In what has turned into a never-ending saga, we learned yesterday of the acquittal of one of the Baltimore police officers charged in the arrest of Freddie Gray. As The New York Times reported: “Officer Edward M. Nero’s acquittal on four charges for his role in the opening moments of Mr. Gray’s arrest was a second blow to the prosecution’s sweeping case, announced as Baltimore was still seething after the unrest following Mr. Gray’s death in April 2015.”
Among other things, the Freddie Gray case points to the path Baltimore has taken – a path to poverty. My colleague, Prof. Stephen J.K. Walters, and I wrote about this in the Investor’s Business Daily on April 22, 2016: “One Year After: Freddie Gray and ‘Structural Statism’”
Here is some of what we wrote about how the path of structural statism has contributed to Baltimore’s poverty and associated problems.
“When Freddie Gray was born in 1989, Baltimore hosted 787,000 residents and 445,000 jobs. By the time his fatal injuries in police custody provoked riots last April, the city’s population had fallen by one fifth, to 623,000, and its job base had shrunk by one quarter, to 334,000.
Little wonder that throughout his life, Mr. Gray had never been legally employed. Nevertheless, friends and family considered him “a good provider,” according to The Baltimore Sun.
Read the rest here...