Baltimore Beyond the Uprising

Baltimore, Maryland, USA

By Grace Paik
uprising, housing, policing, zoning

Those outside of Baltimore rely on media and other pop culture references to understand this city. How do maps and data speak differently?

This project is inspired by the narratives of Baltimore that arose because of the highly-publicized death of Freddie Gray in 2015, and by the existing narratives of Baltimore that may have been perpetuated during this time when the city was under national scrutiny. While the media may show certain facets of this city, what do maps and data tell us about Baltimore? To focus on maps and data as narratives of Baltimore, I have chosen not to include any photos related to the uprising. I believe the media has done enough circulating certain images, and I choose to do differently.

On April 12, 2015, Freddie Gray was arrested and taken into custody by the Baltimore City Police. The police van transporting Gray made five other stops before reaching a police precinct, 45 minutes later. While in police custody, Gray suffered injuries that resulted in a severed spinal cord. He was taken to the Shock Trauma Center at the University of Maryland, where he remained in a coma until he passed away a week later on April 19. From Gray’s arrest and until May 3, the city rose up in protests in response to Gray’s wrongful death and in response to the past year of wrongful deaths of other young black men in other parts of the US, like Michael Brown in Ferguson and Eric Garner in New York City. The Maryland Governor at the time, Larry Hogan, declared the uprising as a state of emergency and deployed the Maryland National Guard into the city. On May 1, 2015, the medical examiner’s office ruled Gray’s death to be a homicide; Maryland State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby charged six officers in their involvement in Gray’s arrest and death. Though the trials of the officers would end in a mistrial and then the charges would be dropped, it seemed like all eyes were suddenly on Baltimore.

During the uprising, the media sensationalized the city’s response to injustice. This is a map of events surrounding the uprising that were recorded by data collected by civic hackers, who took the data from police radio, police radio transcripts, and tweets. I have chosen to not include labels to specify the type of events, because I believe such labels could perpetuate what was already projected by the media. I wanted to recreate this map, joined with a spatialized timeline of Gray’s arrest, to simply give spatial context–to show that all these events are scattered throughout the city, not concentrated on one specific part of the city or particular group of people. In a sense, the whole city had a reaction to Gray’s arrest and death.

In addition to the uprising, Baltimore may be also known for images of its vacant housing. Certainly this is not directly correlated to the events of the uprising, but it is unfortunately present in the city landscape. I wanted to see how much data I could find on this ongoing housing crisis. I did find some data that went back into the 1990s, but I chose to show the past ten years–to show that this is a legacy and not a recent nor isolated crisis.

Another commonly associated topic with Baltimore is crime. This is evident in the data that is available on open source websites and the data that is incorporated into maps and other publications by local government, academia, and other institutions. This is also evident in city policies and past initiatives, to be city that has a tough on crime approach. While looking into these popular datasets, I chose to shift my focus to arrests–to not focus on crime itself but how the people of Baltimore are policed. Who is being policed? And where are they being policed?

There are many arrests, but those who are arrested are predominately black and arrested in areas that are deemed undesirable by the city and mayor’s office. The actual labeling of this undesirable housing is called “stressed housing”. Furthermore, in areas of the city where it is non-residential, such as the downtown area, there are CCTVs in place to police those areas. The majority of CCTVs are owned by the City Police Department, and some are owned by Johns Hopkins University, a privately-owned academic institution and hospital system, and East Baltimore Development Inc., which is a public and privately-owned development company affiliated with Hopkins.

And I wanted to see if the CCTVs were aiding in the arrests, but it seems like most of the arrests are happening outside of CCTV range.

I continued to look through available data to see what threads I could pull out from these sources. As mentioned above, I encountered the language of “stressed housing”, but also this use of language that is indicative of blight and urban renewal. While other cities may have softened this language, blighted housing and needs for urban renewal are still present in terms used by city planning. I also found data on recent zoning changes, which have changed a more simplified form of zoning into a complicated patchwork of zoning–a set-up for stronger forces of gentrification. Overlayed on top of the areas that the city has already determined as undesirable, the patchwork gets muddled further. This is indicative of what sort of mass development is making its way into city boundaries, which contradicts the idea that Baltimore is an abandoned and forgotten city, particularly after the uprising.

Even more, these zoning amendments and renewal plans were already in the works prior to the uprising. While analyses on Baltimore in 2015 by various institutions have alarmed the public, such as the peak in violence by homicides and other crime during that year, houses were being sold throughout 2014 to 2016. I wanted to see what the data prior, during, and after the uprising were saying. I found the most comprehensive datasets on those years on the website of an organization that focused on “vital” neighborhood indicators. Comparing year by year, the most homes were sold in the neighborhoods of Inner Harbor/Federal Hill and Patterson Park.

Looking at a percent change of all three datasets joined together, there has been an increase in houses selling in most of the neighborhoods.

Upon closer look into the Inner Harbor & Federal Hill neighborhood, it seems that this is an ideal set-up for home ownership because of its historic landmark and cultural distinctions, which are determined by city leadership. These sites are not only tourist attractions, but also in view of Baltimore’s waterfront, which is usually a site of revitalization and then the displacement of surrounding communities for new communities.

Upon closer look into the Patterson Park neighborhood, there are also some historic landmark distinctions, but there is the park itself. Patterson Park spans mostly the neighboring Canton area (also a popular neighborhood for new urban dwellers) and into the actual Patterson Park neighborhood. While public spaces like this park should be more inclusive spaces, they are sites of greenwashing and then of suburbanizing urban spaces, catered to a certain type of incoming community.

This is only a piece of further analyses and of a larger ongoing project. The analysis above shows the priorities of policing and abandonment in seemingly undesirable areas in Baltimore are simultaneously desirable areas for city planning, leadership, and real estate interests–a lesser known but actual narrative of ongoing injustice, rather than the sensationalized narrative of a city’s response to one event of injustice.