Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott denounced a media inquiry made by a local journalist who insinuated that a Black city employee was affiliated with a street gang because of the clothing he was wearing.
Scott posted screenshots of an email inquiry that the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement received from journalist Gary Collins.
Collins requested information on a photo of a city employee who accompanied Scott and Maryland Governor Wes Moore on a safety walk through the city.
His email questioned whether that staffer, who was seen wearing a blue jacket and blue hat with his work apparel, was part of a gang.
“Why are the clear gang colors of blue, which tend to illustrate in communities that a person is affiliated or associated with Crips or Crip-related organizations, seen walking with two of the state’s most prominent elected officials?” Collins’ email reads. “Are active members of ‘crews,’ ‘groups,’ or other enterprises currently employed by Safe Streets?”
Attached to Collins’ email was a picture of four city employees who work for Baltimore’s Safe Streets program, a community violence interruption and prevention project launched in 2007 to reduce shootings and murders in the city’s high-violence areas.
Scott made an example of Collins’ message by sharing it on social media with a reprimand directed at the local journalist.
“Y’all according to Gary from Sinclair(Fox45) any black man in Baltimore with a blue hat and hoodie must be a crip. A blue hat in Baltimore = Crip? In Baltimore? These are the kind of questions being leveled against frontline community violence interrupters by MAGA activist, Sinclair reporter, and former RNC Delegate Gary Collins,” Mayor Scott wrote in a caption on Instagram. “This is ridiculous, this is racist, this is dangerous and this is unacceptable.”
Scott added that “MAGA wants us to go back to the good ole days where being Black and outside was treated as a crime,” and vilified Collins’ “blatant racism.”
“Gary, does wearing a blue suit make you a Crip?” Scott asked pointedly of the reporter who is seen wearing a blue plaid suit in his Instagram profile photo.
The mayor went a step further by pointing out several Baltimore schools whose school colors are blue.
“I guess all the students, alum and faculties are all Crips, and we should mandate they all change their colors?” Scott asked.
Collins’ email also asked whether the city enforces any measures to ensure taxpayer money isn’t funding the salaries of employees working with criminal enterprises, alluding to the local criminal case of David Caldwell.
Caldwell was a former Safe Streets supervisor for four years, then left the organization a month before he was charged with two felony drug offenses.
According to charging documents cited by a news report that Collins wrote, authorities say they saw Caldwell wearing “a blue jacket and blue sweatpants” during a “high-level narcotics sale” in February.
Officers arrested Caldwell during a traffic stop. In his car, they found a “black wrapped brick containing white powder, suspected to be cocaine.”
Collins’ recent email to the Baltimore mayor’s office asks whether Safe Streets workers wearing “clear gang colors” are being financed by public money.
Last month, Baltimore and other large, majority-Black cities were maligned by President Donald Trump as hotbeds of violent crime just before the president initiated his federal crime takeover of Washington, D.C. He also has indicated that he might deploy National Guard troops to other large, Democratic-run cities where he insists violent crime is running rampant, even though data shows crime has decreased significantly in the cities he named.
Maryland Gov. Wes Moore invited Trump to Baltimore for a safety walk to see the city for himself and then discuss effective public safety measures. In a TruthSocial post, the president said he would prefer to clean up the “crime disaster” in “out of control and crime-ridden Baltimore” before doing a walking tour of the city.
This launched a fiery war of words on social media between Moore and Trump in which Moore scolded the president for his divisive rhetoric.
