The Daily - “Charm City,” Part 2: The Legacy of Zero-Tolerance Policing

Episode Date: June 5, 2018

Relations between the police and the community in Baltimore weren’t always so troubled. But as job loss and drugs tore through the city, the policing idea of so-called zero tolerance, transplanted from New York City, created a generation of young men with criminal records. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.This episode includes disturbing language and scenes of graphic violence.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today. Part two in our series on race and policing in Baltimore, after Freddie Gray. The story of how relations between the police and the community fell apart, told through three generations of the same family. It's Tuesday, June 5th.

Straight coat, straight coat, straight coat, straight coke. What's up B? This is the pits. And it's sickening. Straight coke, straight coke, straight coke. 24 hours people hollering what they're selling. All day, every day. All night. Sometimes you gotta turn the TV up to drown them out. Yeah, I grew up in this

neighborhood and it wasn't anything like this. It was just totally different. We had pretty flowers growing. We had clean block. It was just so much different and so much beautiful. It was really beautiful. Hello? Do you know when Mama now moved to Baltimore? Who? Your mama, girl. Oh, no, I don't know.

Oh. She's breaking eggs by me. I bet you she know. She's still in the hospital, right? No, she came home yesterday oh she did I'm scared to call her she might be like you didn't come see me and Jesus this and Jesus that

and I'm not trying to hit her ass oh you didn't ever call her no I've been busy I was line dancing and stuff and I forgot really I was going to see her today but I forgot. Really, I was going to see her today, but I forgot.

Okay, bye. She's going to give me a lecture. I want y'all to listen to this lecture. That's why I don't call her. But Jesus brought me through and he saved me. And he saved everybody. I'm going to waste this answer. saved me and he saved everybody. What voice is this? Hello?

Hey. How you feeling? I'm coming along. Oh, I'm glad. You sound like you about on deaf beat. You should hear you. You sound horrible. I was almost there, but God kept me.

Oh, you got the TV on? Yes. Turn it down. I need to ask you a few questions. Okay. Why did Mama move to Baltimore from North Carolina? I don't know. I guess she wanted to get out of North Carolina.

Did she have a job? Did she have a job? Did Mama have a job? Mama used to do hair, remember? Yeah, she did. She went to beauty school and she did hair. So it was DeVetta's mother, and that's Nook's great-grandmother, Ida Ferguson, who first moved to Baltimore in the 1940s. She grew up in North Carolina and was a descendant of slaves. Her great-grandfather was given to a woman as a wedding present.

She wanted to leave farming for a life working in the city. She got a job as a hairdresser and met her husband, who was a baker. And they had six girls. Ray Vada and Dave Vada. Two sets of twins. Vanita and Vanita.

And then two more. Gina and Mary. Everyone called them the Ferguson Six. My mama used to put little hats on our head because we were bald-headed. DeVetta was the oldest. One Christmas, all six of us got the same coat. It was a gray, fake fur coat with black bound in.

All six of us had one of those. And you can tell us we wasn't rich then, girl. We had on fur coats. And you can tell us we wasn't rich then, girl. We had on fur coats. And eventually the family saves up enough money to buy a red brick house high up on Lafayette Avenue in West Baltimore. And the neighborhoods was great. People kept the lawns clean.

Back then, the neighborhood looked like it, you and the county. People planted flowers in their little yards, in their patches. There were these block parties that people would pick up trash and keep the neighborhoods clean with these tended, pretty little garden plots and front porches and front lawns. We had bricks that we'd get out there and clean them bricks up because we knew we'd be out there that evening. It was a lot of steps. A lot of steps. And then the kitchen and the bed.

My girl be up 7 o'clock in the morning on Sunday mornings cooking chicken. Be cooking that chicken early in the morning. Yes, they was good years. Very good years, yes. Used to be so good. What was it like growing up in Baltimore as a kid? Safe. Girl, we used to sleep on the porch in the summertime.

