The Department of Justice released its 163-page report on Baltimore policing last week. It is arguably the most damning of the 67 produced so far in cities and towns around the country. Dense with anecdotes and heavy with statistics, it relentlessly documents the lived terror and humiliation of...
The morning after the Department of Justice's report laid bare the scope of the deep and systemic problems within the Baltimore Police Department—confirming the many stories of abuse of power and civil rights violations that residents have been complaining about for years—Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake,...
The 164 pages that make up the Department Of Justice's investigation of the Baltimore Police Department is essentially a laundry list of police fuckery—and I'll be reading through it closely for weeks and weeks. Already though, one part of the report that sticks out to me: A subsection on page...
Most scientists don't include personal stories in their research reports, but for John Lilly, personal experiences and science experiments were the same thing. His ears, eyes, mouth, and nose were calibrated probes. His mind was the unbiased observer, the ideal model for dispassionate inquiry....
The absence of West Baltimore's Lor Scoota, who was shot and killed in June, and East Baltimore's Young Moose, who is currently in jail, were palpable last Saturday at the Royal Farms Arena where Baton Rouge's Lil Boosie and Washington D.C.'s Shy Glizzy came through for their "One Bad Azz Summer"...
Journalist Natalie Y. Moore's "The South Side" is a loving portrait of black Chicago by a self-proclaimed "South Side girl." It is also an incisive critique of the persistence of segregation in one of America's most diverse cities. Moore's exploration of Chicago's racially segregated neighborhoods...
Flipping matching card pair after matching card pair onto the floor from a brand-new deck shuffled by a volunteer, Maxwell Fink spits, "You can't win if you play with me." Why? Because he's not just a magician, he may be the devil. Lights dim to the candy pop song 'Sh-Boom (Life Could Be a Dream).'...
Baltimore’s favorite foods pay homage to the farmer’s market Last year, City Paper did a “Smoke, Meat, and Heat” issue and declared our intent to “expand the definition of barbecue,” so along with what you'd expect, we also focused on pit beef, that Maryland staple, and vegan BBQ by way of “jackfruit,”...
When I sit down with newly-appointed Baltimore City Public Schools CEO Sonja Santelises in July, she is barely a week into the new job. There is little to personalize her sunny office at the top of North Avenue, save a few small pictures of smiling children and a few stacks of papers. However,...
Protests at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia were larger than the ones at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland and they looked better on the news, but then again, Philadelphia wasn't a police state, while Cleveland totally was. In Cleveland, police reinforcements were...
David Ross walks the halls of the University of Maryland's Shock Trauma Center dressed in scrubs. He waits for victims of stabbings, shootings, and assaults to recover from their injuries—and then makes his move. As those patients are stabilized and begin to feel better, Ross approaches. He begins...
Not long after Baltimore County Police shot and killed 23-year-old Korryn Gaines last week, the questions started. Had police really disabled her social media accounts? How was her five-year-old son injured? How could a warrant for a simple traffic stop end in a death? After barricading herself...
As the United States Supreme Court's latest term came to a close in June, the court decided a critically important issue concerning illegal police stops, a case captioned Utah v. Strieff. The majority of the United States Supreme Court decided that police officers who carry out illegal stops can...
Baltimore State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby arrived at the Gilmor Homes vanquished, her office announcing earlier in the morning that the charges against the remaining officers involved in the death of Freddie Gray would be dropped. But she received a hero's welcome in Sandtown, where Gray lived,...
If you ask Demorrea Tarver what he'd do with an extra 30 grand, the polite 26-year-old man—his teeth decorated with gold veneers, the Burberry sticker deliberately left on the frame of his glasses—doesn't hesitate: "I'd put a down payment on a house, or start a business," he tells me in a downtown...
↓ BPD Last week, the Department of Justice released its report on Baltimore's police—and its findings were damning. In 163 pages, based on hundreds of interviews and thousands of document reviews, investigators concluded that the Baltimore Police Department "engages in a pattern or practice of...
Police arrested several shooting suspects this week, waited out and arrested non-violently an armed suspect who barricaded himself in a house, and arrested a murder suspect minutes after he allegedly shot a man to death in Reservoir Hill. Six people were added to the homicide roll. Last year by...
↑ DeRay Mckesson Activist, former mayoral candidate, and current director of human capital for Baltimore City Public Schools DeRay Mckesson was arrested in Baton Rouge last month during a protest over the police killing of Alton Sterling. This week, Mckesson joined two others in filing a federal...
Dwight Whitley is better than this. His connections used to mean something. Back when George Winfield ran public works, Whitley would meet him at home after work and hang out. "His wife was a sweetheart," Whitley says. "He'd come in and say 'why'd you let this nigger in here?'" He laughs, remembering...
Shorty Davis has his hands in everything. When Duane "Shorty" Davis isn't marching, demonstrating, training others on the ins and outs of organizing, working with the homeless, mocking and sometimes interrupting media outlets not up to his standards, or creating funny protest art in the form of...More
It's the middle of summer and I feel a certain pressure to cook and eat as many of the delicious foods in season as possible. I don't want September to roll around harboring regrets of not having eaten enough tomatoes, corn, and peaches at the height of their ripe deliciousness. With your own garden...
