Det kan man da kalde at “slå ned på kriminaliteten”

David Simon i The Guardian:

In order to elect Baltimore’s mayor as Maryland’s governor, crime had to go down. And when that mayor was unable to do so legitimately, through a meaningful deterrent, his police officials did not merely go about cooking their statistics, making robberies and assaults disappear by corrupting the reporting of such incidents, they resorted to something far more disturbing.

For the last years of his administration, Mayor Martin O’Malley ordered the mass arrests of citizens in every struggling Baltimore neighbourhood, from eastside to west. More than 100,000 bodies were dragged to Central Booking in a single year – record rates of arrest for a city with fewer than 700,000 residents. Corner boys, touts, drug slingers, petty criminals – yes, they went in the wagons.

But school teachers, city workers, shopkeepers, delivery boys – they too were jacked up, cuffed and hauled down to Eager Street – hundreds of them a night on the weekends. Some were charged, but few were prosecuted. And in 25,000 such cases, they were later freed from the detention facility without ever going to court; no charges were proffered because, well, no crime had been committed.

In places like West Baltimore, the drug war destroyed every last thing that the drugs themselves left standing – including the credibility of the police deterrent. To elect one man to higher office, an entire city alienated its citizenry and destroyed its juror pool.

Link: The escalating breakdown of urban society across the US (via Bertram Online).