You know how in the summertime, we used to be 80 and 90 degrees at night? We used to sleep out on the porch. Had the door opens all night. You could leave your house, leave the door open with nobody going there. It was like one big happy family. It was the 1950s and 1960s in Baltimore, and the Fergusons were part of this rising Black middle class. Our whole neighborhood

was considered middle class because we lived in a neighborhood and our parents worked and they had cars and they all, everybody had a job. Everybody had a husband. A lot of the men found work in the steel mill and the factories of the city. Let me tell you, my father had this Black 1957 Buick. A Black 1957 Buick? Mm-hmm. Was it pretty? It was gorgeous. Every Sunday, he would take us for a ride in the car.

You know, you know how you do Sunday family thing. We'd be singing in the car. We'd all be singing. Yeah, uh-huh. My father always said, if you want something, you go out and get it. You get it, and you buy it, and it's yours. You don't have nobody buy it for you or take care of you, because when that's all done, whatever they got you, it's going with them.

My parents had to work for their money, and they showed us we had to work for ours. So Nevada went out and got a job. She got a job at the public library. It was the first job she'd ever had. And she took it really, really seriously. When I first started working here, I was only making $5,000. And I thought that was a lot of money because I was 18. I was young. And I thought that was a lot of money, because I was 18, I was young.

And I've been here every since. And what was it like being a black woman and working in the library? And young. Because people with me. This is where I first started working at when I first started here. Then it changed this whole floor around. But it wasn't as pretty as it is now. This is pretty.

I want y'all to see this. There you go. Ain't it gorgeous? Look at that ceiling. It is gorgeous. Don't you feel a sense of peace just looking there, just standing here like, you can, it's like looking at a museum and all you see is peace, it just brings you peace, yeah. And sometimes I just come and stand and look at the ceiling and look at where I first started

back in the 70s. Yeah. It was the early 70s. It was a really different time from her mother. Fifty years ago today, the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution gave women the right to vote. On this anniversary, a militant minority of women's liberationists was on the streets across the country to demand equal employment for women, care centers for mothers, child abortions for anyone who wants them, and general equality between women and men. anyone who wants them, and general equality between women and men.

Particularly, we're talking about a group of black women determined, fighting black women who are aware of their responsibility to keep the fires of liberation raging. To be black and a woman is to labor under the double handicap of racism and sexism. It was a period of sexual experimentation. There was the birth control pill, and you had this real sense that things were changing in terms of social mores and what was expected of you as a woman. I was just experimenting. I was like a scientist. I just wanted to see what it was all about.

I was serious. She was this kind of skinny, scrawny, well-raised young woman who was aching to just plunge into the wildness of the decade that was kind of unfolding around her. So she's experimenting with sex. I was just trying to see who's who, and everybody was different in their own way, and everybody had their own thing. And bam, she gets pregnant.

And she's not happy about it at all. I'm about to become a mother now. Oh, man. That's exactly how I did. Oh, man. I asked my sister, you want this baby? I mean, because I don't feel like taking no baby. The man she gets pregnant with is a guy who lived across the street, who she had a relationship with, but, you know, didn't leave a huge impression. What did she like about him? That's the jeopardy when you're thinking. You want to choose?

I can't say that on the microphone. Thought I was going to say it, did you? I see. Well, come on, just say it. Okay. Well, the sex was good. That's all I'm going to say. That was it.

That was it right there. I got caught, so it is what it is. But once she was born, it was like a whole different story. And that is baby Toby. And she was born in 1974. She was really cute and fat and very smart and very girly. A lot of stories about how I was such a pretty little girl. Toby was followed by a little sister and after that by a brother. And she was essentially just like this really adorable little baby doll that DeVetta said she just loved playing with. I like to take them out when I dress them up so people can see them, right?

And she'll be like a little model. You know? Yeah, but it was fun. We had fun. She was a really social little girl. She loved people. Oh, yeah. You know what?

Let me tell you. I always liked to be around a lot of people. Right. You always had that thing where you just have to be around a lot of people. You can't be alone. Everybody is family. I think everybody is family. Tom, we used to cook. Y'all used to cook sloppy joes and peas every day, didn't we?

