A curfew and the National Guard stopped the rioting in Baltimore that left parts of city destroyed and put tensions between police and the black community front and center.  As the dust settled, residents, politicians and opinion writers were left to dissect what the spasm of violence, sparked by the death of Freddie Gray while in police custody, was really all about.

The editorial board of the city’s leading news organization questioned the quality of the leadership during the crisis.

Who’s In Charge?

The Editorial Board – The Baltimore Sun

Baltimoreans woke this morning saddened and unsettled by the wanton destruction that engulfed much of the city the night before … People needed the reassurance of strong city leadership, and they didn’t get it.

As Baltimore spun out of control Monday afternoon and evening, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake was nowhere to be seen for hours. When she did emerge for televised news conferences, her demeanor was calm to the point of being flat and expressionless.

The police officers who tried to restore calm Monday night were placed in an awful and dangerous position … But we can question whether the police leadership has done more to reassure the public or to terrify it … police urged the media to disseminate the message that the department’s Criminal Intelligence Unit had received “credible information” that the Black Guerilla Family, Bloods and Crips gangs had teamed up to “take out” law enforcement officers … Even if the threat was genuine, what purpose was served by alerting the public?

One columnist framed the crisis as self-defeating violence, denouncing commentary that he wrote amounted to a defense of the rioters.

The Riots In Baltimore Aren’t Revolutionary

 W. James Antle III – The Daily Caller

Many quoted John F. Kennedy saying, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” Variations of Martin Luther King’s “A riot is the language of the unheard” were also repeated frequently.

Freddie Gray’s killing may well have been unjust and part of a broader pattern of law enforcement lawlessness in communities of color, just as Martin Luther King’s murder was surely unjust and part of Jim Crow’s last gasps. But the riots that followed the latter did nothing to improve those communities or lift their residents out of poverty …

Instead, the riots accelerated the trends collapsing Baltimore’s tax base and perpetuated the cycle of violence. Gray’s neighborhood has a 52 percent unemployment rate among those aged 16 to 64, which cannot be solved by trashing a shoe store or burning down a CVS.

Goodbye to Freddie Gray and Goodbye to Quietly Accepting Injustice

Michael Eric Dyson – The New York Times

A predictable question trails closely behind their actions, a question that always reappears like the ghost of riots past, asking, simply, why are they destroying their own neighborhoods and setting their futures on fire? … It should be asked, however, not in anger, but with compassionate curiosity. Because the truth is as ugly as the facts that fuel riots: Without a brick tossed or a building burning, we are hardly confronting the hopelessness of the future for these young people.

The unemployment rate in the community where Mr. Gray lived is over 50 percent; the high school student absence rate hovers at 49.3 percent; and life expectancy tops out at 68.8 years, according to analysis by prison reform nonprofits. These statistics are a small glimpse of the radical inequality that blankets poor black Baltimore. It’s no wonder that black Baltimore erupted in social fury.

Baltimore’s Experience Is a Cautionary tale for Kansas City

The Editorial Board – The Kansas City Star

Our city has been proactive for years in working to avoid the kind of turmoil that is roiling Baltimore after a 25-year-old black man, Freddie Gray, died in police custody … As incidents have shown in Ferguson, Mo., Cleveland, Los Angeles and North Charleston, S.C., a sudden event can turn a city upside down in a flash.

The Police Department under Chief Darryl Forté has spent the last few years striving to improve relations with minority residents who live in central city areas most affected by high murder and violent crime rates … Forté, the city’s first black chief, rightly has pointed out for years that hiring more black officers can help the department in this cause.

We can be thankful today that we are not Baltimore. But Forté, James and many others still face plenty of challenges in building faith in the Police Department and a safer, more economically healthy city.