Baltimore through the eyes of Al Jazeera
“War on blacks” at heart of city’s woes, documentary argues
Above: Al Jazeera’s Sebastian Walker, in “Baltimore: Anatomy of an American City,” at the scene of a shooting.
For Baltimoreans who see it every day – and in many cases live it – the cycle of joblessness, poverty, drug dealing and incarceration depicted in Al Jazeera’s new documentary about the city will be quite familiar.
But the polemical punch of “Baltimore: Anatomy of an American City” comes from the thesis that the massive incarceration wrought by the national “war on drugs” is not a historical footnote but a continuing culprit – and that the initiative is aimed at more than drugs.
“It’s not a war on drugs. Don’t ever think it’s a war on drugs. It’s a war on the blacks,” says ex-policeman and “Wire” co-creator Ed Burns.
City police and Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake are also interviewed by Sebastian Walker, of the English language arm of the Qatar-based network. They talk about the city’s stated shift in strategy to target guns and gun-related crime, rather than drug dealing. “The reduction in violence, while at the same time reducing arrests” proves their strategy is working, Rawlings-Blake says.
The images in the film (literal blood on the streets, crime scene after crime scene) and the interviews (with people who say they see no other way to live or get by) are meant to say otherwise.
The filmmakers argue that the “one-sided war” Burns speaks of is still being fought through misplaced priorities – too much spent on incarceration and building youth jails, not enough spent on rehabilitation and education.
Anthony Thomison described for Al Jazeera what it was like to be 16, and in jail with adults in Baltimore.
A teenager named Anthony Thomison describes in the film what it was like being in the Baltimore City Detention Center, along with adults, when he was 16: “scary.”
He had been charged as adult with armed robbery, according to Al Jazeera, and was eventually cleared of the charges.
At the end of the piece, Al Jazeera’s Walker concludes: “The legacy of the war that these communities have been through is so bad that rhetoric and anything short of radical change won’t solve the problem.”
Burns puts it even more bluntly, “This is a crime that we have committed and we have to redress it.”
Overwrought? Off-base? Or on the money? What do readers think of “Anatomy?”