Oh, and you and Bursley made me turn the radio off and put everybody out. What else do I remember? And y'all, the house caught on fire when you just first said, Shanika and I was going to school in Lafayette Elementary. Yeah, the man next door. Let me tell you, the man next door, he had his house. He was a hoarder, and he had all this paper in his house. And it caught on fire.

I forgot about it. I was at school, and I seen the house on fire from the school. Yeah. It used to be like a calm year. You know, like the settling, the changing. That's when the change was coming over. You could feel the change, but you didn't know what the change was going to be. And we went to sleep and we woke up and our whole life just changed.

Like, our whole life just changed. We'll be right back. Okay, so this is when, in the 80s, that's when the crack came. That's when the streets of Baltimore was flooded with drugs. It was mid to late 1980s. Crack came in. I didn't know it was crack. I knew something was evident. It got crazy because I think the drug board just went off the chain. You know, it went from undercover to they just pulled the cover off and everybody wanted a piece of the pie.

Pulled the cover off, and everybody wanted a piece of the pie. Crack was this lava that just started oozing into neighborhoods, and it just devoured the ecosystems there. They got the best of the neighborhood. They got the best of the people. Drugs just started coming out like that. It just started going down like crack cocaine and weed. They were snorting that cocaine real bad here in Baltimore. And there was something else happening.

The crack epidemic collided with this massive job loss among African-American men. Factories and manufacturing plants in the center cities, and particularly in Baltimore in the center city, were moving out to the suburbs. They were moving to the south, looking for cheaper labor and cheaper places to produce things. And this devastated African-American employment

and devastated African-Americans in the city of Baltimore. In 1970, three-quarters of African-American men in Baltimore were employed, men that were of working age. By 1980, it was just over half. And we think today

of how manufacturing job loss has affected whites, but it affected blacks many decades earlier and much more severely. And at that moment, crack began flooding in. Taking over, really, in a way, it was like an entirely new economy

had begun to replace the manufacturing one that was in tatters. This was the new economy. Make a long story short, the economy dropped. Now their fathers ain't coming around because they can't pay the bills. They embarrassed. You understand what I'm saying? They got this habit.

Then they steal it from our mothers. Some of our mothers continue to work. Some of our mothers knew how to get out there and go get a job. Some of our mothers said, fuck it, before I get high, I'm going to get high too. And Devetta is seeing this unfold before her eyes. And I will move from one neighborhood when it looked like it was getting bad. I'll move us out of there and moved into another neighborhood. From house to house, neighborhood to neighborhood, hoping to escape, really outrun this epidemic that is smashing through all of these families all around.

We lived on Pimlico, Elgin Avenue, La Ola Southway, McCullough Street. We had three, four, five, like six houses. I just wanted my kids to be in an environment where I know that when I come to work, they will come home and they will be protected. I didn't want them in an environment where I thought that I'd be at work and somebody would be breaking into my house because I knew they was there by themselves. But the outside getting in, that really didn't end up being the problem. I would always sneak out the house once I got back home from school

to go down to the playground in my elementary school because I spent all the kids' leave. And I just wanted to be around everybody. Because I told you back then, boy, your family was your neighborhood. Well, at least I thought, because I didn't have a big family. So she went exploring, and she went exploring

in the neighborhoods of West Baltimore in the early and mid-1980s. As a child, I thought my friends hated it good. Like, my girlfriend Patrice, I might have never heard, I might have always told her, and then when she got home from school,

like, I might have been making chicken nuggets, and I thought that was the life, had a refrigerator full of Marley Steakhouse food. Mother's always home with them. They doing something right, man. I don't know, you talk about them them. They doing something right, man. I don't know you talking about them people. Them people doing something right. That's because they had food stamps.

I know. And your mom didn't have food stamps? Mm-mm. My mother was making it the way that she was taught. The right way. You ain't going to have a house full of food if you working for the city because they're not going to give you no food stamps. I thought they was living a good life.

I can understand it. They seem like the happiest people. And they lived in them tall buildings. I thought if you lived in a building in the elevator, I thought that was good living. I don't know. What she was actually seeing was the government paying for housing for people who could not afford it. She thought that that was just privileged people who were able to live in tall buildings with elevators that went up into the sky.

