News Brief — Baltimore Uprising 10 Years on: PR Co-option vs. Genuine Reform
Citations Needed | May 7, 2025 | Transcript
[Music]
Nima Shirazi: Welcome to a Citations Needed News Brief. I am Nima Shirazi.
Adam Johnson: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: You can follow Citations Needed on Twitter and Bluesky @citationspod, Facebook Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. All your support through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated, as we are 100% listener funded. We do these News Briefs in between our regularly scheduled full-length episodes of Citations Needed. And today, we are so thrilled to have a couple guests, reporters from The Real News Network, Taya Graham and Stephen Janis. So we’ll be bringing them on in just a moment, because today, we’re going to discuss the recent 10th anniversary of the death of Freddie Gray.
Freddie Gray died on April 19, 2015, after suffering severe injuries to his spinal cord while in police custody in Baltimore. Now a new documentary from The Real News Network entitled Freddie Gray: A Decade of Struggle reflects upon the past 10 years since the police killing of Freddie Gray, and we are so thrilled that we can speak today to the reporters behind the documentary, as I said, Taya Graham and Stephen Janis. Taya and Stephen are both award-winning investigative reporters and hosts of the Real News Network’s Police Accountability Report. Taya is also producer and co-creator of the award-winning podcast Truth and Reconciliation on Baltimore’s NPR affiliate, WYPR, and Stephen has co authored several books on policing corruption and the root causes of violence, including Why Do We Kill? The Pathology of Murder in Baltimore, and You Can’t Stop Murder: Truths About Policing in Baltimore and Beyond. Taya and Stephen, thank you so much for joining us today on Citations Needed.
Stephen Janis: Thank you so much for having us. We appreciate it.
Taya Graham: Absolutely. Thank you both.
Adam: I want to start off by, because I think the reason why this documentary is, well, there’s a ton that’s really interesting in it, but I think, it’s been 10 years since Freddie Gray, which I really think was kind of the, I don’t want to say the peak, or the kind of height, of some of the uprisings post-Michael Brown. And then you had, obviously, George Floyd in 2020 and you had the reaction to that. And now, kind of 10 years on, we can take, I don’t want to turn this into a struggle session, but maybe we can take some of the lessons that were useful and the lessons that were not useful, and kind of think about it, because it does feel like both a million years ago and also 10 minutes ago at the same time. And I think that one thing that’s documented as well as it struggles with those questions in a more, maybe more localized way, in terms of Baltimore, but so many of the different themes are relevant to Chicago, Ferguson, St. Louis, New York, and Jacksonville or Dallas, right?
So I want to talk about the ways in which you use the Freddie Gray lens and his killing and the subsequent uprisings after that, and of course, that spread to other cities and dealt with the issues of police abuse and systemic racism and all that. And then in 2020, I think the demands got more radical for very good reason, because, as we’ve talked about to death on this show, reform became this way of just giving more money to the police somehow. Talk about why you wanted to make this documentary, why you think it’s urgent now, and what sort of lessons can be gleaned from both the early weeks and months of the uprisings to the present.
Stephen Janis: Well, I think one of the things that we wanted to comprehend or understand or kind of wrestle with was something that had been a fact in Baltimore for decades, and that I covered, which is that Baltimore, like many cities, had been addicted to policing as a solution to poverty and long term-structural inequities, and Freddie Gray was kind of a reckoning with that. Now, prior to Freddie Gray, we had had seven years of some of the most intense policing in the history of this country, which would be Baltimore’s failed experiment with Zero Tolerance policing, where 100,000 residents were arrested year in and year out through the aughts. And I covered it, and it was an extremely intense and horrifying experiment with using militarized policing in poor Black neighborhoods, which of course, the consent decree and the investigation by the Department of Justice eventually brought to life, but that I reported on.
