Police Chief Fired in Freddie Gray Aftermath

Two months after violent riots rocked the city of Baltimore, the city's police commissioner has been fired.

Commissioner Anthony Batts had been hand-picked by Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake to combat crime and to reform a troubled law enforcement department in one of America's most violent cities.

But Wednesday Rawlings-Blake announced she was firing Batts, saying the recent spike in homicides required a change in leadership.

Those murders came in the aftermath of riots over the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man who died while in police custody.

The Baltimore riots were just one episode in a growing backlash over police brutality against African-Americans around the country.

A Baltimore police union report on Wednesday blamed the city's fired police commissioner for allowing the riots there to get out of control.

"Officers repeatedly expressed concern that the passive response of the Baltimore police commanders to the civil unrest allowed the disorder to grow into full-scale rioting," Gene Ryan, president of the Baltimore Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 3, wrote in the report. "The riots were preventable."

But it was Mayor Rawlings-Blake who had instructed police in April to allow protests to turn violent, saying publicly at the time, "We also gave those who wished to destroy, space to do that as well."

In the weeks after those riots and the decision by the city's top prosecutor to file charges against police officers over Gray's death, homicides and other violent crimes spiked.

Arrests also began to plummet as word spread that police officers were afraid that they, too, would be charged with crimes if something went wrong during the course of their duties.

Baltimore's homicide total this year is 156, according to police. That's a 48 percent increase compared with the same time last year. Shootings have increased 86 percent.