I got accepted to Western. She got admitted to Western High School, which was a very prestigious all-girls high school, kind of college prep high school in Baltimore. You had to have a certain GPA to go there. Did you have a good GPA? Mm-hmm. I was like 3.8 back then. Did she like school, Toby?

No. I hated it. She went, but she didn't like 3.8 back then. Did she like school, Toby? No. I hated it. She went, but she didn't like it. The whole thing, getting up early, going in, learning, the whole shebang. All girls. Proper. She would go, and she would do what she had to do, but she didn't really want to be there, you know? The minute she'd get out of school, she would race over to the regular public high school, which was where her boyfriend went.

I did go to Western like my mother made me. But then after school, I'm going to get on that bus. I'm going down to Douglas with my friends. I wanted that room because I had this boyfriend. His name was Donald. He was popular. He was into drugs and really was from one of those families that Devetta was trying to keep Toby away from. She wasn't used to the fast money. She worked for

the city at the library. She still worked at the dime. So all of a sudden, her best friend, who was 13, was pregnant. Devetta panics because her daughter is running in that same crowd. My mother didn't know what to do to save me. But she had to work and she had to try to save her child. Because she didn't know what this world was turning into. Lord, Jesus, what am I going to do with this girl? Oh, my God. Her mother was in North Carolina. Get this girl.

So Devetta turns to her own mother, to Ida, who'd moved back to North Carolina. They came to my school and got me out of school one day. My mother and her twin sister. They already had my clothes. They put me in their car and took me to North Carolina. So DeVetta takes Toby out of school and drives her down there. Were you mad? Of course I was.

They took me away with my boyfriend. My first everything. He used to beat the mess out of me. Really? He used to beat me up bad. I'm glad they removed me because I was chasing that other girl so bad. Why did you want it?

Because they stuck together. Why did you want it? Because they stuck together. And they put her in school in North Carolina. And she finishes high school there in North Carolina with honors. But as soon as she graduated, she made a beeline back to Baltimore. So she came home, came back to Baltimore, and been held on wheels ever since. So did you, so what happened then?

I became a Baltimorean. What does that mean? I came down straight into the drug gang. She was running the streets. She would leave for two or three days, a week. Back to her boyfriend Donald, the streets, and the absolute peak of the crack epidemic. Come back, okay, my same first boyfriend,

at this point, now we're 17. He was still selling drugs. And Donald, by that point, the early 1990s, was a really important person. He was rich. He had a car. Everybody he hanged with got cars.

He bought other people cars. He bought Toby a car. I had a car. I couldn't drive. He bought me a car. And she fell into life with him. He was so jealous. You know, at that age, you think that many love you.

It started off, he was so jealous. I thought it was cute. I mean, he loved me so much. It was a very isolating life for her. He cut off all of her friendships, didn't allow her to see people, would even sometimes lock her in the house. And then he made it to where he was my only friend because I couldn't have no friends.

So that didn't turn out good. Sometimes we wouldn't hear from her for months. You know how they had missing persons? I used to look at the news just to see if I seen something happen to her. Because she wouldn't call us. Because back then, you know, we didn't have cell phones. So we had to have the house phone. So I would just wait for the call.

The call never came. It worried me terrible. But after that first year, I had to get my life together. I was like, I can't sit here worrying myself to death. And she's not trying to get in contact. I don't know where she at, what she doing or anything. How's she surviving? How's she living?

Because guess what? I'm not going to not know if my child in an abusive relationship or not because I'm not spending that much time away from my child. So if she didn't know, she should have known. Don't get no paces with me because I was your child. You were supposed to protect me. And that's why we don't get along. I love her. I respect her. I'll do anything for my mother. But I was raising my child different.

After she'd spent probably what amounted to a couple of years in this situation, she just decided that just physically she could not take it anymore. And the story she tells is that she walked out of the apartment, went to the bus station, got on a Greyhound bus, and went to North Carolina. She had to leave Baltimore to get away from him. So it was like nothing to go down there and get your unemployment. I just do what you had to do.

