NEWARK STATE OF MIND

Mayor Ras Baraka's reasonable radicalism.

- KELEFA SANNEH

On an August day in 2011, a man stood outside City Hall in Newark, New Jersey, exhorting a crowd through a wireless microphone. "Stop giving love to these psychopaths," he roared. The "psychopaths" were criminals; a few days earlier, a twenty-nine-year-old teacher named Dawn Reddick had been shot and killed a seemingly random crime, except that killings in Newark had come to seem dispiritingly unrandom. The city was on its way toward ninety-three murders that year, with a population of two hundred and seventy-seven thousand people-a rate five times that of New York City, which sits less than ten miles east but often feels much farther.

The killing of Dawn Reddick was unsolved then-indeed, it remains unsolved.

So the speaker railed against the unknown perpetrators, as well as the systems and circumstances that enabled so much perpetration. "How you get a Chinese-made rifle in the middle of Newark?" he asked.