ABSTRACT
About two weeks after Freddie Gray died in police custody and droves of residents-many black-took to Baltimore streets to protest anti-black policing and official violence, police in Charlotte, NC, decided, in the words of one Charlotte Observer news story, to "engage in dialogue on officer-involved deaths". The press have a longstanding role in the creation of dominant ideology in the US, specifically when it comes to explanations of people and spaces of urban environments. Journalists operate within an interpretive community that measures and maintains a paradigm of approved journalistic practice. By and large, local coverage of Baltimore protests in newspapers whose cities had their own instances of nationalized police violence against black men focused on information updates about Baltimore's unrest and the potential causes for violence that were rooted in national narratives of racialized disorder. News place-making did ideological work in shaping coverage of Freddie Gray's death and subsequent protests in Baltimore that appeared in local news across the US.