I met this guy. Back in North Carolina, she meets another guy. Abusive. He's also pretty abusive. And at this point, she's wise to this type of behavior and gets out of it pretty quickly. Gets in her car

and drives back to Baltimore. And when she gets back to Baltimore, she finds out she's pregnant. So I called down that boy and told that boy in North Carolina, he begged me to come back. I went down there a week before he was fighting on me again.

I've been getting beat up by boys all my living life from having boyfriends. I'm not letting my child see no man be no man. Everything was about that child from the day I found out I was pregnant with him.

I got in my car and I came at the Baltimore and it ain't no bad. Let me think when they started arresting everybody, well, I'm going to say, how about in the late 90s? The 90s was hell broke loose, you know? And I think that's when it started in the 90s to current, which is present, which is now. Oh. Titobe comes back to Baltimore and in May 1998 gives birth to Nook. Sit down, girl. I think I love you. And all I want you to do Nook. In a city with only one serious political party, it's hard to get voters excited for a

two-party election. But in its way, this is a pretty dramatic moment. It's the first time we're getting a new mayor in 12 years. That was around the time of a really big race for mayor of the city of Baltimore that would really come to define Nook's adolescence and the world that he ended up inhabiting. Frustrated by what's happening in our neighborhoods? So is Martin O'Malley. And that's because one candidate in particular has promised the one thing that so many people in Baltimore were really, really, really craving. Getting tough on drugs, getting tough on crime, and cleaning stuff up. Former prosecutor, respected city councilman. For every street, O'Malley has a real plan to make our neighborhoods a safer place to live, learn, and play. Martin O'Malley. And that candidate was a city council member named Martin O'Malley. My campaign for mayor has been about uniting the

people of our city, uniting every neighborhood to bring about the changes we need to move forward. Changes to make our public schools the safest and smartest places to learn. Changes to make neighborhood safety and closing down open-air drug markets a top priority. Despite the fact that he was white, Black Baltimore really embraced him. On Tuesday, I'm thinking about character and integrity. That's why I'm supporting Martin O'Malley. They wanted someone to get tough on these things because they were tired of having to live with them every day.

It won't happen overnight, but with your vote and confidence, we can put Baltimore back on top. But then it turned out really differently. We are taking back streets that we effectively de-policed in the 1970s. We're re-policing them. We're putting police back into them. But the police aren't just there. They're doing something.

Martin went to New York City. And what they saw was zero tolerance in its embassy stage. So New York at that time was experimenting with this thing called zero tolerance policy. Essentially, widespread arrests for small kind of routine crimes. that time was experimenting with this thing called zero tolerance policy, essentially widespread arrests for small kind of routine crimes. We're using police to control behavior to such an extent that we are now changing it so that people who thought they could get away with drinking in public, people who thought they could get away with urinating in public, people who thought they could ride the subways without paying their fare are learning that somebody is going to challenge

that behavior and that somebody is going to challenge that behavior and that somebody is the police. And at that point, it really looked like it was working. It looked good, you know, because all the numbers and this and that. So O'Malley wants to try this in Baltimore. But there are cops like Lou Hobson who really disagree. And we realized that, you know, this zero tolerance is going to be a disaster. All you're going to do is put black marks on people's records.

You know, I appealed to Martin myself. I said, Martin, listen, if you bring a zero tolerance here in four or five years from now, I said, it's going to be so unbelievable. You have corrupt police officers right and left. You can't give this kind of authority to a police department and just say, look, you guys go do what you want. Not without some type of, you know, checks and balances and everything. So Martin O'Malley brings someone down from New York City to run the Baltimore police force. You see, they went crazy. They were arresting people who had mental health problems. They were arresting people who were drunk. They were arresting people who were just standing on corners or walking down the street. They were arresting people on their way to work.

Even kids just out playing. Seven-year-old Gerard Mungo Jr. was handcuffed, arrested, and booked. He says he was sitting on his dirt bike with the motor off in front of his East Federal Street house. A police officer returned to his house, handcuffed him, put him in a caged police car, and took him to the Eastern District before sending him to juvenile booking. My son got pulled over quite a few times, but he was walking. He don't drive. Devetta's son was picked up by the police many times, not for having done anything illegal, but just stopped, walking down the sidewalk. Anyway, they would just drive up in their car and stop in front of them like this and pull them, tell them, sit down, get on the floor, get on the ground. And they would test, you know, or pull them over in their cars and stuff.