During that period of time, policing became the predominant industry in Baltimore, and policing became the predominant so-called solution for the problems that Baltimore faced, which was, you know, endemic poverty and other social ills. So when Freddie Gray happened, it was like, for once, we looked at that through a critical lens, and it was a time and a period, sort of a breaking-off point where it just started, now this has only kind of come to a head now, which is what we were kind of struggling with with the documentary, but just started to question that premise that policing should predominate as a solution and as basically an industry in Baltimore. So we were basically wrestling with that and wrestling that question, had it really changed? And I think it has, but until Freddie Gray, pretty much it was accepted that the more policing, the better. And of course, the whole conditions under which Freddie Gray was arrested, where a police officer just looked at him and chased him, was something that was common in Baltimore for decades, and particularly under Zero Tolerance. And I know you guys have covered the Broken Windows theory, well, in Baltimore, it was applied in a way that has never been seen. I don’t think anyone’s ever seen anything like it, and certainly we covered and had a huge effect on us.
Taya Graham: Absolutely. I just wanted to add that the type of unconstitutional and, frankly, racist policing that Baltimore residents experienced on an everyday basis, I don’t think people outside of Baltimore could really understand. So I lived in one of these neighborhoods that was considered a high-crime neighborhood, and on a regular basis, when I was taking the bus to work or school, I could not leave the house without my driver’s license, because I knew at any time I could be stopped by a police officer and asked who I was, where I was going, where I’d been, and do I belong there? And that was the experience of a lot of residents in these neighborhoods, and the Zero Tolerance policing that Stephen’s describing, people would be arrested for expectorating, or spitting on a sidewalk, or having an open container of beer while sitting on the stoop of their own home, or, of course, loitering, which means you didn’t get off the corner fast enough while you were talking to your friends. And so this type of erosion of our constitutional rights every day, I have to admit, I didn’t even understand how wrong it was. It’s just something I lived under. And for that type of policing to finally be exposed to the nation, it was so important, and I think we did finally get some meaningful reforms. But things aren’t perfect yet.
Adam: So let’s talk about the positive. Because I think one common thing people hear is they say, Oh, all we got out of the George Floyd uprisings and the Ferguson uprisings in 2014, 2015 was we renamed some streets. Now, I know in Chicago, that’s not really true, because the county population of Cook County, for example, is half of what it was 10 years ago. So there were reforms that actually did have material results, albeit, again, very limited. But you say there were real reforms, you say this in the documentary, can we talk about the good that came out of it, that you feel actually as an improvement over 10 years ago?
Stephen Janis: Well, there are two things, and as I said before, the addiction to policing, which was called in question. But the first thing was that Maryland was one of the first states to have a law-enforcement officers’ bill of rights, which gave law-enforcement officers special protections under the law, and that was actually rolled back in the Maryland legislature shortly after George Floyd’s death. But I think the biggest thing was that this idea that policing is somehow connected to a safer, more productive city, the spell was finally broken over time. It took a lot of time, because it didn’t happen immediately after Freddie Gray. But I think a lot of political leaders learned their lesson about just deciding that unleashing police upon a citizenry is somehow going to make a city safer or effectively improve a city, I think that spell was broken. I think it’s because there was so much attention and focus on the city and political careers were ended for people who had embraced it. For example, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, who was the mayor during Freddie Gray, prior to that, we would bring as reporters, or at least I would, evidence of police brutality, and she would just laugh it off. Well, no one laughs it off anymore. And then similarly, community programs were embraced in the legislature, like Safe Streets and now the Gun Violence Reduction Initiative, things that were community-based solutions to violence, which have actually led to less homicides. Right now, we had five homicides in April in Baltimore, which is a record, and none of this was achieved with a police department, because the police department is actually down between 500 and 1,000 officers. So we have this, I guess, recognition that we never had before, that somehow using police to deal with violence is not the way to do it, but rather community-based programs.
Taya Graham: And the one thing I would add to that is when the Department of Justice did their investigation and told the nation that we had unconstitutional and racist policing practices in Baltimore, one of the first things they did when they put our city under consent decree was they gave the Baltimore City Police Department $10 million and I said to myself, Okay, here we go again. The police department messes up, and the first thing they do is hand them a bunch of money. It was something we had seen again and again in our city. But this time, they ensured that these officers actually put on those body cameras and turned them on. And although you’ve both done really good reporting showing that body cameras don’t necessarily alter the patterns of officers, what they do, for sure, is they help with accountability, and I’ve seen the body-camera footage used again and again to finally get people justice. Now, it might not have prevented the brutality, it might not have prevented the violation of their rights, but it did help people get justice.
