Baltimore police called ‘an army of occupation’

Days of peaceful protest about police aggression turned to rioting, looting and arson in Baltimore on Monday following the funeral of black man, Freddie Gray (25), who died on April 19th, a week after suffering a spinal injury while being transported in a police vehicle.

Businesses were set ablaze and more than 200 arrested in west Baltimore, one of the poorest areas of this majority African-American city.

Time magazine ran a photograph of a young black man running from riot police with the headline, "America, 1968," on its cover. The year was scratched out and 2015 written over it, as the magazine asked what had changed since the race riots that followed the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

At the White House, just 64km away, President Barack Obama branded the rioters "criminals and thugs" but urged police and local communities "to do some soul-searching" as these problems had gone for decades.

A week of tensions culminated in Baltimore’s state’s attorney describing Gray’s death as “homicide” and filing charges against six officers who “illegally arrested” him, including a second-degree murder charge against one.

Attention turned earlier in the week to Baltimore’s system of policing. The debate became political, with questions asked about former Baltimore mayor Martin O’Malley, who is preparing to announce his 2016 presidential candidacy.

One critic is David Simon, Baltimore writer and creator of acclaimed TV drama The Wire. Simon based the character of ambitious politician Tommy Carcetti on O'Malley.

Simon claimed that the data-driven O’Malley, mayor from 1999 to 2007, adopted a zero-tolerance approach that manipulated statistics to show a sharp drop in crime levels but created a police culture of mass arrests. This, Simon argued, led to tensions boiling over.

"They're an army of occupation and once it's that, then everybody's the enemy," Simon told The Marshall Project, a news organisation. He noted that a crew member on The Wire was jailed with no charges for "driving while black" after filming had wrapped in the city.

The former mayor cancelled a planned trip to Ireland on Tuesday to return to the city where he lives and to meet protesters. He received a mixed reception, welcomes from some and heckles from others, who blamed the violence on his policies as mayor.

“You’ve got to present in the middle of the pain,” O’Malley told reporters.

Explaining how a black man suffered a fatal injury in the back of a police van will be especially painful.