BALTIMORE — AT the moment, what’s going on in Baltimore seems to be all about Freddie Gray, the 25-year-old black man who was viciously attacked by police officers on April 12 more or less because he looked at them. They subdued him; his spine was nearly severed, his voice box was smashed and he was hauled off in a police van, even after he requested medical attention multiple times. He died a week later as result.

But it’s not only about Freddie Gray. Like him, I grew up in Baltimore, and I and everyone I know have similar stories, even if they happened to end a little differently. To us, the Baltimore Police Department is a group of terrorists, funded by our tax dollars, who beat on people in our community daily, almost never having to explain or pay for their actions. It’s gotten to the point that we don’t call cops unless we need a police report for an insurance claim.

And it’s about more than just the cops. We’ve watched as Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, in conjunction with Police Commissioner Anthony W. Batts, spent over a week investigating what appears to be an open-and-shut case. I’d like to think that if I broke a person’s neck for no reason, I’d be charged in minutes. But the system — even when it’s run by a black mayor and a black commissioner, even when a majority of the City Council is black — protects the police, no matter how blatant and brutal they are.

I can easily skip right past the cases of innocent victims of police brutality who received a combined amount of nearly $6 million in settlements from the city over the last three years, or Tyrone West, Anthony Anderson, Freddie Gray and the more than 100 people killed by local police officers in the last decade, and dive straight into some of the random experiences I’ve had with cops because I’m black in Baltimore.