Since the death of Freddie Gray in 2015 and subsequent riots, Baltimore has become the deadliest city in the United States. Baltimore’s homicide rate is now the highest in the country.

“[T]he pace of the killings this year has been stunning as the city struggles to recover from rioting in 2015,” the Washington Post reported on May 14. “As of Friday, 124 people had been slain, including five on a recent day. … It is more than triple Washington’s rate and higher than the homicide rates in New Orleans and Chicago, two places that have become national symbols of gun violence.” Baltimore is on track to maintain the highest homicide rate this year.

The Washington Post continued, “The 124 slayings in Baltimore, with a population of 614,000, bring the homicide rate to 20.2 per 100,000 residents.” Washington, D.C., another city known for its crime, has a rate of 6 per 100,000.

Two years ago, Baltimore went up in flames as fierce rioting and looting commenced after Freddie Gray was arrested and died in police custody. Before the facts of Gray’s arrest or the cause of his death became known, protesters determined the verdict: guilty. Then-Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake told a press conference that she instructed police “to do everything that they could to make sure that the protesters were able to exercise their right to free speech. … [W]e also gave those who wished to destroy space to do that as well.”

And they did. Rioters in the city destroyed damaged an estimated 285 businesses and $9 million in property.

All six police officers involved were found not guilty; three of them were acquitted by a black judge. Some of the officers themselves were black. Yet the media emphasized the turmoil as a white-against-black issue. Since then, homicide rates have grown, and it appears that police are keeping their distance, giving criminals space to destroy human lives.

“[T]he lives that are being lost in this crime spike, Baltimore is now at its highest per capita homicide rate in its history, are overwhelmingly black lives,” Heather Mac Donald wrote in her book The War on Cops. One policeman from Chicago told her “he’s never seen such hatred directed at officers in his 20 years in policing. He said this is an almost undoable job now.”

In the July 2015 Trumpet, editor in chief Gerald Flurry wrote: “Accusations of police racism are heightening public mistrust of law enforcement and fueling a trend of violent race-related incidents and lawlessness. Anger among certain high-profile segments of the black population in particular is growing, and is boiling over in rioting and violence with increasing frequency in American cities.”

Baltimore is falling apart, businesses are being boarded up, and people are dying in the streets. That is what happens when there is no law. That is what happens when you give criminals space to destroy, rob, loot and murder.

But the root causes of this unprecedented violence go beyond the justice system. Mac Donald writes:

This is a breakdown of the family that is leaving kids without any socialization and any decent role models. They don’t have fathers. So to say it’s an economic problem, I think, is completely false, and you have lots of Asian immigrants who are at much lower income than many people on welfare and their children are virtually not involved in crime because they have two parents at home that are teaching them academic discipline and respect for authority.

The Bible prophesies that such moral breakdown will lead to our cities burning with fire, just like Baltimore. Until the root causes are addressed and solved, the problems will only grow worse.