Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake (AFRO File Photo)

“If you want to have your kid run amok 24 hours a day, go live out on a farm somewhere,” said Baltimore City Mayor Stephanie Rawlings Blake, in a clip aired on Fox 45 News in May 2014.

The context was a heated public debate over an expanded curfew measure being considered at the time by the Baltimore City Council.  The mayor supported the idea, but many residents were concerned that the bill, which sought to make Baltimore’s already existing curfew more strict, would lead to increased engagements between young people and a police force seen as overly aggressive and often abusive.

Stephen Janis, who wrote the news story about the mayor’s comment for Fox 45 while an investigative producer there (he is now with the Real News Network in Baltimore), says that some in the community “considered to be dismissive of the complexity of what it means to try to raise a kid in a city like Baltimore,” based on social media reaction to his story, though there were also those who lauded the mayor for calling out irresponsible parents.

As Rawlings-Blake’s use of the term “thugs” to describe those engaged in looting during the April 27 riot continues to ring in the ears of many Baltimoreans, last year’s ‘go live on a farm’ episode is illustrative of the political challenge the mayor currently faces as she seeks to show that she is not as disconnected from the community as she has appeared over the last couple months.

The mayor’s ‘thug’ comment, much like her ‘go live on a farm’ comment, reduced a fairly complex issue to a stereotypical soundbite.  At the northwest corner of the intersection of W. North Ave. and N. Fulton Ave. on April 27, as mostly young looters were breaking into nearby businesses, this is how one community member, Cory Clarke described the rioting that was taking place to the AFRO:

“These , from the street perspective, these are our street soldiers, letting the voices be heard.  And the people that can’t speak, and don’t want to do stuff like this, and can’t do stuff like this because they have a prior life to live, the speakers .”

The mayor’s ‘thug’ comment the next day suggested she had not heard those voices, and worse, aligned her with the sort of law and order perspective that had long cultivated an environment where police action was insulated from accountability to the community.

In some ways, though, the mayor was simply using tried and true political rhetoric (President Barack Obama had made essentially the same comment regarding the looters), employing language that seemed an attempt to draw a dividing line between the community and those who were engaged in acts of property theft and destruction.  But, as Clarke’s comment suggests, some in the community see no such line, and view those young men as part and parcel to the community, not an element that stands apart and in opposition to it.

Rawlings-Blake’s failure to perceive that has become a political stumbling block, and lately she has seemed to be making a concerted effort to show that the alleged disconnect between her and the community is more perception than reality, going on neighborhood watches (granted, during daylight hours), and even making appearances at places like barber shops.

Dr. John Bullock, a professor of political science at Towson University and a political analyst, thinks the mayor still has a fair bit of ground to cover.

“ still seem distant to some, but I think she’s trying to make those overtures to show that there’s more to her than just the law enforcement and calling people ‘thugs,’” said Bullock.

And in fairness to Rawlings-Blake, she has hardly been a strictly law and order mayor, in contrast to someone like Martin O’Malley, who introduced zero tolerance policing to the city.  In 2012, Rawlings-Blake hired Baltimore Police Commissioner Anthony Batts specifically with an eye toward implementing more community policing.

Though many feel she arrived late on the issue, the workgroup Rawlings-Blake put together in the last quarter of 2014 to study and make recommendations regarding the implementation of a police-worn body camera program was a serious and deliberate effort that moved rather quickly as far as municipal initiatives go.

But the deliberateness has been part of the problem.  Months after the workgroup released its recommendations, the Baltimore Police are not equipped with cameras and the city is recovering from riots sparked by the death of a man—Freddie Gray—as a result of injuries sustained while in police custody.

It also does not help that just weeks before Freddie Gray’s death, the city had moved forward with residential water shut-offs for persons with delinquent accounts, putting the mayor at odds with those concerned that the city was targeting poor and vulnerable residents while ignoring wealthier, commercial customers who also were significantly in arrears with respect to their water payments (as of April 16, just three days before Freddie Gray died from his injuries, the city had shut off 350 residences—with 132 being restored after working out a payment of some sort—and zero commercial customers, despite a new policy of shutting off water to both commercial and residential accounts).

This fueled a perception that the mayor is aloof to the difficult realities faced by many Baltimoreans while allowing well-heeled businesses operate outside the same parameters residents are forced to (if it sounds a lot like the complaint that police are held to a different standard than residents when it comes to violent behavior, that is because they are closely related complaints).

In part, the tension between many in the community and the mayor comes down to a tension between the need to develop the city economically and improve its public safety.  Many in the community see Baltimore’s public safety issues as a function of its lack of economic opportunities, especially for Black men.

But in an interview last January with the AFRO, Rawlings-Blake argued that, as mayor, she cannot pursue that logic from a policy standpoint.

“As the mayor, I don’t have the luxury of having that debate , I have to do both, work to create jobs and make the city safer.  I know that if I don’t continue to make the city safer—and it’s made a lot of progress—I won’t see the amount of growth that I’d like to see, and whatever growth we see won’t be sustained.  So you have to continue to push on the public safety front.  You also have to, at the same time, work to spur development, investment, and to create jobs,” said Rawlings-Blake.

That calculation has made it more difficult for the mayor to distance herself from law enforcement, which in turn has made many in the community feel like she is on ‘the other side’, as reflected by a comment given by India Bell to the AFRO during a Freddie Gray demonstration on April 23.

“ should be out here with us, supporting her people, the people that voted her in,” said Bell.

ralejandro@afro.com