Post-election mysteries

Kamala Harris in Reno, Nev., a few days before the election. (Photo by Brycia James)

Questions for America
 that I cannot answer

Four years ago, in the weeks leading up to Election Day, my wife Bonnie Schupp was deeply worried. "I don't want Trump to be the last president in my lifetime," she told me.

 Election night was tense, the result too close for comfort -- and the accelerant for Donald Trump's "Big Lie" alleging rigging.

 We had for weeks watched Bill Maher's HBO show, "Real Time," in which the comedian/social critic repeatedly warned that Trump would not leave office willingly. Then, like prophecy, came the January 6 insurrection -- a riot and invasion of the Capitol which Bonnie and I watched, transfixed and horrified. 

I assured her that the attack would not change the result, that Joe Biden would be inaugurated as scheduled two weeks hence. Days before the inauguration, Bonnie found out she had aggressive pancreatic cancer. 

We watched the inauguration together. Though she knew her own time remaining was limited, Bonnie was relieved for the future of others and the nation she loved that Biden was president. She died two months later. 

Four years down the road, it is my turn to worry. No, I'm not on the edge of death. But I'm anfew months older than Trump. His health status (both physical and mental) has always been a mystery couched in vague assurances, but I've had some challenges of late. Like a brush with mortality just two months ago. And I had hopes, as Bonnie did, that Trump would not be the last president in my lifetime.

 Now it seems he might be, assuming Trump has four years without an intervention of fate and I don't. And I fear for the future of the nation that I love, but now have a harder time understanding.

 I've read numerous stories and heard TV pundits in the election aftermath assessing reasons for the failed Kamala Harris campaign. 

The economy? She offered proposals to help families and vowed to take on companies for price-gouging. Trump blamed her for not fixing the economy during her four years as vice president. Not that she had the power to fix the inflation of higher consumer prices, mostly the result of initial shortages during the pandemic and the simply relationship of supply and demand.

 He harped on America as a failing nation, claimed only he could fix it, and tariffs were the answer -- despite the warnings of experts that tariffs amount to a tax on consumers through higher prices and would fuel a new inflationary spiral. All this nonsense when unemployment was at a record low, wages higher, interest rates finally dropping and the stock market at a record high. America is hardly failing economically.

 Illegal immigration as an invasion of criminals was a constant theme, and inevitably the few recent cases of undocumented aliens linked to murders -- including one if Maryland -- served Trump's purposes for political exploitation. And even when the House and Senate had reached a bipartisan agreement on legislation to deal with uncontrolled border crossings, Trump got his legislative sycophants to kill it. He needed the issue to remain as uncontrolled as the border. 

Trump as the problem-solver? How many times has he been asked for his promised plan to "fix healthcare" to replace the Affordable Care Act? In four years as president, there was none -- only a Republican attempt to scuttle the ACA that was foiled by the late Sen. John McCain.

 Or for many voters, was it simply the fact that Trump's opponent was a woman of color? They were just looking for excuses to vote for him? 

More than a dozen former key aides in his presidency urged Americans to vote for Harris, saying Trump was a danger to the nation. A fascist, even. Others in his administration or took part in schemes to subvert the Constitution were convicted of crimes, imprisoned, disbarred. But Trump himself, the crime boss, despite his New York state conviction on fraud charges, will not lose a day of his freedom and doubtless as president will scuttle all federal cases against him.

 How could more than half of the participating electorate vote for him? I cannot fathom it. President-elect yet again, four years after his defeat by Biden, despite his innumerable faults and failures as a human being and from 2017 to 2021 in office. What voters chose to ignore, forgive or forget is astonishing, but inevitably offers a clue to their psyche.

 I am left to ask how anyone who lost a family member to Covid could ignore, forgive or forget Trump's lies and ignorance in his public response to the pandemic and undermining of public health science. More than a million Americans died. He at one point voiced the idea of people injecting bleach as a cure, among other preposterous suggestions, as he undermined the work of experts studying the virus and their push for wide acceptance of the quickly-developed vaccines to help contain it.