Stephen Janis: Yeah. I mean, like for Ethan Newberg, who was caught on body-camera footage in the new body-camera review program by the City State’s Attorney’s Office, which never existed before. This was under Marilyn Mosby. He had made like, nine illegal arrests, where he just arrested people for no reason. Very reminiscent of Zero Tolerance, right?
Taya Graham: But the thing I have to emphasize is that the body camera review unit reviewed only six months of this Sergeant’s footage. And within that six months, he ended up, for his actions, being charged with 32 acts of misconduct in office. And I reviewed, I fought for that body-camera footage.
Nima: And that’s only from six months.
Taya Graham: Just from six months. And he had nearly 24 years on the force.
Stephen Janis: 24 years, yeah.
Taya Graham: That’s right. So who knows how this officer had been violating rights in my community for over two decades? And the way he bullied and acted like such a petty tyrant in those neighborhoods, you had to see it with your own eyes to believe it. And so even though he cost people their jobs, he cost people their freedom, they were eventually able to get some form of justice, and he was removed from the department.
Stephen Janis: And that’s a positive note. What we learned covering that case was that that was pretty much standard fare for the Baltimore Police Department. It’s how the arrest of Freddie Gray was effectuated, you know, just he saw someone, and the officer decided to be a tyrant and chase him down for no reason. Had not committed a crime, no probable cause. But that stuff, I think, has been curtailed. I think there’s been a positive outcome. And I think now that we have lower homicides and less police, Baltimore can be a poster child for saying, this idea that we need more and more police and we need to put more and more funds to police, you can’t make that case here in the city. And I think that’s a major breakthrough, and that’s a positive.
Nima: So let’s actually go back 10 years. I know we kind of jumped right into this conversation, and I want to make sure that everyone listening has all the right context. Can you talk to us about the spring of 2015, and about the uprisings in Baltimore, but also maybe some of the media narratives that preceded them, and how this extreme version of policing was kind of seeded already throughout the city. Obviously, this is seen across the country, and has been for decades. But some of the kind of antecedents to then what we saw 10 years ago, and then what actually happened in the case of Freddie Gray?
Stephen Janis: Yeah. I mean, I think the antecedents are the idea that this proactive, aggressive, sort of, I mean, Martin O’Malley, who was then mayor in the aughts before Freddie Gray, and Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, who was the mayor during Freddie Gray, all sort of believed in this aggressive, proactive policing. That policing could prevent violence by being proactive in neighborhoods. We had a variety of specialized units, which is very different from what you see in a standard police department. They don’t work in police uniforms. They wear jeans and t-shirts and drive around in unmarked cars and jump out. They were known as the ‘jump-out boys’ in some neighborhoods, where they would just jump out in a predominantly poor African American neighborhood and just put people in the back of a van who hadn’t committed a crime.
I mean, we had in Baltimore City, during the aughts, during the height of Zero Tolerance, prosecutors invented this idea called “abated by arrest,” where someone would be just dragged into a van, and there were no sustainable charges or probable cause, so the prosecutors should drop the charges under the auspices of abated by arrest, which really isn’t anything that applies to our legal system. So this type of idea, but here’s what’s important about it, it wasn’t just the process itself. It’s the basically political economy it created, because Baltimore City was pumping most of its money into policing. It was double what we would spend on education of the program. So Baltimore City was run like a police town. It was, police was the biggest business. Anyone who visits Baltimore can drive down to our Central Booking, which is in the middle of the city, which is this huge, huge center for processing arrests. It was built to process 40,000 a year, and during Zero Tolerance, it was processing 100,000 to the extent that people would get what’s known as a walkthrough, where they would just be walked through, because there just wasn’t room for anybody, because they’ve been arresting so many people.
So we’d had 15, 20 years of this type of policing, and I think the public was accustomed to it, and so when Freddie Gray occurred, we got to see, you know, how that worked in one person’s life, which was he was standing on a corner. A police major, I can’t remember his name, had been sleeping at the western district headquarters, got up with a bunch of five or six officers and bikes and just started chasing people. And one of them was Freddie Gray. They chased him to the Gilmor Homes housing project, where then that’s when you pick up and you see him dragged into a van. And of course, then they later, at a second stop, hogtie him and throw him in the back of the van. And then that is when the medical examiner says that the fatal injury occurred. But the cruelty of it, and the capriciousness of it, was something that didn’t, I wrote a lot of stories about it, but it didn’t really resonate, because there was such a support industry for the industry of policing. So it’s very difficult.
