Baltimore riots: The central question for authorities is not how to contain the protests, but how Freddie Gray came to die

The city's approach to the demonstrations has been deliberately non-provocative

Baltimore, the grittiest and, arguably, the most racially divided of America’s grand old East Coast cities, has become the latest flashpoint of the deep-rooted and long-festering tensions between local police and the majority black populations that have erupted across the US in the past few months.

After three days of rioting and looting, mainly in the poor neighbourhoods on the city’s West side, Baltimore was all but closed down. Maryland’s governor has declared a state of emergency, imposed a 10pm to 5am curfew, and ordered in the National Guard to restore order. Mercifully, no one yet appears to have been killed in the disturbances, but at least 200 people have been arrested and 15 police officers injured.

The proximate cause of the disorder is all too familiar – the unexplained death 10 days ago of Freddie Gray, a young black man, from a severe spinal injury sustained while in police custody. For a week, protests were peaceful. But that changed after his funeral on Monday, as groups of youths ran amok, ignoring the pleas of Mr Gray’s family and church leaders for calm. The city authorities, who had allowed a “space for protest” after the incident, were plainly taken by complete surprise by the violence.

Up to a point, events in Baltimore resemble those in Ferguson, Missouri, where rioting broke out last summer when an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, was shot dead by a white police officer. But whereas those demonstrations were met with an excessively heavy hand, Baltimore’s approach had been deliberately non-provocative.

A more exact comparison is the rioting that swept Los Angeles in 1992, after LA police beat up the motorist Rodney King. Then, as now, pent-up resentment and frustration at police treatment of blacks and other minorities boiled over, with street gangs – as entrenched in Baltimore as Los Angeles – in the forefront of the mayhem. What has now happened on the opposite side of the country is proof that 23 years on, the same problem remains.

The crisis in Baltimore, however, is in some ways more complicated. Historically, the police department of a city that is now 60 per cent black was run by Irish-Americans and Italian-Americans. But that has changed in recent decades. While a slight majority of police officers are still white, the department is led by an African-American. Baltimore’s mayor is also black.

But these developments – and, one might add, the arrival of a black president in the White House who has chosen black candidates to serve as attorney general, the country’s top law enforcement officer – have not sufficed to change the culture of a tough and racially segregated city, nor soften the excessively rough brand of justice often doled out by its police department. The immediate risk is that the riots will shift attention from the Gray case to the success, or otherwise, of riot containment. The circumstances of his death must be promptly and comprehensively investigated by an impartial outside body, and those responsible properly dealt with.

In the longer term, it is a question of completing the work of the civil rights movement. Much has been done to revive Baltimore – in its 19th-century heyday, once the second largest US city – after decades of decline that led to its ironic local moniker of “Charm City”. But the benefits of new jobs and opportunities have yet to spread to poorer African-American districts. No less imperative is a reform of the absurdly harsh prison sentencing norms, above all for drug offences, that have broken up black families and contributed to the sense that the entire system is stacked against them. All this has helped fuel the riots in Ferguson and now Baltimore. But if they now help hasten change, they will not have been in vain.