Melissa Firman, thank you for writing this article. I am a high school English teacher in Baltimore Cit. This place is my home, and the roughest parts of this city has its strongest and most appealing residents. The truth is that the part of town where I go to church, in Sandtown-Winchester, two blocks away from where Freddie Gray was chased down, is a very different place from Camden Yards. I have a friend who’s in Baltimore for a while, who tells me that kids these days are different from kids 20 years ago. These days, kids just want to leave Baltimore. It’s not about Eastside or Westside pride like it is in The Wire. And I drive Uber and Lyft on the weekends and I was talking with a guy in his 30s that grew up on the Burger King on Smallwood and North Avenue who told me that The Wire was an extremely accurate portrayal of Baltimore — 20 years ago. Now, it’s worse than The Wire. In the show, the crime was organized and now, in the four years post-Freddie Gray, we have over 300 murders a year, and since prosecution of the Baltimore PD by Marilyn Mosby, 40% of which is African-American (and 3 of the 6 cops that arrested Freddie Gray were African-American), a lot of police in these communities have been reticent. The kids in my classroom are smart kids. They’re good kids, caring ones. They have bright futures. But I don’t know if Baltimore is the place where you can see that kind of hope you want when you’re a kid right now, and unfortunately President Trump captures that reality.