Taya Graham: I just wanted to add that we cannot ignore the role that our local media played in this narrative that policing was the solution. Our young people were consistently referred to as gang members, as thugs, as delinquents. People’s mugshots were printed. And if someone was arrested and their mugshot was printed, and let’s say they were later cleared of this arrest, there wasn’t an update in that newspaper later. And just as an example, Stephen did an incredible story on a seven-year-old named Gerard Mungo, who was arrested for sitting on his father’s dirt bike parked outside of his home. Now, the details of why the arrest occurred, there’s a, I think, a very strong theory that–
Stephen Janis: It came out in the lawsuit.
Taya Graham: Well, it came out in the lawsuit. The officer was simply annoyed with the mother talking back to him about the bike. But the fact is, is that when Stephen wrote the story about a seven-year-old being alone by themselves in the middle of Central Booking, having their wrists be so small that they couldn’t cuff him properly, being scared and crying, people wrote in and said, That little thug is just a drug mule in the making. The environment was so toxic around our young people, that the role of the media really cannot be ignored here.
Stephen Janis: Yeah. And, I mean, we’re one of several cities that has a Juvenile Justice Center, which is also a bad sign for a city. We’re a city to process juveniles. I mean, it’s a facility to process juveniles. And we took a tour of it, and it’s like they have these huge pens where they’re just herding young people and put them in, sort of, yeah, it’s, it’s pretty–
Taya Graham: Bleak.
Stephen Janis: So this is what preceded Freddie Gray, in the sense that we had built up this infrastructure of policing that was absolutely unconstitutional and downright authoritarian. And it had been accepted because the media had, I think, in many ways, cooperated with it.
Taya Graham: In some cases, the media was literally embedded with the police department.
Stephen Janis: Yeah. Yeah.
Taya Graham: I mean, Peter Hermann, and before David Simon made The Wire, he was embedded with the police department as well, and they were part of telling those narratives of the police being heroic and our city simply being out of control.
Adam: Let’s talk a bit about the purge narrative, which you’d cover. I wrote about it at the time, which, God, I’m getting old.
[Laughter]
And I was like, That was 10 years ago? God damn. On the day of Freddie Gray’s funeral, there was worries of social unrest, I guess, for want of a better term, and the days leading up to it, and especially the early-morning hours, there was full-blown coverage, Baltimore Sun, local media, talking about this purge, which the media coverage itself fueled the narrative in this very, it’s textbook moral panic. Nobody knew where the supposed flyer came from, or what the origins was, people were sharing it both, very much ironically, but that was seen as being promoting it. It took on this kind of hysterical narrative that led to the closure of public transportation in Baltimore the day after, on or around the time people were getting out of school. And if anyone knows anything about Baltimore, and correct me if I’m wrong, it’s a very charter-heavy system where, and magnet-school-heavy system where people don’t necessarily live close to their school, so the kids there need public transportation to get home. So it’s not like you can just sort of walk home. You actually need to take the bus.
Stephen Janis: Yeah, we don’t have school buses the way, normal, like the county does, for example. Yeah, very true.
Adam: Exactly. So this basically stranded the children at these large hubs where they were kind of quarantined by cops. And then this led to, I want to go home. Can you let me go home? This led to unrest, and then, therefore that kind of reinforced the purge narrative. And there were some investigations into what happened. I guess, to this day we don’t even know who actually shut down public transportation. Nobody’s taken ownership of it, but it really, what that whole episode did is it showed this idea of preemptive guilt, like you talked about how they’re kind of a drug mule in the making. There’s this idea that Black youth are kind of written off and forgotten about, and I don’t want to analogize it too much, but it’s almost the way that Palestinians were talked about as kind of proto-terrorists, who are just dehumanized, and the government’s role is to kind of corral them and put them in cages. And it sort of was this microcosm of a specific moment. Can you talk about the “purge,” quote-unquote, and what you think that says about the ways in which Black people are discussed in Baltimore media and national media?