 I am left to ask how any military veteran could ignore, forgive or forget President Trump deriding the courage and sacrifice of the nation's defenders. among other insults. "Suckers and losers," he said in minimizing visits to the American cemeteries in France where many lost in World War II are buried. Or his stated suggestion of using the nation's military to deal with Americans exercising their free speech right of protest. (All this from an obvious draft dodger in the Vietnam war era whose alleged bone spurs must have been miraculously cured.)

My neighbor's lawn

 I am left to ask how any police officer could ignore, forgive or forget President Trump inciting the crowd he summoned to Washington for the Jan. 6 rally and failing to intervene as a mob's ensuing attack on the Capitol injured 140 police officers and contributed to the deaths of several. Close to a thousand people eventually were convicted on criminal charges related to the attack. Trump has called them patriots and vowed to pardon the many who are now serving prison terms. (In my own neighborhood in Pasadena, Maryland, a police officer who brings home his county patrol car after work flies a Trump "no more bullshit" flag outside his house and has a line of lawn signs adjacent to his driveway declaring he was voting for law and order, and for "felon and hillbilly.")

 I am left to ask how any good union member could ignore, forgive or forget Trump's blatant contempt for organized labor (and forget, by comparison, the incumbent Democratic president joining auto workers on their picket line during their strike in battling for a fair contract).

 I am left to ask how so many American voters could ignore, forgive or forget the incessant lies of Trump, his obvious lack of empathy for anyone other than himself and his family, his personal greed, his theft from charity, his con-man frauds, his racism and xenophobia, his abuse of women, and his crimes -- indicted by grand juries in multiple states, convicted in New York, and proving through millions spent on lawyers to delay justice that laws and the Constitution at the bedrock of America for more than two centuries do not apply to all.

 And I am left to wonder how those voters will perceive the results of their choice four years hence. I might not last that long, but suspect they will find themselves paying the piper. To say nothing of the likely global damage that may never be undone.

From my 1965 yearbook, the newspaper staff at the College Crier shows me (top left) and Chuck Milland (bottom right).

 

Remembering a friend

who tried to be a good cop

From 43 years ago: A night on duty together

 

"At nearly 4 in the morning," my story began, "the whisper of the downtown streets is broken by an alert on the police radio: '10-31 rape in progress, Mount Royal and Cathedral, 10-31.'

"Lt. Charles Ford Milland glances at the only civilian car on Calvert Street and hammers the gas pedal. The blue dome light reflects off building walls as the Central District cruiser roars with the surge of power.

"Braking at each corner, the lieutenant checks for oncoming traffic and hammers the pedal again. Two minutes at speeds of up to 50 mph to Mount Royal, and the radio blares again: 'Suspect running west toward Mount Royal.' "

The crime, an ensuing foot chase, and the arrest of the suspected rapist by a couple of patrol officers were highlights of a routine overnight shift for Milland -- and my ride-along for this story that ran on the Metro section front page of the Baltimore Sun on June 22, 1980.

Milland called me later that day, and his funny reaction to my story has been frozen in my memory for nearly 43 years: "Geez, Dave, now they'll never let me have a new patrol car."

Saturday morning, a mutual friend called to let me know that Chuck Milland had died after a year of declining health, including respiratory difficulty.

Chuck and I had been friends since the early 1960s -- first as students at Pimlico Junior High School, then at Baltimore Junior College where, oddly enough, he became my first editor when I joined the features staff of the College Crier newspaper.

Our lives diverged sharply in the ensuing years, as I  lucked into a career at the newspaper and Chuck, after briefly teaching at an eastside elementary school, joined the city police force in 1970 and a decade later added a law degree to his resume. But he was also a good writer, and attained some notoriety for an essay published in Gallery magazine (a Playboy imitator) titled, "Why Cops Hate You."

The essay came to the attention of a popular Baltimore radio talk show personality, the late Allan Prell, who invited Chuck to talk about it on his "Lunch With Uncle Allie" show. Chuck pointed out that the article was intended to explain what many cops on the street think, and why they get annoyed with the public. It was not a reflection of police department policy or his own view, he said -- but top police officials were not amused.

For a time, Chuck was moved from his shift commander role in the Central District covering downtown Baltimore to the communications division overseeing dispatchers at police headquarters. Eventually, though, he was back on the street as a shift commander in the Northern District.

