On May 26th, Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott imposed a curfew to curtail the free movement of the city’s youth for the entire duration of the summer. This is the latest in a long campaign of antipathy, repression, and outright violence against children — especially Black children — from an administration that has given nothing but mealy-mouthed lip service to the centering of youth voices. In response, the Baltimore Student Union has submitted the following statement.
On May 12, the Baltimore Student Union received word through a secondhand source that we had been invited to a town hall to be co-hosted by WJZ, the Baltimore Banner, and the University of Baltimore Law School where some of Baltimore City’s top political leaders — Mayor Brandon Scott, State’s Attorney (DA) Ivan Bates, Police Commissioner Michael Harrison, and City Schools Chief of Staff Allison Perkins-Cohen — would be present to engage in a conversation about what could be done to curb the rising tide of youth violence.
In response, we issued the following public statement outlining that we would be boycotting that forum, and any such forum where student voice was an afterthought rather than a deliberate, centralized goal:
This week, Baltimore Student Union received a secondhand request to participate in a so-called “youth violence” forum hosted by WJZ, UBalt Law, and the Baltimore Banner to be aired live next Thursday. Also in attendance will be mayor Brandon Scott, police commissioner Michael Harrison, City Schools chief of staff Alison Perkins-Cohen, and state’s attorney Ivan Bates.
We want to be clear — “solutions” to youth killings will not be found in BPD, who allowed the death of Donnell Rochester, and just last night allowed the shooting of a 17 year old, or in district board staff, who are authorizing Evolv, or in the mayor, who has accelerated the police budget & eschewed every promise that got him elected.
As community organizers, we understand that political “solutions” to the deaths of young people in Baltimore will not be found through the theatrical exchange of ideas on live radio, but through a comprehensive mobilization of civil society & community residents in Baltimore fighting in one motion for true community safety.
As such, we will not legitimize the authority of city officials who have failed to act in arm with the demands of the community, and we certainly will decline to participate in any event where youth voice is an afterthought; these events must be after school hours and easily accessible to student attendance.
If the press wants to hear from us, they know how to reach us. Solidarity.
Indeed, there is an epidemic of youth violence in our city. On the very first Friday of the school year, a Mergenthaler High student was killed amid a dispute between several people on the street. Only four days later, a Carver High student was killed, and Baltimore students were thrust into a fever pitch of fear and mass panic as the school year kicked off in early September.
Then, in January, a student at Edmondson-Westside High was killed, followed by a nonfatal shooting at Ben Franklin High only two days later, setting students into a spiral right after a return to school from the December holidays.
In March, gunshots afflicted Baltimore students yet again with a mass-shooting ‘false alarm’ at Digital Harbor High, resulting in a school lockdown and a SWAT team being sent in. Students, already on edge, then watched as a Patterson High student was shot and killed, and only three weeks later, a mourning Baltimore City went aflame with rage and grief as the Covenant School mass shooting in Nashville made national news.
The school year is now approaching a close, but it has been a year bereft with loss of life, and a city already weary of ineffective government has only grown more discouraged by the embarrassing missteps made by various government institutions in response to this epidemic of violence in the school system.
In response to the Edmondson-Westside High shooting, Councilman Kristerfer Burnett introduced legislation to the Baltimore City Council to raise fines on businesses that serviced minors during school hours — say, students going to the mom & pop shop on their lunch break for a coffee — and Mayor Brandon Scott announced that new youth curfews would be imposed over summer break, prohibiting students under 16 from being alone in public after 11pm. On the part of the school district, the School Board moved forward with a $300,000 new weapons detection regime pilot program from Evolv — a manufacturer that is notorious for producing ineffective, shoddy equipment that has been pulled out of numerous school districts in the last 5 years for ineffectiveness, most recently in Utica, NY. And the City Council, which unanimously passed resolutions asking the School Board to adopt restorative justice practices in all schools and institute trauma-informed training for teachers and staff, has seen their pleas ignored by the school district. Meanwhile, the Baltimore Police Department has been embroiled in scandal over the cops’ murder of Donnell Rochester, an 18-year old who was shot and killed during a traffic stop in 2022.
The Scott administration, like all others before them, has continued to offer nothing to the city’s youth but condescension, disdain, and harm. It is no coincidence that the city has selected Inner Harbor, Fells Point, and Federal Hill as their “primary static locations,” stationing police around the sites of the greatest class privilege in the city. The message sent is clear: the mere presence of working class and racialized youth is offensive to bourgeois interests, and must be met with the full force of state repression. The young people of this city are not so easily placated by facile promises of an “exchange of ideas” or fooled by empty gestures that hint toward reform. They demand — and deserve — justice, dignity, and an end to the policing of youth.