That was around about that time. Do you remember that happening to your son for the first time and being surprised? When it first happened to him, yeah, I was surprised. But after my son told me it happened to him like three or four times and they didn't find nothing more of him, so they let him go. But the point was, couldn't no black young man walk down the street without being pulled over. Philosophy was arrest, arrest, arrest, arrest. And people were saying, this is not focused laser-like to reduce crime. This is rounding up everybody. The cells were full.

There is a wall outside of Central Booking. And at any given time during zero tolerance, there would be at least 200 people in line, easily. The jails would be so full that you could get arrested. And they wouldn't know you were arrested, your family and friends, anybody wouldn't know you were arrested for like a week, two weeks, because they haven't even processed you. Arrests doubled from 1996 to 2003. And that effect was very, very apparent in the neighborhoods. Many young men were being rounded up. And this is the point at which police

departments really all over the country, but also in Baltimore, became completely obsessed by statistics. So the policies that were implemented, they were following the policies and not so much connected to the people. Tyrone Powers was an FBI agent. He grew up in Baltimore and he's advised the Baltimore police. The policies is what kept them in positions, so it got them promoted, or it got them chastised if they were not making enough arrests. I mean, because you got promoted based on your stats. You got promoted based on your stats. Right.

They looked at your stats and your arrests, and if commanders didn't have enough arrests in their districts, then they could actually, many of them were actually removed from their command positions right at ComStat meetings. But that sets up this weird conflict of interest, no? No, absolutely. Many of them were actually removed from their command positions right at Comstead meetings. But that sets up this weird conflict of interest, no? No, absolutely, in their districts. And so that's what they focused on.

They focused on, no matter the consequences and repercussions of what's happening with police-community relations, they focused on the fact that this was the edict of the administration, and the administration said that if you want to keep your position, then you have to file this. But that's all they were focused on. There was a disjunct from the top down from the police in the community. It began to drive things in this very unhealthy way, really encouraging arrests and encouraging policing that cut corners and focused on numbers as opposed to focusing on doing the hard work required to arrest and track down violent criminals. And the majority of the people, obviously, that were arrested were African-Americans. So now people are saying that this whole experiment has gone tremendously bad because now everybody's the top.

So this is a big change from earlier years. So for DeVetta, you know, she remembers having conversations with police officers. She remembers them kind of being around in the neighborhood. She remembers them kind of walking around on foot. And, you know, she doesn't have particularly strong memories of them one way or another, just kind of that they were this sort of, you know, not perfect, but capable and basically trustworthy force. And if you called them because something bad was happening to you, like your house was getting broken into, it basically trusted that they would probably show up and probably try to

help. You didn't have the sense that they were going to come after you if you hadn't done anything at all. Policemen did harass people back then. They helped them. But weren't they more racist back then? They was, but they wasn't as bad. I mean, they never plant drugs on us. They would lock us up. They would give us hard time. So maybe it was like they were more racist, but they were also more fair. Right. Something like that, where the policemen of today, they're breaking into your house without a warrant. Listen, I won't say they were ever great, but I will say this. They were better because people weren't getting rounded up in mass numbers.

The message that parents and grandparents were telling their children is, you know, if you do something wrong, they're going to arrest you, you're going to be treated differently. But the key word in that sentence was, if you did something wrong. But with this aggressive policing, they were arresting people, even if the charges didn't stick. So now the parents and grandparents who had had the instructions that they gave to the children and the young people is just stay out of the way of the police. They're saying that my children and grandchildren can't even stay out of the way of the police because the police are actually actively pursuing them.