In junior high, we were casual friends and classmates, and it was just by chance and curiosity that I walked into the college newspaper office and found him back in my life... my first editor. On the rare occasions when our paths crossed at the nexus of reporter and cop, we would smile at our newspaper link. And it helped explain why Chuck was helpful to reporters at crime scenes or occasionally as an unnamed source for information -- at least with reporters he came to trust.

His police career came crashing down in 1998 after a couple of domestic disputes with his girlfriend -- a former addict he was trying to keep off drugs -- resulted in his arrest. His girlfriend had called police, and Chuck fled for several days before surrendering on a domestic assault charge. But soon after his arrest, she retracted her complaint that he had hit her and said she was too drunk to remember what had happened.

The case nonetheless drew the ire of the police chief, and his days with a badge came to a sad ending.  But at least he had a backup career as a lawyer.

"I love this job," Chuck told me during our night together in 1980. "I had more fun being a patrolman. I don't have as much fun now," he added, referring to the paperwork that came with the brass lieutenant's badge, "but the fun is more intense."

That night remains my best memory of Chuck Milland, him walking through the bars and back rooms of strip clubs on "The Block" -- the downtown adult entertainment section -- to assure a semblance of order in the minutes before the 2 a.m. closing time that sends "revelers, drunks, prostitutes, and even an assortment of just-nice-folks onto the sidewalks."

"He walks along East Baltimore Street," I wrote, "checking on the welfare of women in a massage parlor where, he acknowledges, something else obviously goes on in the back rooms. 'Sure they're whores,' he says, 'but whores get robbed, too.'

"On the street, the lieutenant offers to meet one of the Block 'girls' at the station to talk about her problems. She had been there the night before, drugged or intoxicated, claiming there was a 'contract out' on her life.

"Around the corner, at Fayette Street and Guilford Avenue, the first action of the night begins with the arrest of a female impersonator known as 'Bubba.'

"Lieutenant Milland assigned a special detail to arrest a few of the growing number of female impersonators soliciting for prostitution, to give them something to worry about. The charge is loitering for the purpose of prostitution.

"Bubba, 6 feet tall, about 190 pounds with legs like a linebacker, has been waving one of them at passing traffic through a slinky black dress slit to the thigh. He, or she, is the first of three to be locked up for the night."

The night continues with Chuck checking on staffing at assigned spots -- businesses where trash cans have been thrown through store windows, a clothing store that had been an occasional smash-and-grab target,  the lone patrolman watching over a bustling construction site for the future Charles Center subway station.

"On the district's western fringes, the cruiser crunches through a coal-black alley paved in broken bottles. A giant pile of debris and garbage narrows the passageway, and an overfed cat ignores a few scampering rats and the approaching police vehicle.

"A little past 4, on North Avenue, a disco closes for the night and the scene on The Block is repeated. Lieutenant Milland parks the cruiser and watches an old wino waving his arms like a bird and staggering on the sidewalk.

" 'He's going to get mugged,' the lieutenant says."

My story came a few days before the firing of a white city police detective named Stephen McCown for his shooting of a black 17-year-old he thought was holding and about to rob a pizza shop. The young victim, Ja-Wan McGee, who had been holding a cigarette lighter, was left paralyzed from his wounds.

The view from inside the Central District police station, I wrote, was that the police commissioner was bowing to racial pressure and firing a good cop.

But it was hardly the first and or last such incident in Baltimore, or nationally -- and only in recent years, particularly with the proliferation of security and cell phone cameras, has the violent intersection of race and police brutality or mistakes come into clear focus.

Chuck Milland was always on the side of his cops, and outspoken -- such as suggesting publicly that the Constitution be suspended for 30 days, giving police free rein to address growing urban crime.

At the station roll call that began our night, Milland discussed policing with his shift of officers. "The silent majority out there have a lot of respect for you guys," he said. "You don't run into it because of the nature if the people you deal with."

He added that 'it takes just a fraction of a second to be blown away," while worrying about whether to draw a gun and fire it. "There's an old saying, 'Better to be judged by one than carried by six.' "

"You got to use good sense and act in good faith. That's really all I have to say."

With Chuck Milland's death at our mutual age of 77, I am left wondering about how his life and world view would have turned out had he, like me, gone into journalism -- or after his first decade in uniform tried his hand at fiction to voice his views on policing.

Considering the roads not taken can be maddening.