Stephen Janis: There are two things operating here. Like I said before, we have a Juvenile Justice Center, which is unusual. Not a lot of cities have a dedicated youth-processing facility. But also what you hit on, which I think was huge, and I don’t know if people appreciate it, but Baltimore City Police Department, as its influence grew, it also created a huge public-relations propaganda machine inside of it. One of the things I used to report about that was very controversial is, this is how much they value it, the head of PR for them, their spokesperson, was given a badge as a major, or a gold badge, and used to really upset the officers, but it showed how pivotal they thought telling their story and creating these narratives of criminality, mass criminality, was so essential to their existence, and it was basically monetized.
So the whole, leading up to this, we had covered documents from juvenile booking that showed that they were arresting kids who wouldn’t get on the bus, for example, if they didn’t get on a certain bus, they would arrest them. If a kid got off a bus, they would arrest them. This was a constant practice of trying to create this perception that young children were actually part of the perpetrators of Baltimore’s abject failure or crime. And so, along with parallel to the system that was arresting 100,000 adults, they had a juvenile system that was just as punitive, but they also had a PR system. And you know, another rumor that came out that was just as baseless as you uncovered, was a rumor that gang members had threatened to kill police officers, and that became another story. So there’s this constant cycle, and what the police were doing were trying to, I think at that point, evade responsibility, because they knew that they had screwed up, and they were trying to come up with a narrative again, to say, Look, no matter what we do as police, all of it is justified, because this is a criminal city. Our children are criminals, our adults are criminals, and we can do whatever we want, and just because Freddie Gray died in a van doesn’t mean we weren’t doing the right thing. And I think they firmly believe that, and they would pay people a lot of money to sow those stories, like the one that you showed was so fraudulent, and it’s a horrifying thing. I mean, it really was. We were paying millions of dollars a year as taxpayers have people throw stories back at us about how horrible we all were.
Taya Graham: The piece that I have to say, the media narrative again once cannot be ignored. I mean, other than Adam and Mother Jones, there was no pushback against the idea that there had been some sort of planned purge. And I believe it was Kevin Davis and our mayor, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, they actually created a ‘war room’ in 2015, they chose that terminology, to deal with crime and homicide in our city right after the death of Freddie Gray. So think about what that means, calling it a war room when our city is crying out for help and for justice and simply asking to stop being brutalized.
Stephen Janis: And just for geographical note, this all happened at Mondawmin Mall, which was a mass-transit center, had a subway, buses, where all the kids kind of had to feed through to get back to their homes, and they closed it all down. And, Adam, you’re correct. No one has ever–
Taya Graham: No one’s ever owned up to it.
Stephen Janis: We’ve never known who made the decision to close it down. That was pretty key.
Nima: I mean, all of this just continues to paint the police as the ultimate victims of violence or threat directed against them, which then, as you said, Stephen and Taya, you know, it kind of perpetuates the idea that the city itself, the people of Baltimore, especially the Black people of Baltimore, are the ultimate threat. Now we’ve been talking about different aspects of the story, and this amazing documentary that you put together, which I think you break out in kind of seven different chapters, which is a really effective way to tell the story, like the economics of it, the uprising, what preceded it, what does the future look like. I’d like to dig into one aspect of this, which is, yes, you talk about the media and you talk about real estate interests. And I’d love to kind of combine the two in a question here. Where in Baltimore, do those two things intersect? And kind of, what does that mean for the, not only the way that power operates, but then what stories we are told, and why? So, again, how do the media and real estate operate together in the city of Baltimore?
Stephen Janis: This is what we call the narrative of a failed city, and the essential part of that is telling the tale over and over again of Baltimore somehow unworthy or not worthy of being treated fairly or having equitable economic gains for the city. So where it intersects, I would say, like, and I don’t know if Taya would disagree with me, is it a place called Harbor East, which is a luxury 20-acre development right on the water, which has luxury apartments, upscale dining, entertainment. It’s really quite an active place. But what’s really interesting about it is that it is controlled in part by the same family, which is the Paterakis and the Smith family, that controls Fox 45 and Sinclair Broadcasting, which is a rightwing broadcaster. Now, just to understand the failed city, the way the failed city narrative works is you have, you overspend on policing for decades, so police become sort of the predominant narrators of the city’s story. And then at the same time, while the city is failing, well, of course, we have to give tax breaks and incentives to rich people to build you because no one, no one would want to come here. Why would anyone want to be here? This is a horrible city full of criminals.
