BALTIMORE - Political billboards all over this city on the Chesapeake Bay show the faces of mayoral hopefuls.
But it is the painted face of a dead man that speaks even louder.
One year after Freddie Gray died after being stuffed into the back of a police van, street art and murals punctuate almost every block in the neighborhood where he died. Some of the colorful pieces are huge and elaborate, some small and simple. Some encourage peace. Some promote rebellion.
Together, they paint a picture of a city trying to come to grips with itself. Gray, a 25-year-old black man, has come to symbolize a national struggle of sorts between police and young black men.
“It should never have happened,” says James Brown, 54, a home improvement specialist who lives in the Gilmore Homes, about 20 feet from the site Gray was arrested. “His legs were crushed. They (police) picked him up like pallbearers."
In some ways, life has changed here after Gray's death. Police vans now have cameras and the police department is working to improve its relationship with city residents. The mayor is moving on. A CVS pharmacy that was burned to the ground amid racial strife has reopened.
But one thing remains the same: The tense relations between the cops and the impoverished city neighborhoods where Gray grew up. The dynamic is similar to that of many large American cities.
Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, a native of Baltimore’s well-to-do Ashburton neighborhood, believes she will leave the city of 621,000 a better place. Her term ends in December.
“I think the lessons are still being learned,” Rawlings-Blake said in an interview with USA TODAY. “I think what we adopted was resilience and a community coming together and a resolve to be better than our worst days.”
But some residents would not agree. They say change has been slow or nonexistent, even after six police officers were indicted last May in the death of Gray.
The Freddie Gray incident happened because of a culture launched during the era of the crack-cocaine epidemic that promoted an attitude of police versus the community, Baltimore Police Commissioner Kevin Davis told USA TODAY.
"Going out and stopping 300 people and stopping 30 bad guys, that's been tried and failed," Davis said. "What about the 270 other people who we encounter in an aggressive, uncivil way?"
The commissioner, who also has held high posts in Prince George's County and Anne Arundel County in Maryland, is trying to erase the gap by instituting foot patrols into every shift, requiring new officers to spend their first months on a beat, and through a program that includes one-on-one outdoors interaction between police officers and local youth.
Trainees are now being taught about the history of Baltimore's varied communities, and also are being introduced to neighborhoods so that more will live in the city, Davis said.
The commissioner said he also wants to promote the idea that it is not just the police who are responsible for public safety, but other institutions, too, such as schools.
"In Baltimore, the arrest of Freddie Gray and his death a week later, that wasn't just about Freddie Gray," Davis said. "I think everybody realizes that."
The Gray story unfolded on April 12, 2015. It was a clear, Sunday morning in Baltimore and the temperature was about 50 degrees. Police officers in West Baltimore spotted Gray at the corner of North Avenue and Mount Street.
The officers approached Gray, who ran from them and they grabbed him about a block away on Presbury Street, calling in for a police van. Gray asked for an inhaler, police said. Witnesses report seeing Gray dragged into the van, legs limp.
About a block away, at the intersection of Mount and Baker Streets, the van stopped. Police reported Gray as being “irate.” Police pulled Gray out of the van, put him in leg irons, and put him back in. Witnesses reported a violent encounter.
On the way to central booking, the van driver asked for an additional unit to check Gray. Police officers requested paramedics to come to the Western District station. Emergency medical responders reported Gray was not breathing. He was transported to a shock trauma unit.
Court records showed that police asked that Gray be charged with carrying a switchblade, but Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby would later say the knife was not a switchblade and Gray did not commit a crime.
On April 19, one week after his arrest, Gray died at the University of Maryland Medical Center. Autopsy records showed he suffered a significant spinal injury before his death.
Protests began on April 18, the day before Gray’s death, outside of Baltimore’s Western District police station, but it was on April 27, after Gray’s funeral at the New Shiloh Baptist Church in West Baltimore, that widespread rioting and looting began, putting Baltimore at the top of national news.
The case came on a national wave of deaths of black males – sometimes at the hands of police – that grabbed national attention. The wave started with the Feb. 26, 2012, death of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black Florida teen shot and killed by a self-proclaimed neighborhood watchman.