 

 

 

 

"

 

Fifty years later

Remembering landmarks

after half a century

My first front-page byline, 

overshadowed by history

It was 8:30 on a Saturday night when the story began -- a middle-aged man knocking on the door of a Catholic church rectory on Baltimore's Old York Road seeking help, telling a priest  he was being "terrorized by a group of teen-agers."

Another priest called the city police emergency number. And then they waited. And waited. In the ensuing hours, Father Richard T. Lawrence tried to navigate by phone through the chain of command, but was unable to get beyond the patrolman manning the office of the night commander, Maj. George C. Schnabel. When he called again, the same patrol officer informed the priest that the major had flatly refused to send a patrol car to the area.

Two days later, Father Lawrence reached out elsewhere -- calling the Baltimore Sun, where this young reporter arriving for work on a noon general assignment shift was handed the story to check out. It was a Monday, and bigger news was breaking elsewhere in America and Maryland, but the priest's complaint became the lead story of the next day's front page.

Turned out, the police department had stopped responding to calls from areas near the home bases of half a dozen organizations deemed to be black militants. "We're not responding to certain areas on a selective basis," Col. Frank J. Battaglia, the chief of patrol, told me, "in areas where we may have a confrontation."

The church rectory was more than a city block from the home of a group called Making a Nation, on Cator Avenue. The space between was informally referred to as "a gray area" -- and the police were not responding there.

The story won my first front-page byline, and showed a measure of importance for issues of race relations in Baltimore -- which has not really changed much since.

That story appeared exactly 50 years ago today, and can be readily found in a coffee table-size book published by the newspaper in 1999 titled "A Century in The Sun: Front Pages of the 20th Century."

In the context of history, my story was vastly overplayed on what was then an eight-column page. 

Next to it, across five columns, was an eventual Pulitzer Prize-winning photo by photojournalism student John Filo of a teenager, her arms spread in anguish as she knelt over the body of a student killed by Ohio National Guard gunfire during an antiwar demonstration at Kent State University.

In all, four students were killed and nine injured as the guardsmen tried to disperse hundreds of demonstrators on campus. And a story under the photo reported that police and Guard troops had been ordered to occupy the University of Maryland's College Park campus. "College Park Declared Emergency Area As New Disorders Erupt," the headline read. A bottom-page photo showed state police using tear gas to disperse a crowd of demonstrators there.

Kent State and its reaction across America marked a homefront turning point in the antiwar movement, but the Vietnam combat grinded on another five years -- and not the last of ultimately useless wars for this nation, as witness Iraq and Afghanistan.

Likewise for race relations in Baltimore.

My slightly overplayed story on "gray areas" was flanked by an article on state and federal arrest warrants being issued for black militant H. Rap Brown after he failed to appear for trial on riot and arson charges,   and there was a "reefer" under my headline to a back page story on Baltimore's police commissioner denying that arrests a week earlier of Black Panther members caused a rise in tensions.

Gov. Marvin Mandel, who in those days had oversight on the city police chief, ordered an investigation of the "gray areas" incident, which quickly determined that the commissioner had ordered no response to calls from the half-dozen addresses of militant groups without the presence of a ranking officer. The order was misinterpreted, however, as subordinates simply avoided response even to areas nearby.

I was sent to police headquarters to interview the commissioner, Donald D. Pomerleau, but he was having none of it. His secretary said he was too busy to see me, so I told her I'd wait. I sat there for five hours. Came 5 o'clock, and the secretary turned off the lights and told me he was gone.

What has not gone in the 50 years since is the issue of race in Baltimore, as witness the "uprising" of five years ago, after the fatal injury of the arrested Freddie Gray in a police van that still divides the city. And race continues to be a component of nearly every aspect of life in the city -- education, health, housing, economics, politics. The current mayoral election features a handful of credible black candidates, and one white female candidate. A recent political ad for a black candidate purported to show the geographic pattern of her campaign donations as a swath of the city through its predominately white population centers.

And there is the issue of race in public safety, and distrust of police by much of the black community not just because of the Freddie Gray death. It has been exacerbated by the scandal of the police department's rogue Gun Trace Task Force, many of whose members (not all of them white) falsified evidence, stole money and drugs in raids and arrests, and ended up in prison themselves.

