Precarious by design: Life and death in police-occupied Baltimore.

If you run from the police, this is common knowledge on the streets, you're going to get beaten up. And you might very well get punished by a 'rough ride,' which is being thrown in the back of a van without being secured, and jostled around as the van drives through the streets. This has been happening to Black citizens in Baltimore for so many years - it's remarkable this reached the level of criminal charges, but not at all surprising that it didn't end up in convictions.

Journalist Anjali Kamat explores the mechanisms of police violence and impunity in Baltimore in the week after the final charges against Freddie Gray's killers were dropped, and connects that injustice to a larger set of economic and political forces that isolate and criminalize Black Americans from childhood, setting the stage for mass uprisings in search of justice and equal treatment in Baltimore and beyond.

Anjali wrote the chapter "The Baltimore Uprising" in the Verso Books collection Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter.