Freddie Gray died in April 2015 of a spine injury suffered in a Baltimore police van, and the city rose. During the uprising and the week-long curfew that followed, police arrested nearly five hundred people, holding many for days without charge as courts and jails jammed; public defenders documented arrestees released en masse when no paperwork could be produced. The emblematic defendant was eighteen-year-old Allen Bullock, photographed smashing a police car with a traffic cone: he turned himself in on his parents' advice and was held on $500,000 bail — higher than that set for any of the six officers charged in Gray's death.
The prosecutions of those officers produced no convictions; the charges were dropped by mid-2016. Bullock, facing life-maximum riot counts, eventually received a suspended sentence and probation after years under the case's weight. Baltimore condensed the era's asymmetry into a single ledger — a dead man, zero officers punished, and the heaviest pretrial detention reserved for a teenager with a traffic cone — and the movement's bail funds, which had cut their teeth in Ferguson, became permanent infrastructure there.