Nima: Make it worth rich people’s while.
Stephen Janis: Exactly. So these narratives work very well together. So the failed city, and then, of course, I’ll use the term white knights, because they’re all white, and they come in the city, and they build these huge developments, with a caveat, which is it that they have to tax breaks. Now, we did an investigation, because the city does not disclose this information, and we found that this development, Harbor East, owned by Sinclair Broadcasting family members, who are interrelated by marriage, got about $110 million in tax breaks in just 10 years. So $110 million in taxes they don’t have to spend to build upscale, luxury apartments. At the same time, Fox 45 is running these stories called “City in Crisis” and “Project Baltimore” that makes the city look absolutely dysfunctional. And so you can’t just have a self-serving narrative. And I wrote a story about it, and I talked about my own role in it, because I worked at Sinclair in the early ’10s, how I didn’t even know any of this stuff. But really it’s kind of a beautiful thing. You can sit there and weaken the city, and then come in and say, Well, we need these tax breaks to build these luxury apartments and make tons of money. We did a documentary, investigative documentary, called Tax Broke about this, where we told this story. But it’s kind of amazing that they’ve been able to really get away with this in many ways, because it’s entirely self-serving,
Taya Graham: Absolutely. I mean, this is a prime piece of East Coast waterfront, and yet, they got this incredible tax break. And what this tax increment financing allows them to do is that these property taxes that should be put in the pot that is used by the city for everything from Parks and Rec to education or even the police budget, instead, they’re able to take that and reinvest it. Can you imagine, as a homeowner, if you could take the projected property taxes based off of how you think the value of your property is going to increase, and you’re given that money so that you can reinvest it into the property? That sounds like a pretty nice deal, and it is for these wealthy developers. And so right after the death of Freddie Gray, our city gave away one of the biggest tax breaks in the history of the state, if not the country, almost $600 million, to Port Covington, to build out Port Covington, this sort of isolated area that’s difficult to reach if you live in the city and don’t have a car. And they gave it to Kevin Plank of Under Armour, the CEO, billionaire CEO of Under Armour, apparently, he needed that $600 million tax break to build out essentially, a little private peninsula for a group of very wealthy people with amenities that your average person in the city would never have access to.
Stephen Janis: And the irony of it is, you know, there was just a report that almost 80% of all apartments built in Baltimore because of these tax breaks are luxury or not affordable for the residents who subsidize them. And that’s just to me, like, a very perverse economic program, to literally make people who can’t afford it subsidize something they can’t afford. But that’s kind of what the structure of the system that we built here is. It’s extractive, is what it is.
Adam: Yeah, I wrote about this for The Appeal, I think, in 2018. The relationship between, especially the kind of the grosser Sinclair broadcasting, which is almost kind of cartoonishly pro-real estate, anti-Black. I mean, it’s but it’s still very prominent. I mean, it’s still, you know, a major, the most popular sort of local news, the ways in which it basically serves as a vanguard for gentrification. I know people have written obscure PhD theses on this. You can kind of show how demagoguing crime correlates with real-estate interests moving into certain areas.
Stephen Janis: I would love to read that actually, because that’s, we’ve been on the front row seat of that.
Adam: In August of 2020, we had on a guest, an assistant professor of sociology from the University of Colorado, Denver, named Brenden Beck, who showed the correlation between, in his field work, the correlation between gentrification and both police and media driving narratives of out-of-control crime, which makes sense, because, again, real estate interests, especially in certain cities, especially in Baltimore, own the media, and they own the real estate. And gentrification is a great investment. You can get 200, 300, 400% returns. So if you need to go in there and crack some skulls, to them, what difference does it make? Especially if they put it in this kind of sanitized ‘cleaning up the city’ language that makes it seem like you’re sort of taking out refuse, right?
