Once more with feeling: Violence didn’t start with Freddie Gray’s funeral

It started with Freddie Gray’s death while in the custody of the Baltimore police department. A meditation by Rebecca Traister, at The New Republic, which includes this:

Violence broke out and erupted not when students threw stones at police, but when Freddie Gray suffered a spinal cord injury while in police custody, and, eventually, died.

But somehow the original act in this story—the killing of a man—has been detached from what happened in its aftermath, even at the same time that the two events are inextricably linked. In The International Business Times’s account: “The violence broke out just a few blocks from the funeral of the 25-year-old Freddie Gray. … Trouble then spread through parts of the city. … [H]undreds of police moved into glass-strewn streets where the worst of the violence had taken place and used pepper spray on rioters who had sacked convenience stores.” In this formulation, the “worst of the violence” was apparently the sacking of convenience stores and the resulting glass-strewn streets, not the use of pepper spray or the death of a young man.