So the parents, the grandparents that wanted the police to become a part of the solution began to see them as part of the problem. Now we've got nowhere to go. We were bad when we didn't have anywhere to go because of the criminal element. Now, increasingly and demonstratively, we're afraid of the cops and the robbers. So how does this put us in a better place? Everybody now has an antagonistic relationship with the police department. People who may have had a, at the very least, a neutral relationship with the police department, the divide became greater. It became more problematic. Even if the relationship between the police and the community was suspect, it wasn't good, this absolutely unequivocally

made people who were on the fence or who were neutral, certainly in the city of Baltimore, move to the other side. I didn't know they hate police like I do now. I mean, like the kids do today. I didn't know you were supposed to hate the police. I hate the police. My son is seven years old. Why are you pulling up with him, asking him anything about where's his mother?

And Toby was also seeing this happening. Listen, I'm sorry that I'm not rich. And, you know, I had to live down here on Gorman Avenue, this one-way street. So now my son's seven years old, out here on Gorman Avenue playing baseball with all the rest of these kids. So y'all keep hopping on these cars with these guns. Leave these kids alone. Why are y'all practicing on them?

And if you look at the whole Freddie Gray case, he ran from the police and the police chased him and arrested him. No major crime, no major issue. A number of officers involved in that. I don't think people ever looked and distracted at that. A number of people, it was kind of like you would respond to the robbery of a 7-Eleven or a convenience store. But they were responding to a guy who ran because he saw the police. The community said, I've had enough.

We've had enough. And when you said I've had enough. We've had enough. And when you said I've had enough, that's it. You're not going to take it anymore. It's like the first time that something like Freddie Gray happened. You know what I mean? Everybody could understand because they've seen it over and over. They've seen it in their families being beat up all the time. You know, you can only beat on somebody so much.

You can only push somebody so far. So when those kids had enough, they remember, they cut the bus services. You left those kids with no way to get home but to walk. That means you have to walk clear across town. You're going to try to find a ride. You had to see if your mother or father could get off early. And then they tried to force those kids off that area.

So kids doing what kids do. You know, when you threaten them, they threaten you back. So the kids picked up rock and started rocking them, you know? So when the protests first broke out in the spring of 2015, Nook was there with his friends. But they weren't just protesting, shouting at the police. They were also looting. A couple of his friends told us they were in a sports store,

looking at jerseys and taking some. Taking advantage of the situation. They were only about two miles away from that house on Lafayette Avenue. The one where Devetta grew up. But they were a world away from that house on Lafayette Avenue, the one where Devetta grew up. But they were a world away from that life. The neighborhood I grew up in is gone. It's gone. It's sad. It looks so bad.

The whole block is just tore up from the ground up. The houses done decapitated and the streets done sunk in. It's just bad. Wow. This is it. And the house itself, with its tall steps and its red brick, is boarded up now. It's falling in. Its front porch has weeds growing all over it. The windows have been punched out. And the front door is nailed shut. We'll be right back. Thank you. your first year, plus your first month free. It's a good deal. To learn more, visit nytimes.com slash the daily offer. That's nytimes.com slash the daily offer. And thank you.

Here's what else you need to know today. On Monday, the Supreme Court sided with a Colorado baker, Jack Phillips, who refused to create a custom wedding cake for a same-sex couple in a case that pitted gay rights against claims of religious freedom. In a 7-2 decision, the court ruled that Phillips' religious rights had been violated when lower courts ruled that he had to bake the cake for the couple's wedding, which he said was at odds with his religious beliefs. In his opinion, Justice Kennedy, who was the decisive vote in the decision

to legalize same-sex marriage, reaffirmed protections for gay rights and left open the possibility that future cases involving similar issues could be decided differently. And in his latest attack on special counsel Robert Mueller, President Trump tweeted that Mueller's appointment was, quote, totally unconstitutional and said that he has the absolute right to pardon himself at the conclusion of the Russia investigation.

The tweet represents the president's boldest attempt yet to undermine the legal basis for Mueller's investigation and suggests that Trump is considering extraordinary action to protect himself from the probe. Does the president believe that he is above the law? Certainly not. The president hasn't done anything wrong. During a news conference at the White House on Monday,

Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked about the president's claim that he could pardon himself. I guess the question is, does the president believe the framers envisioned a system where the president couldn't pardon himself, but the president could be above the law? Certainly the Constitution very clearly lays out the law. And once again, the president hasn't done anything wrong. And we feel very comfortable in that front.

That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.