suicidal. Burning the stores, pharmacies, etc. in inner city neighborhoods as in Baltimore helps perpetuate a culture of poverty. People are already suffering in a “food desert” where liquor stores proliferate and mom and pop groceries provide almost no fresh fruits and vegetables. The riots lessen the facilities available to the poor inhabitants, denigrate their livelihood, and decrease the likelihood that food stores, pharmacy chains, and so forth will take the risk of investing in these neighborhoods for decades to come.

Riots also mean that upwardly mobile immigrants and others who would take advantage of the inexpensive store and home rentals available and provide examples of success in neighborhoods that are woefully starved for role models of success for the young are much less likely to move into these areas. The paucity of male role models other than drug dealers and gang leaders in these neighborhoods decreases the likelihood that young men will see a way out of their poverty. When we look at the burned-out remnants of buildings in Baltimore, we think of how many people made a good life and thrived in these same types of buildings. Their children went on to become artists, business owners, doctors, engineers, lawyers, psychologists, social workers, and whatever they wanted to become. To the extent poor people are ghettoized, their opportunities are limited.

Racism is alive and well in America, often thinly disguised as critiques of Obama, Obamacare, welfare, big government, and affirmative action. Nevertheless, our achievements in lessening racial inequality and legal prejudice have been enormous. In our lifetimes, we have gone from Saturday night lynchings and laws against miscegenation to racial acceptance of an almost unbelievable level when compared to the laws and social mores of our parents and grandparents. The young people I (PHE) teach despise the idea of racism, although it is very difficult to know how this belief in equality is implemented within their daily lives. During virtually all of my adult life, I’ve had Hispanic or African-American neighbors living next door; I no longer see this as unusual in the suburbs.

However, this middle class racial integration is certainly not the experience of minorities in Baltimore, Ferguson, and other places where citizens rioted, denigrating their own neighborhoods. It is important to explore this tendency and ask where the adults are when the young carry out such destruction and self-destruction. To what extent are they working to stop the violence rather than just making pronouncements to the media complaining of governmental

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actions or inactions? Some adults are working on it. During the Baltimore riots the media focused on a mother who, upon seeing her son on TV involved in rioting, left her home to find him and dragged him home, cursing and beating him along the way.

It should be noted that overwhelmingly, after the death of an African-American at the hands of the police, the minority community peacefully demonstrates in protest. This is not usually the focus of the media in our celebrity society. Rather, it is the anger and destructive/self-destructive rage of the small minority of mostly youths that makes the evening news. This brings back memories of participating in anti-Vietnam war rallies with thousands and even hundreds of thousands of peaceful demonstrators, only to see the riotous actions of a handful of destructive inner city looters as the focus of the TV news in the evening.

The roots of hostility to the police start early. Even for the most law-abiding citizen, “peace officers” represent conscience that leaves many people uneasy. In an elevator, a Hispanic policeman who is my (NW) patient, warmly smiled and exchanged pleasantries with a little African-American girl whose mother furiously told her to “never again talk to the police!” There is a growing defiance of authority among teenagers, especially minority ones. When I drive past a school as students are dismissed, many kids will slowly, defiantly, walk in front of cars as if the drivers don’t exist.

As a psychoanalyst, I (NW) consider what the possible unconscious psychodynamics of men who confront, provoke, and defy policemen can be. What comes to mind is some combination of unconscious, suicidal wishes, defiance of a father figure, omnipotence in the face of force, identification with a rebellious father, and the denial of passive needs. A study of the upbringing of those victims recently in the news pertaining to their childhood would be productive.

Growing up is difficult for teenage boys generally, more so for inner city minorities who have fewer fathers and other role models around as well as minimal economic opportunities. Suburban boys are much more likely to be protected by their parents and communities from the criminal justice system when they cross some legal lines as teenagers sometimes do. Even in cases of single parent suburban families, there is more space, both within and outside the home as well as online, for kids to express themselves than in the crowded inner city where the police have a much greater

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presence.

Those policemen are authority figures and teenagers’ rebellion all too often gets played out with them these days. We need a study of the upbringings of Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, and other victims recently in the news pertaining to their childhood and fantasies about confronting the police. There are surely better, less self-destructive approaches to the demand for equality and recognition.

Another aspect to this tragic loss of life is that many police, if not treated with respect, overreact out of fear of situations getting out of hand when dealing with defiant teenagers and men. Several policemen have recently been killed or maimed, an occurrence frightening to all officers. This alone can lead to police overreacting with life-threatening violence.

When people look at black or Hispanic teenagers as dangerous, we wonder if there is a possibility that some of these young people may incorporate a sense of badness into their self-image. Barack Obama has told the story of being a teenager entering his own Honolulu apartment building only to have an older woman report him as following her. She refused to apologize after being told he was a resident, leaving him feeling upset. But he could talk the issue out with his grandparents. This is not just an intellectual issue for me (PHE). We have a tall 10-year-old grandson who the world sees as black, even though he was born with Native American, Caucasian, and African-American DNA and adopted by our son and his partner within weeks of his birth. Will this very sweet boy soon be looked upon as a dangerous teenager by police and others who see only his blackness?

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