While in Baltimore City, Maryland, death and despair are a few things that are plentiful as the region descends into chaos. Deindustrialization coupled with depopulation started in the 1960s stripping the city of economic wealth. Many don’t want to admit, the city is shrinking as their looking glass is clouded with Kevin Plank’s gentrification narrative.

Wealth inequality in the area is some of the widest in the United States with more than 100,000 African Americans with zero dollars to their name, according to JPM. Baltimore is a skeleton of what it once was many decades ago when it had its industries.

Now, 46,800 homes are vacant– almost 16% of the housing stock as citizens are either leaving the area or being pushed into multi-family complexes by the city. Neighborhoods are rotting away as the local economy crumbles giving way to a surge in homicides. Baltimore is on track for the worse year ever with a homicide rate the highest in the United States.

Baltimore is home to about 615,000 people, but the city has more homicides than New York or Los Angeles, both of which have far larger populations. Earlier this year, Mayor Catherine Pugh called in the Federal Government in hopes to restore order. She was even quoted, “violence in the city is out of control”…

With the police department hemorrhaging officers, local community organized groups have taken to the streets in attempt to slow the momentum of out of control homicides.

The movement is called Baltimore Ceasefire and the group has held two weekend city-wide ceasefire campaigns of “Nobody Kill Anybody”… Both ceasefires have failed.

According to WSJ,

Most murder victims are African-American men, and shootings happen largely in areas where residents live surrounded by poverty, unemployment, drug addiction and crime, city police records show.

WSJ interviews Jackie Moodie, a resident of Baltimore who said

“I’m always looking around at my surroundings”.... Moodie’s 27-year old son, Sir Jamareo Moodie, was fatally shot in February. “These children are so crazy. They get on drugs, they don’t care and they have guns. This is nothing but a bunch of genocide,” she said.

According to WSJ, Moodie supports “martial law” on the streets to stop out of control homicides,

At this point she would support “martial law” on the streets. “They need it in the areas that are highly targeted as shooting zones, killing zones,” she said, noting that this month, three people were shot, one fatally, a short distance from a Northwest Baltimore police station.

In a preview of what’s to come, we reported on an incident over the weekend where the “police declared martial law” according to one citizen, after an entire neighborhood was shut down with the installation of checkpoints. The 4-5 day lockdown started late last week and ended Monday, after a police detective was executed in broad daylight.