Stephen Janis: Yeah, one of the things that people don’t realize about Taya was talking about a TIF, which is tax increment finance, which is one of the widely-used financial mechanisms for these types of deals that are precipitated by this media coverage. And what happens is that, as she said, you get 30 years of, in Baltimore specifically, some cities are different, but you get like, 30 years of property tax payments up front. But what is often missed in this is these are financed by Wall Street, so they come with very high interest rates because these bonds are not backed by the entire full faith and credit of Baltimore City, just for the specific area. So sometimes we found the interest rates on basis points are three times higher for these bonds. But what that means, like in a Kevin Plank scenario, the $600 million TIF becomes a $1.2 billion TIF, and that’s $600 million of interest that goes to Wall Street out of the city’s general fund, one of the poorest jurisdictions in the state, has sort of committed hundreds of millions of dollars of interest to Wall Street. So it doesn’t just benefit Sinclair, and it doesn’t just benefit the real estate, it benefits Wall Street. And you’re talking about an extremely poor city. So these TIFs are extremely expensive. These financing mechanisms are very expensive. And it leaves the city in a tremendous amount of debt.
Taya Graham: And it once again, it places the burden on the Baltimore City resident. So just imagine the Marriott Waterfront Hotel, they have a pilot, which is a payment in lieu of taxes, another form of tax subsidy. They pay $1 a year in taxes. That is what they pay. And a grandma living on Pennsylvania Avenue pays around $3,000 a year in property taxes to maintain her home, trying to hold on to generational wealth for her family. So you see how not only is Wall Street benefiting, these wealthy developers are benefiting, but once again, the burden of supporting the city is put on the backs of the people who actually need support and help.
Stephen Janis: Yeah.
Nima: Yeah. I want to talk, just for a moment, about the process of even kind of revisiting this story. I mean, not that it’s gone away, but in the way that you have through this documentary, again, Freddie Gray: A Decade of Struggle, which was produced by The Real News Network, and would love to just hear from you, Stephen and Taya, about the process of connecting with the organizers, the residents, the teachers, activists, you know, and really lifting up their voices, right? Because so much of what we talk about on Citations Needed is about whose voices are privileged, right? Who do we get to hear from, whose stories are told? And so I’d love to hear from you both, just about revisiting this story in your own city and connecting with those people that lived it, that are still living with this, and what that was like to kind of bring their voices to the center here, where they should be all the time, but sadly, are not.
Stephen Janis: Right. Well, I think one of the things that’s great about working for The Real News is that we do not participate in that narrative of the failed city or the pro-police propaganda business, and that we had always before the uprising, been telling stories of people who felt that this was the wrong way for the city to go, felt it was unjust, felt it would not ultimately succeed. And through that process, we connected with a lot of people who don’t normally end up on, let’s say, Fox 45 or in the Baltimore Sun, like State Senator Joe Carter, or Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, which is a group that’s been fighting for police reform. It was just a natural outgrowth of our coverage because we were skeptical as reporters, and we wanted to provide context that, you know, there is another way to go about this idea of healing a community which is not pro-police and does not have to do with the hundreds of millions of dollars that the city funnels into policing.
And through that process, the people that we included were the voices that would actually complement our reporting in that sense, that they would be able to first of all, offer other solutions and offer the kind of context that we’ve discussed already about poverty and about tax breaks and about the narratives, and were willing to counter that narrative. So the people that we included were the people that we had gone to over a decade, or before that, to talk about these things because they were already talking about, every person in this documentary prior to Freddie Gray was talking about how policing, over-policing was unjust, unconstitutional, racist, whatever, and also saying that it wasn’t the proper solution.
Taya Graham: Absolutely, and I can actually give a very specific example of how the media framed and attacks activists in our community, and very specifically, Tawanda Jones. Now, Tawanda Jones is one of the women in the documentary we interviewed, and she’s an activist, and she became one when her brother Tyrone West was killed by police in 2013. And so for the past 12 years, she has been holding West Wednesdays, nonstop, hail, rain, sleet, or snow. Every Wednesday, she has been protesting to try to get justice for her brother, and she has been very active in the anti-police brutality movement, in the Black Lives Matter movement. Now, WBFF Fox 45 actually took a clip of her protesting in DC and said that she, in a chant, said, “Kill cops.” But what she’d actually said was, “Killer cops need to be put in cell blocks,” but they cut it so that it appeared that she said, “Kill a cop,” and that is how the reporter framed it on air. Well, eventually, Tawanda was able to prove in court that she was not advocating for the death of police or violence against police, but that’s just an example of the type of framing that activists would receive. So to even be spoken to or interviewed at all as an activist against police brutality was unusual in Baltimore, let alone to have your activism framed properly.