Fifty years and running, and what has changed in our society?

Turmoil then and now

Artist Nether works on his Freddie Gray mural. (Photo by Bonnie J. Schupp)

Racial tension haunts Baltimore

across chasm of 45 years

Today marks the 45th anniversary of Ohio National Guard soldiers fatally shooting four students during a protest of the Vietnam War at Kent State University. The eventual Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of a young girl kneeling in anguish over the body of one of the slain students ran atop the front page of newspapers across the world.

In the next morning's edition of The Baltimore Sun, the Kent State story ran under the picture. But the lede story -- at the top right of the page -- carried my first front-page byline, and had nothing to do with the shootings or the increasingly unpopular war that was raging in Southeast Asia.

My story was about policing and racial tension in the City of Baltimore.

You don't see much these days about war protests, even though America has been at war for close to 14 years in Afghanistan and Iraq.

But racial tension is back in the news in Charm City, in the wake of the arrest by city police officers, and subsequent death, of 25-year-old Freddie Gray in a westside neighborhood little changed economically or demographically since the rioting here and elsewhere that followed the 1968 murder of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

My story began with a call to the city desk by a priest at a Catholic church along Old York Road, about two miles north of the central downtown area. A man who had been robbed had come knocking at rectory door in the wee hours, seeking help. To the priest's astonishment when he called the police, he was told that officers could not respond there because it was a "gray area."

It turned out there were half a dozen so-called "gray areas" around the city, each of them near the location of headquarters of what were perceived as black militant groups. In this case, it was a group called Making a Nation, located more than a block away on Cator Avenue.  The fact that the city police were refusing response to portions of Baltimore out of fear of provoking racial unrest was stunning enough to make it the top front-page story in Baltimore the next morning.

Not many people remember my story. Kent State, however, was and remains a watershed moment in American history.

The "gray areas" fiasco proved to be misinterpretation of a directive issued by then-police commissioner Donald D. Pomerleau for officers not to respond to any of the addresses occupied by black  militant groups without the presence of supervisory personnel.

You don't hear the term "black militant groups" in Baltimore these days. More often, you hear about street violence and gang disputes over drug territory. The 2015 gang roll call: Crips, Bloods, Black Guerrilla Family. They were more about turf control for drug dealing and crime than addressing racial inequities in Baltimore -- until last week, when gang leaders came together seeking to discourage the rioting and disorder that brought a surge of thousands of police officers and National Guard soldiers into  town.

In 1970, Baltimore was a powder keg of racial tension. It was just two years after the King riots, whites were fleeing to the suburbs in ever-increasing numbers, the downtown shopping district was in its  death throes, and police were trying to avoid confrontations that might make matters worse.

Forty-five years later, the city population has shrunk to about 630,000. Parts of Baltimore look like ghost towns for all the vacant buildings. Poverty is endemic, opportunity elusive. The American Dream -- well, what is it? Does it even exist in cities like Baltimore? Or is it just an American Nightmare now.

Today, driving through town, we were passing through a section where a week ago young people had been throwing rocks and bottles at riot-equipped cops in skirmishes broadcast live on television, globally. It was an explosion of the racial powder keg, again.

At the intersection of Mount and Presbury streets, an outdoor mural artist who uses the name Nether was rolling brown paint to create a giant image of Freddie Gray's face, flanked by a scene of marchers for social justice.

There was not a police officer or soldier in sight.

Baltimore's Riot of 2015

In the matter of Freddie Gray

the 'routine' has vastly changed

During a 40-year career in the news business, I came up with my "two first laws of journalism": 

No. 1 is "Cops Lie."

No. 2 is "Cops can't spell."

I mean no disrespect for officers of the law. I like most cops I've met. But I deemed it important for folks in the news business to understand that cops are very much like other folks you meet -- they do not always tell the truth or get things right.

Face it -- everybody lies. Maybe not all the time, but sometimes. And who hasn't made a spelling error? The point is to understand that information you are being given may not be accurate or true. Journalists have an obligation to check facts and get other points of view. Truth can be elusive, perhaps not even possible to ascertain.

I learned about cops lying -- or perhaps not telling all the truth -- as a young police reporter at The Baltimore Sun nearly half a century ago. A tactical squad sergeant invited me to go along on drug investigations and raids with his team of about half a dozen men. But I had to make a deal with the devil. I might witness some activities that I had to agree not to report in my story.

