How Big Data failed Baltimore

Gyalwang Drukpa, a Buddhist leader from South Asia, prays in front of a mural of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Md., May 7, 2015. 

Photo by Carlos Barria/Reuters

In the days following the death of Freddie Gray, the 25-year-old black man who sustained a fatal spinal injury in Baltimore police custody, I was taken back to my time in Baltimore, at the height of America’s “tough on crime” era. 

I arrived in the city in 1999 as a federal employee, sent to the city health department to support a crumbling local public health infrastructure. I had a deep sense that I wanted to fight the good fight, but at 27 years old – just two years older than Freddie Gray – I had little understanding of what that meant. No sooner had I arrived in Charm City than the Baltimore Sun broke the story that would shape my years there. The headline went something like this: Baltimore’s children are canaries in a coalmine: City does little to combat child lead poisoning.

No one could have known it then but Freddie Gray, who would have been about 10 years old at the time, was one of those poisoned kids in Sandtown-Winchester.

Like other post-industrial cities, Baltimore’s famous row houses were riddled with the stealthy neurotoxin. Deceptively sweet like manna from heaven, lead paint permanently rewired the developing minds of kids in East and West Baltimore who ate the dulcet chips and breathed in their dust. In the poorest neighborhoods, kids moved from leaded-home to leaded-home as their families were evicted, fathers incarcerated, mothers fended for themselves.

Of course, violence, drug-addiction and despair were common. At the time, one in eight Baltimore residents were addicted to heroin, the evidence of which could be found near City Hall where “poppers,” the small needles long-time addicts used to inject the drug just under the skin on their hands, could be found all over the sidewalks and alleys. The dominant narrative confirmed that the city traded in despair: HBO’s “The Corner” aired in 2000 and “The Wire” followed two years later. 

Via: MSNBC

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