Baltimore riots: After the violent protests and looting, the clear up and recriminations begin in a city in shock

After Monday night's rioting over the death of a black man in custody, some people are saying it took such violence for the rest of the country to attend to their plight

Firefighters battling a blaze at a building site on Monday in east Baltimore (AP)

Faced by a line of police and National Guardsmen in riot gear, crowds of young people from Baltimore were once more at the corner of Pennsylvania and West North Avenues across from a CVS chemist’s gutted by fire. But it was not rocks most had in their hands: it was brooms and shovels.

This was one of the flashpoints on Monday when anger boiled over across the city not just at the handling of the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray while in police custody from a severed spine this month in mysterious circumstances, but at what many say has been years of marginalisation of its black youth.

Not since the 1960s has Baltimore seen rioting on such a scale. Today it was a metropolis in shock. A desire had taken over some to scoop up the debris of the mayhem of the night before – as if to say “This is who we really are”.

As a police helicopter circled above, a crowd had spontaneously gathered near the chemist’s. They prayed, they sang “Amazing Grace”. Then they swept.

Volunteers say a prayer before Tuesday's clean-up

It was not like that just eight hours before, when violent clashes here and elsewhere in the city left 15 policeman injured and countless properties ransacked, and men took the law into their hands to defend their businesses, some with machetes and tyre irons. It prompted political leaders, the Governor Larry Hogan and Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, to declare a state of emergency and deploy the National Guard.

With hundreds of additional police and Guardsman in place, there was hope that the violence of Monday would not be repeated. But the situation in the city is volatile. People prayed for calm but knew that one incident – a shot fired perhaps or scuffle started – could set it off once again.

Police and National Guard keep the peace outside the fire-damaged CVS pharmacy store

Officials were counting in part also on the 10pm to 5am curfew that Ms Rawlings-Blake ordered for a week to keep a lid on the city. And so many pills were taken from so many chemists on Monday it was possible scrambled heads be would enough to keep the rioters from returning.

Empty pill bottles littered the floor of Best Care Pharmacy a little further down Pennsylvania Avenue. Shelves for refill prescriptions were completely bare. Left to deal with the mess was its owner, Joseph Adeola, 42. He said he watched helplessly as about 400 people tore into the place on Monday afternoon, taking drugs and ripping a cash machine from its façade. “Even adults were taking advantage. They drew up in nice cars and went in too.” His computers filled with patient profiles were also removed.

While there was anger at the system and the death of Mr Gray, there are many people furious at those who wrought all this damage. Mr Adeola was distraught. “I would never have believed this could happen in our community.”

Renee Duvall, 29, who was struggling to get to class with buses that were cancelled, was incandescent. Her words, some graphic, were to be heard repeated in small clutches of folk who had gathered outside digesting the wreckage together. “It just don’t make no sense, it don’t. I think it’s disgusting what they did. They are making all of us look like animals and we are not animals. The stores didn’t have nothing do with them.” How was it allowed to happen? “I am not sure whose fault it is. I just want them to stop this s***.”

But not everyone is without sympathy for those who did the rioting even if very few would openly condone it. Inevitably, there is some blame for Mayor Rawlings-Blake, elected in 2010, who said at the weekend that she wanted to give “those who wish to destroy space to do that”. It was a remark that triggered wide condemnation all across the country.

Mr Hogan said he had phoned Ms Rawlings-Blake repeatedly but that she held off calling in the National Guard until three hours after violence first erupted. “The Mayor of Baltimore had the city of Baltimore police on the ground. Quite frankly, they were overwhelmed,” the Republican Governor said.

“I’m a lifelong resident of Baltimore and too many people have spent generations building up this city for it to be destroyed by thugs who are trying to tear down what so many have fought for,” Ms Rawlings-Blake said.

“Her political career is over,” said Terrence Smith, 44, outside a gutted mobile-phone store, its alarm bells still ringing, windows smashed and its stock of new smartphones vanished. “But she was between a rock and a hard place.”

He too voiced disgust at all the damage done, but warned that the rioters had real reasons. “I have a lot of sympathy for them because they have no outlet for their frustration and anger.”

“This is not new and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise,” President Barack Obama almost concurred at a press conference at the White House alongside the visiting Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

Protesters stand on top of a police car destroyed during Monday night's rioting (AP)

“There are some police who are not doing the right thing,” Mr Obama said, adding that some police departments need to “recognise they have to work together with the community to solve the problem. There are some police departments that have to do some soul-searching.

“If our society really wants to solve this problem we could. It would just require everyone saying, ‘This is significant and we don’t just pay attention to a community when a CVS burns, or we don’t just pay attention when a kid gets shot or gets his spine snapped’.”

At the same time as the President was speaking in the Rose Garden, 19-year-old Rkel Hill was talking to a reporter inside that same wrecked CVS interior reduced to ruin, wires dangling from the ceiling.

“We have to be heard and it takes violence for people to pay attention to us, to this city, to our problems. Everybody is concerned because Baltimore is destroyed but they don’t care about the poverty of its people, they don’t care about its homeless who have nowhere to go to.”

Outside, Yahya Ansarullah, 47, raged that the Mayor on Monday had called the rioters “thugs”. “How come they are the thugs because they tear down some stuff and the police aren’t thugs when they murder a person?” He gestured towards the police line across the street. “It’s their behaviour that is f***ed up.” The rioting – he, like everyone else spoken to here, said he stayed at home on Monday and watched everything on TV – will have an impact. “Now everyone knows what has been going on in Baltimore. Even the President knows. The President didn’t know nothing.”