How racist is our mainstream media?

You want this cleaned up? That’s racist!

This racist:

2018: USA Today names Baltimore nation’s most dangerous city.

Baltimore’s highest-ever per capita homicide rate in 2017 also made it the deadliest big city in the country, USA Today reported Monday.

Though official data from the FBI won’t be available until later in the year, USA Today reviewed the homicide rates in the nation’s 50 largest cities and Baltimore came out on top. The 342 homicides the city experienced in 2017 were a 17 percent increase over the prior year, and translated to a rate of 56 killed per 100,000 people.

That easily outpaced New Orleans and Detroit, which both had about 40 killings per 100,000 people, according to the report.

Baltimore had more homicides last year than New York City, Philadelphia and Los Angeles, all considerably larger cities. Only Chicago, also a considerably larger city, had more.

2018: PBS airs documentary on Baltimore’s fight against rats

July 2019: Baltimore Deputy Police Chief and wife mugged at gunpoint

2015: Bernie Sanders: Baltimore is a Third World country and a disgrace”

Forbes: 2017: “America’s ‘Inner City problem’ as seen in one Baltimore neighborhood”

Some visitors to Charm City may never have veered from the downtown waterfront, which has been scrubbed clean thanks to ample government subsidies. But walk east or west, and one begins to see the real Baltimore.

Take, for example, McElderry Park, a 103-acre area just east of Johns Hopkins University's centrally-located medical center. The neighborhood, which was once middle-class, is now a severe version of the city's downward spiral. About one-third of families there live in poverty, and workforce participation levels are 54%. Nearly three-quarters of residents don't have any college education, meaning they are generally supported either by the government, or low-wage service jobs—which make up an increasingly high percentage of jobs in the city. The neighborhood's physical emptiness symbolizes another discouraging trend, population loss, which is at the heart of Baltimore’s problems.

The physical results of this decline are apparent in places like McElderry Park, which is 80% black, and one of the city's most dangerous neighborhoods. Streets here are full of closed storefronts, cracked sidewalks, and trash-filled alleyways. The prime development pattern is row houses covered with “formstone,” a uniquely Baltimorean stucco that has been shaped, in various shades of grey, to emulate actual rock. While once considered formidable, many of these homes now have broken windows and boarded-up doors, contributing to the neighborhood's 22% home vacancy rate. There are few pedestrians, and some of the ones who do pass offer forbidding looks, or ask if you're there to buy drugs. Some lamp poles feature police cameras that flash blue lights nonstop all day, giving one the sense of being not only in a dangerous area, but a surveillance state. They should be interpreted, explained one officer, as a warning to “bike out of the area as fast as you can.” It’s no surprise that David Simon, while filming The Wire, used parts of McElderry Park and nearby neighborhoods to portray his depraved version of the city.

And yet McElderry Park is not an anomaly; it's one of dozens of similar Baltimore neighborhoods, contributing to a widespread atmosphere of blight. Together, these areas compile what one Baltimore Sun reporter dubbed the city's “other world,” marked by stagnancy and abandonment.

As noted over at Instapundit:

Baltimore Ambush: Trump forces Democrats to defend the indefensible, again. “What it shows is Trump not only means to ‘win’ against his opponents, he intends to annihilate them. His election game is on and he’s not playing beanbag. He using the same powerful tactics he was able use on Pelosi and her bickering ‘squad’ which had the effect of forcing Pelosi to defend the indefensible and making Rep. Ilhan Omar the face of the Democratic Party. Now he’s making urban decay the second face of the Democratic Party. His poll numbers went up after the first one. Count on them going up again after this.”