BALTIMORE — Engines raced across this city early Tuesday as the Fire Department strained to extinguish blazes, even as the police said some firefighters were reportedly having cinder blocks heaved at them as they responded to emergencies.As Baltimore residents recoiled from the rioting and looting that struck largely in the west of the city on Monday, the police said officers were deployed overnight alongside weary and harried firefighters to ensure their work was not disrupted by people with “no regard for life.”As dawn broke, the city was relatively calm compared with the violence that had left 15 officers injured — six seriously — from thrown bottles, rocks and bricks, as well as dozens of businesses, homes and cars damaged or destroyed by looting or arson. It is not known how many protesters were injured.
The police also reported that two people had been shot, each in the leg, in separate incidents overnight. One victim, a woman, was shot on Fulton Avenue near where some of the worst rioting and looting had occurred hours earlier. The other victim, a man, was shot about two miles west of the Mondawmin Mall.
At the Mondawmin Mall, where the rioting began, a few police cars sat in the parking lot early Tuesday morning, but the protesters seemed long gone. The police said a flier that circulated on social media had called for a period of violence on Monday afternoon to begin at the mall and to move downtown toward City Hall.
Members of the National Guard began to deploy in the city just after daybreak on Tuesday. Wearing tan and earth-green military fatigues and driving sandy-color humvees, they took up posts around the city’s Western District police station, the scene of earlier protests. More than a hundred National Guard members with rifles lined the street in front of Baltimore’s inner harbor.
Near the debris-strewn corner of Pennsylvania and North Avenues, scene of some of the worst rioting on Monday, including the incineration of a police car and the looting of a CVS drugstore, state police troopers in riot gear were lined up in a human barrier across two intersections as the sky began to lighten.
No protesters were visible. Some people had begun to clean up, with a pickup truck full of scrap metal parked near one line of police officers.
But fire engine sirens could still be heard and acrid smoke wafted from some of the areas hardest hit by arsonists who have left the Baltimore Fire Department stretched to its limits. One early-morning fire struck a large pawnshop in a commercial strip on the west side of the city, and several fire companies were called to put out the blaze.State and city officials said they hoped that measures scheduled to be put into effect on Tuesday would reduce the chances of a repeat of Monday’s unrest, where the police acknowledged that, at least early on, they had been outflanked and outnumbered.
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