(Re)Presenting Baltimore: Place, Policy, Politics, and Cultural Pedagogy

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Notes

The city does have full and rich African American histories. With the exception, however, of the recently opened Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture, these histories do not tend to feature heavily in the city's promotional campaigns—although the recent comprehensive master plan does recognize the supposed $90 billion potential in “minority tourism.” For a discussion of African American history in Baltimore, see Allman-Baldwin (2003).

These representations have, in particularly The Wire, sparked what is a peculiar fascination that the British broadsheet media/intelligentsia/chattering classes seem to have with the fetishizing of blackness/black urban “authenticity.” Undeniably popular, in Stuart Hall's sense of the word, yet we wonder if consumption of The Wire is more an exoticizing or eroticizing of the urban Other through a lens almost reminiscent of traditional “colonialist” anthropology. Although beyond the scope of this article, there are a number of academic texts that explicitly address the cultural politics of The Wire, such as Potter and Marshall's (2009) The Wire: Urban Decay and American Television.

As a direct response, the Baltimore Police Department produced its own 4-minute DVD titled, Keep Talkin. Employing the same distinctly black, urban, hip-hop, “street” aesthetic as Stop Snitching, Keep Talkin encourages residents to keep reporting criminal activities in their neighborhood.

For a paper length explication of Anthony's “embodied urbanite,” see Andrews and Silk (2010).

This was however a relatively brief appointment as in 2003, he left the Baltimore City force under a cloud of expense account indictment threats. He joined the State force, but Federal indictments issued in 2003 lead to a guilty plea to two counts related to spending from a Baltimore Police Department “supplemental” fund on items that were for personal use rather than for police-related activities. He served six months in various federal prison camps and continues to serve home detention because of a plea bargain with the U.S. Attorney's Office in May 2004.

This distance, the lack of public accountability, has however been challenged in Baltimore as a result of an extremely horrific, high profile, and tragic incident that points to the shortcomings of the shifts away from welfare capitalism. Within the spirit of the Believe campaign, Angela Dawson, of Oliver, North East Baltimore, and her husband, Carnell, stepped forward to work with the city of Baltimore against the drug dealers in their neighborhood. From July to October 2002, Angela Dawson called the police more than 50 times. After several incidents in which they were intimidated by local drug dealers in their East Baltimore neighborhood, including an attempted firebombing, the Dawson's house was broken into, accelerant distributed throughout the living rooms, and set on fire on October 16, 2002. Angela, Carnell, and their five children, 9-year-old twins Keith and Kevin, 10-year-old Carnell Jr., 12-year-old Juan Ortiz, and 14-year-old LaWanda Ortiz were all killed. Darrel L. Brooks, a known drug dealer, was sentenced to life without parole for the offence. The relatives of the seven members of the Dawson family killed in the arson attack have filed suit against the city, state, and various agencies, claiming not enough was done to prevent the tragedy (Hurley, 2005). The suit alleges that the Believe campaign, which encourages residents to come forward with information about drug dealers, only served to contribute to the problem because law enforcement did not provide resources to protect witnesses. The suit alleges that the Believe campaign was launched at a time when it was known that witness intimidation was commonplace and critiques the administration for a focus on a high-priced symbolic campaign at the expense of witness protection provision (Hurley, 2005).