At least 15 police officers were hurt, 235 people arrested and at least 60 structures burned in the Baltimore protests, authorities said. A CVS store that sold necessities to the neighborhood was among the structures that burned.
In the midst of it all, Rawlings-Blake faced public criticism for waiting three hours to call in the National Guard after the rioting began. Rawlings-Blake defended her choice, saying a too aggressive response could have escalated matters. That blow up is part of the reason Blake announced last September she would not seek reelection this November.
“It was clear to me that I had to get the city through, to continue to work, as well as the work to prepare the city for at least six … police trials and I knew that every one was a potential powder keg and that required my attention,” Rawlings-Blake said. “I also know that every single thing I was doing was being looked at through the lens of reelection and I had to make a choice of myself whether I was going to govern or campaign.”
Aside from a mayoral election, there are other changes in Baltimore. There are now cameras with GPS technology in police vans. Gray’s family won a $6.4 settlement with the city in September. Gray’s two sisters, who shared a house with him in Baltimore, have now moved out to suburban Baltimore County. Rawlings-Blake fired Police Commissioner Anthony Batts in July 2015, and Kevin Davis, a former deputy commissioner, replaced him.
Perhaps the biggest change over the last year involves Freddie Gray's surroundings.
The native of Baltimore’s Sandtown-Winchester area lived a bumpy life that included not only his 2015 arrest, but a childhood marked by lead poisoning, a rap sheet and poverty. Friends have said he never worked a real job but lived off of a legal settlement from his family's lead poisoning suit..
His current resting place – Woodlawn Cemetery and Chapel in suburban Baltimore County – is populated by ducks and sea gulls. A nature photographer who spends a lot of time at Woodlawn pointed out the area where he believes Gray rests in an unmarked grave. It is in a section called Serenity that sits on top of a quiet corner hill.
It is seven miles and worlds away from the streets of West Baltimore, where helicopters fly over on a regular basis, people openly appear to exchange drugs and money, and where every second or third home seems deserted.
Gray is a frequent topic around West Baltimore.
“We talk about him every day,” said Michael Brown, 28, a youth mentor for a program called Yo Baltimore. “That was my childhood friend. He was a good person.”
“All he ever wanted to do was crack jokes and make people smile, go out with females,” he said. “Ever since he passed things haven’t been the same around here.”
On Presbury Street at the site where police arrested Gray, a small mural reads, “Freddie Gray 8-16-89 4-19-15.” Almost anyone you see on the street near it seems to have been there that day.
“Police had that foot on his neck and back and he was hollering,” James Brown said.
Brown’s companion, Rosa Mobley, said she was watching from the window.
“I told them to get their feet off his back,” said Mobley, 60. “They didn’t see me.”
Mobley said police then “took (Gray’s) right leg and pulled it all the way back.”
When asked to explain, she repeated, “All the way back,” and closed her eyes and pointed her face to the ceiling.
Around this neighborhood, residents seem pessimistic about dealings with the police and about life. Brown in fact says he was once detained by police for an unknown reason and then released with no explanation. He says he lost a contracting job from that incident because he could not get to work. Mobley said she lost a nephew who was fatally shot by police. She said police told her the incident was gang related.
Almost whole blocks look abandoned and many of the federal-style row houses are boarded up. A man with teardrop tattoos under one eye advises a reporter not to stand near him because there is a contract on his life.
Rawlings-Blake believes parts of the situation were misrepresented by the media. Rawlings-Blake has been advocating for police reform since before Gray’s arrest.
“In ’68, we had riots in Baltimore – the city burned for weeks,” she said. “In 2015, we had a few hours of unrest … about three hours of unrest, and not one single life was lost.”
West Baltimore resident Cara Montgomery, who sat recently on a stoop with her dog and a friend, said not much has changed in the last year, and says the police need to worry less about drug users, more about killers. She also faults the protesters for not having a better plan.
Said Montgomery, 23, “We could have made the whole situation better if we had just rioted right – standing up as a community, not standing apart.”