The first such incident came as the cops were trying to locate a drug dealer, and leaned on his mentally slow brother-in-law for information, stopping by the man's tiny street-level apartment in pre-urban renewal South Baltimore. They told the man he faced arrest for drug possession and, to his denials, got him to agree to a search of his dwelling. As they rummaged around, one of the officers planted a packet of powder under a lamp, then "found" the supposed drugs. The guy was scared. And then, to avoid arrest, he told the team where to find his brother-in-law's drug stash nearby.

That was a little deception, a warrantless search -- a shakedown, really --  at the expense of a simple-minded citizen of Baltimore to get what they wanted. And it was part of the investigative process that I was bound by our agreement not to report.

Which brings us to Pennsylvania Avenue, in 1969 an epicenter of illegal drug activity -- and this week, an epicenter of the protests over the strange death in police custody of Freddie Gray.

It was another investigation here by the squad, this time with a search warrant for a building that had a padlocked front door. Two men sitting on folding chairs on the sidewalk in front of that building were detained, while the squad broke open the padlock and began combing through a 3-foot-deep heap of trash piled inside. They found, at the bottom of a trash can under the pile of debris, a plastic bag containing filled drug capsules.

Neither of the suspects resided in the building, and neither had a key to the padlock. Neither was holding drugs. They had been sitting in chairs on a public sidewalk. And they were charged with possession with intent to distribute narcotics.

In the official report on their arrest on drug charges, the cops wrote that the men were "on the premises."

As distasteful I deemed their deception in the case of the feeble-minded brother-in-law, which I was unable to recount in my story, I realized in the Pennsylvania Avenue arrests that the cops were lying in their official report -- and this time, I was free to write the circumstances of the search and arrests, and quote from the official report by the police that the suspects had been "on the premises."

They were not in jail very long. Defense lawyers noted my first-hand account as proof that the men had been outside the premises -- not on the premises. 

I asked the sergeant about that, and whether the men his team had arrested were in fact guilty. "They were dealing drugs, Dave," was the sergeant's reply. "Maybe not there, but they were drug dealers."

"On the premises" was an example of using vague language to avoid the truth. It was so routine that the cops hardly saw it as lying. 

Which brings us, 46 years later, to the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray, whose arrest on April 12 was partially recorded on video -- just the last seconds, in which he was shown face-down on a sidewalk, a cop on either side of him, and then, seeming unable to walk, dragged to the back of a prisoner transport van. He was shouting in apparent pain.

Police reported that Gray had been "arrested without incident."

It is a phrase so routine, perhaps the officers themselves could not see it as untrue. From their point of view, Gray's arrest was routine. He had made eye contact with them, then ran, and he was chased, caught, handcuffed and loaded into the van. That's what they do.

But it was hardly routine for Freddie Gray, whose short life was marred by childhood exposure to lead dust in his mother's cheap rental home and later a long rap sheet of drug arrests.

Sometime between eye contact and Gray becoming unresponsive and not breathing, his spinal cord had been snapped. He died a week later.

The death became Baltimore's Missouri Moment -- its turn in the global spotlight, with angry demonstrations following deaths at the hands of police  in Ferguson, Mo., New York City and other communities. Charm City, one of the local and usually ludicrous nicknames, is under a State of Emergency and occupied by National Guard soldiers after the demonstrations grew into a riot of looting, burning and violence.

Later this week, police promise a fuller report on Gray's arrest and death as the department turns over the investigation to the Baltimore state's attorney's office -- the prosecutorial arm of the criminal justice system. Meanwhile, six police officers involved with the arrest and transport of Freddie Gray remain suspended with pay.

And key questions from a period of some 30 minutes remain unanswered -- starting with what was the "probable cause" for Freddie Gray's arrest. The joke, of course, is that he was simply "running while black." And how could his spinal cord have snapped? Before that bystander's video began, did an officer have a knee resting on Gray's neck? Left unattended and without a safety restraint in the caged confines of the transport van, was he given a "rough ride" to the police station?

Nothing here is simple, other than the public response to deaths at the hands of or in custody of police in a nation that has changed, remarkably, since the 1960s. 

What once was routine is anything but.