I’m still processing the outrageous violence which took place in Ferguson, Missouri, yet there is another necessary protest occurring due to the killing of an African American individual, Freddie Gray. The 25 year old died in the hands of police custody on April 19. I’m upset with the thought of a police official treating a civilian brutally violent just because a civilian chose to change his direction while approaching an officer. How possibly can the civilians of Baltimore respect and act peaceful towards the police authorities?

Protests erupted on April 25, shortly after the death of Gray. Civilians held up posters, trying to find an answer for Gray’s unjust death.

The mayor of Baltimore, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, proceeded to call for a citywide curfew from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m., aiming to avoid any violence on the streets. Of course, this curfew was violated by protesters, leading to violent clashes with the police.

But the curfew act only deals with the issue of the current riot, yet it does not heal the issue of racism going around in Baltimore. Moreover, there are more significant conflicts that should be dealt with rather than setting a curfew for the civilians.

According to the Baltimore Sun, since 2011, victims of severe police brutality were mostly colored civilians. Police brutality is very famous in Baltimore and riots have proven it. What more can civilians take? One can’t help but get the feeling that such obvious marks of unrest are simply ignored by the state or the country unless someone starts burning cars. It truly does feel that the nation’s “state of emergency detection” system has two settings: calm or on fire. This seems counterintuitive and illogical.

The state chooses to risk lives of people and force a community abused by several ill-fit police officers to get up and protest, instead of fixing the issues that the community faces. So the last question at this point is, why does the state of Maryland, or any other state where riots have occurred for that matter, feign ignorance in such a manner?

Perhaps it is the nation’s inability to accept these riots as bits of a bigger problem, that being the remains of racist behavior within America. Many people will call such riots isolated events, referring to them as something a few bad police officers did, when really this is simply a problem that people refuse to face and instead wish to believe that it has been over for a long time.

Well, it simply hasn’t, and riots such as these, spanning for over 40 years in large American cities such as Los Angeles, Miami, and now Baltimore, prove that the problem of racism still exists.