National Guard arrives in Baltimore as police commissioner admits rioters ‘outnumbered us and outflanked us’

Posted 2015-04-28 11:09 by Grunt Report with 0 comments

National Guard troops arrived in Baltimore shortly after midnight Tuesday, almost nine hours after a confrontation between black youths and police at a city mall mushroomed into riots during which several businesses were looted and burned and over a dozen officers injured.

A few minutes earlier, city police commissioner Anthony Batts admitted that his officers were not prepared for the outbreak of violence that forced Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan to declare a state of emergency, activating the Guard, and Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake to announce a weeklong 10 p.m.-to-5 a.m. curfew, to take effect Tuesday.

“Yes, we planned for it. That wasn’t the issue,” Batts told reporters late Monday. “We just had too many people out there [for us] to overcome the numbers we had.” The commissioner added that the rioters had pulled his officers to “opposite ends of the city” and had “outnumbered us and outflanked us.”

Rawlings-Blake described Monday as “one of our darkest days as a city” as she surveyed fire damage.

“Too many people have spent generations building up this city for it to be destroyed by thugs who, in a very senseless way, are trying to tear down what so many have fought for,” she added. “It’s idiotic to think that by destroying your city, you’re going to make life better for anybody.”