Stephen Janis: Yeah. So that’s how we came up sort of with the idea that people to have, they were people that we had talked to, interviewed, spoken to, written about over the past decade, and they were the people that really, if I were to give credit to the drop in homicides, I would give it to them. Because they were the ones who were advocating for a different path, for a community-based path. And I just want to emphasize that, because here in Baltimore, let it be known throughout the land that we reduced homicides through community, not through policing.
Taya Graham: Yeah.
Stephen Janis: And just seeing the pernicious effect of policing on the psyche and the health of this city, I hope that other cities see this and adopt this and understand it can work this way, because it’s just so important. Probably the most important lesson from the Freddie Gray uprising.
Taya Graham: Absolutely. And the proof is in the numbers. I mean, our department is down on any given day by 500 to 1,000 officers. Recruitment is nil, and yet violence has dropped dramatically in our city. So we have the proof right there that the practice of the aggressive over-policing our communities we’re receiving simply didn’t work.
Nima: Well, I think this is such an incredible story to tell, and the way that you’ve told it is so powerful. I think you know, anyone watching this documentary again, Freddie Gray: A Decade of Struggle on The Real News Network, can just see not only the power of your community and of the people, but also just the love of Baltimore. And I think that that is also a part of this, this idea you both have kept kind of returning to of, This is a failed city. This is not a place that deserves any attention, any love, any respect. And I think you’ve shown through this piece of course, that the people who make up Baltimore obviously don’t feel that way, and they’ve been fighting for their city that they love well before the uprising, and that, as you said, they are the ones that deserve the credit for everything.
Stephen Janis: They do.
Taya Graham: Yes, they really do.
Stephen Janis: For example, Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, Dayvon Love, you know, we go to Annapolis every year, which is our state capital. And they’ve been to Annapolis year in and year out, fighting for police reform, for reparations, for reforming marijuana, making sure that some of the money that’s come from our very profitable marijuana industry go back in the city. Those type of things you don’t see, and Fox 45 doesn’t usually report on them. In fact, they’ve taken a very negative attitude towards the Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle and some other efforts, like the youth fund that we created after Freddie Gray that puts a certain percentage of tax revenues into a youth fund for youth programs. But those are the things that have made the difference over time. In a police-driven narrative and the failed city narrative, those things don’t get highlighted, but those changes over time have resulted, I think, in this historic drop.
Nima: Well, it’s been so great to talk to you both. Of course, we’ve been speaking with Taya Graham and Stephen Janis, both award-winning investigative journalists and hosts of The Real News Network’s Police Accountability Report. Taya is also producer and co-creator of the award-winning podcast Truth and Reconciliation on Baltimore’s NPR affiliate, WYPR, and Stephen has co-authored several books on policing, corruption, and the root causes of violence, including Why Do We Kill? The Pathology of Murder in Baltimore, and You Can’t Stop Murder: Truths About Policing in Baltimore and Beyond. Stephen and Taya, thank you so much for joining us today on Citations Needed.
Stephen Janis: Thank you so much for having me. It was a real honor and a pleasure.
Taya Graham: Absolutely. Thank you both so much.
Nima: And that will do it for this, Citations Needed News Brief. Of course, you can follow the show on Twitter and Bluesky @citationspod, Facebook Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. All your support through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated, as we are 100% listener funded. We will be back very soon with more full-length episodes and other News Briefs of Citations Needed. So stay tuned for those. But until then, thank you all for listening. I am Nima Shirazi.
Adam: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: Citations Needed’s senior producer is Florence Barrau-Adams. Producer is Julianne Tveten. Production assistant is Trendel Lightburn. The newsletter is by Marco Cartolano. The music is by Grandaddy. Thanks again for listening, everyone. We’ll catch you next time.
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This Citations Needed News Brief was released on Wednesday, May 7, 2025.