It's the height of summer here in Baltimore, the weeds have grown thick, the tomato vines are heavy with fruit, and the mint desperately needs thinning. As anyone who has grown it knows, mint is an assertive, determined plant, willing and able to take over your entire yard if you don't keep it...
Life is timing. Yes, it's a worn out trope, but one that rings true in both life and art. Had crack not ravaged South Central Los Angeles, had brutal policing not become the norm, the five-man crew of NWA would have lacked the source material to pen 'Straight Outta Compton,' 'Gangsta, Gangsta'...
In Sparrows Point, the sky is filled with the sound of a steady stream of planes making their way to and from BWI Airport, and there are white picket fences amid a sea of evenly mowed lawns—many of which flaunt signs supporting Donald J. Trump as the next president of the United States. It's a...
At the corner of Harford and Moravia, just three hours after beloved West Baltimore rapper Lor Scoota was shot and killed in his car, there is little evidence that anything happened. Some yellow police tape is still up, someone has swept broken glass into an orderly pile near the curb, but that’s...
Moments In Club 61 digressions about Baltimore Club music By Brandon Soderberg 1 "Which is better?—to lay open a new sense, to initiate a new organ for the human spirit, or to cultivate many types of perfection up to a point which leaves us still beyond the range of their transforming power?" -Walter...
A day is coming sooner than any local house music fan wants to admit. Paradox, the city's dance music mecca, is living out its final days in the equivalent of building hospice care. We can still go visit it and experience everything that made it special for 25 years, but there's that rapidly approaching...
After the poorly titled misfire of "Star Trek Into Darkness," one could be forgiven for assuming Paramount hiring "Fast & Furious" vet Justin Lin to direct the follow-up was the worst kind of Hail Mary. Diehards already quibble over J.J. Abrams realigning Gene Roddenberry's cerebral brand of science...More
A few weeks ago, a friend arrived at a late-night party with a strangely dystopian anecdote. While looking up transit directions to the venue, located near the intersection of East 25th Street and Harford Road, Google Maps warned him that he was entering a high crime area. We laughed at how odd...
If you deny something from a group of people for a really long time, they'll be happy with any morsel you throw their way. That's why "Orange Is the New Black," Netflix's hit comedic drama about women held in a minimum security prison, Litchfield Penitentiary, was so successful in the first place....
Comics artists Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird originally conceived "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" as a parody of brooding '80s comics artist Frank Miller's obsessions with grim urbanity. So what better time than now, when Netflix's "Daredevil" series fashions itself as "The Wire" with costumes and...
"What could it look like?" This is the eternal refrain of Jess Solomon, the interim director of the Bromo Arts District, which is hosting two upcoming "community visioning sessions" this month, so that those within the district can sit down together and actively imagine how to improve the community....
Jackie Milad chases something personal in the 12 mixed-media-on-paper pieces in her solo exhibition, "Pyramids Fall Too," at Phoebe Projects. The intensity of that pursuit hits the eyes immediately upon entering the gallery. Black, the absence of visible light, dominates her compositions. The chief...
Kaita Niwa recalls one of her earliest memories: playing dress up with her sister and cousin, wearing Singaporean silk dresses and nail polish. "I was like any other child playing with their favorite toys or reading their favorite book, gleaming with joy," she writes to me in an email. But then...
There are signs that warn you, before entering the gallery that houses FORCE’s Monument Quilt installation, that there’s work in this space that addresses sexual violence. But I knew that already—I knew that FORCE, as a group, is a Sondheim finalist; I have seen pieces of the Monument Quilt before...
The man in the photograph has collapsed to his knees and holds his head in his hands. He leans onto a folding metal chair, his Bible resting in the chair. Titled 'The Prayer,' the photograph, taken by Baltimore photographer Kenneth Royster in 2000, captures a man utterly overcome. "That's from...
In the middle of the large back room in the former Peale Museum, there is an old stack of brown paper or cardboard, bound with twine. The stack is smushed, water-logged, and anonymous, label-less. It's a relatively small detail; the floor is covered with stacks and spread out sheets of large, wrinkled,...
It's an unseasonably brisk night in February when we pull up to EMP Collective. The energetic emcee Killjoy raps to a swaying crowd while a projection of curated images such as TLC's "Word Up!" cover and other black '90s icons shines bright off to the side. On another wall hangs a dreaming sun...
On a Tuesday evening in early April, seven students sit at iMacs in a classroom, some wearing headphones, as they transcribe interviews or watch video footage on the computers' screens. Two instructors unplug recording equipment from retractable extension cords connected to plastic orange spheres...
My hand is holding an object that looks somewhat like a bar of soap: smooth and pink, but not waxy like soap is. Pressed into it, like a brand, with haphazard letters and pieces of plastic broken to look like letters, are the words "CLEAN 5UM." I take the cord coming out of one end and plug it...
Norman Mailer, “Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968” (Random House) Random House couldn’t have chosen a better time to reprint Norman Mailer’s account of 1968’s political conventions than in the current 2016 election season. We’re...
Four hundred years have passed since the death of William Shakespeare, and 2,060 since the death of the subject of his great tragedy "Julius Caesar," but both live on as specters in the meadow behind the Evergreen Museum, where the Baltimore Shakespeare Factory holds performances in the evening...