Former Maryland Governor O'Malley has spent the past two days on the ground in Baltimore the city he loves and governed as Mayor from 1999 - 2007. While he's been in Baltimore, the national media has been having a field day hammering him and digging up his old critics to take a swing at him. MSNBC puts on a former Baltimore cop who was fired over ethics issues to say there will be a riot if O'Malley comes to Baltimore while O'Malley is on the streets passing out food and hugging citizens. The media breathlessly reports David Simon's (The Wire, Homicide Life in the Streets) claim that the riots in Baltimore can laid at O'Malley's feet. Simon who has spent the past decade feuding with O'Malley over crime policy, the drug war, money, permission to film in Baltimore and Simon's portrayal of Baltimore as a city of despair.
While the national news is pre-occupied with those stories, I'd like to talk about Baltimore before O'Malley, after he left and why I still hope that he'll run for president. For some skeptics, they think that O'Malley is just a numbers cruncher who doesn't care about Baltimore. I think that this article as well as the many other articles about O'Malley on the ground in Baltimore prove that isn't true.
politicians are much like the rest of us; they have a story they tell about themselves, a self-image that defines and sustains them. And O’Malley’s story is about a 36-year-old white councilman in a majority-black city who gets elected mayor by promising to slash crime in one of the country’s most dangerous cities, and who becomes a local hero for getting it done. It means more to him than any campaign.
Campaigning that summer, O’Malley would ask every audience the same question, which had become a kind of mantra in the city: “If I can see it, and you can see it, how come the police can see it and don’t do anything about it?” He won 53 percent of Democrats in the primary vote and swept into office with 91 percent of the vote.
This is what O'Malley
inherited when he took over as Mayor:
With nearly 10 percent of the population—60,000 people—addicted to drugs, more than 300 murders a year throughout the 1990s, only 16 percent of third-graders meeting state reading standards, 15 percent of teenagers neither in school nor employed, an unemployment rate twice that of the rest of Maryland, and somewhere between 10,000 and 40,000 homes left vacant by the fleeing population, the city he turned over to O’Malley was on life support.
O'Malley won re-election with 88% of the vote. The city overwhelmingly agreed with what he was doing and voted to re-elect him.
When O'Malley left the Baltimore Mayor's office, violent crime had fallen 41% according to the FBI and Baltimore had gone from being the most violent city in America to the 13th most and it's # of homicides had been below 300 his entire tenure. As O'Malley's zero tolerance policy has encountered criticism, it should be said that:
But it’s also true that crime reductions like those O’Malley achieved in Baltimore aren’t just numbers on a page; they represent a vast difference for poor families whose neighborhoods had become overrun with corner dealers and drive-bys, to the point where their children couldn’t go outside. If you’re going to indict the excesses of policing that victimize minority populations, then you also have to acknowledge how that same policing made it possible for a lot of citizens to go about their daily lives.
For some O'Malley skeptics, they doubt his progressive commitment after his tenure as Mayor of Baltimore. For me, I think his entire career has shown a belief in government, in a responsibility to improve the lives of the people he governs and that he is willing to make bold decisions. From repealing the death penalty to enacting DREAM Act, giving shelter to child refugees from Central America, signing SSM into law and campaigning for it, to working to reduce crime in Baltimore and to reducing police-involved shootings in Baltimore, etc.
But what has me really inspired to vote for O'Malley is this summed up in this op ed by him:
As Dr. Martin Luther King once said, "a riot is the language of the unheard." And, this week the people of our city and our entire country were forced to listen.
Let's talk about policing and public safety. Let's expand drug treatment and find smarter ways to protect society from repeat violent offenders while incarcerating fewer of our citizens. Let's do more of the things like body cameras, and the timely and standard reporting of police-involved shootings, excessive force, and discourtesy complaints so that we can improve public trust for public safety.
But make no mistake about it, the anger that we have seen in Ferguson, in Cleveland, in Staten Island, in North Charleston, and in the flames of Baltimore is not just about policing. It is about the legacy of race that would have us devalue black lives -- whether their death is caused by a police officer or at the hand of another young black man. It is about declining wages and the lack of opportunity in our country today. It is about the brutality of an economic system that devalues human labor, human potential, and human lives. It is about the lie that we make of the American Dream when we put the needs of the most powerful wealthy few ahead of the well-being of our nation's many.
We are still capable of acting like the compassionate, and generous, and caring people our grandparents expected us to become and that our children need for us to be.