When Independent reporter Mark Hughes arrived in Baltimore, he stepped off the train at Penn Station and into a shooting scene in East Baltimore. Then, a few days later, he hit the streets with city cops and encountered a homicide scene. Joseph Taylor, 28, had been shot to death inside green Honda Accord in the 1300 block of W. Fayette St, one of two homicides and five shootings that night.

Today, we learned that police have made an arrest in Taylor's death. Here's how Det. Raymond Yost recounted the investigation:

The driver of the car was parked on Fayette Street and observed a small dark-colored car pull into the block. He recognized the driver of that car as Corey Darnell Parker, who he said had shot him previously. In that incident, he said Parker attempted to kill him over a "large amount of money." (Court records show Parker, who is also known as Corey Parks, was charged with attempted first-degree murder in May 2008. All charges were dropped by prosecutors in September 14, 2009. It is not clear if this is the same incident referred to by the witness).
"For this reason, the witness has been especially vigilant in looking out for the defendant," Yost wrote.
When the driver observed Parker drive up, he attempted to leave the area. At that time, a black male exited the vehicle and began shooting at the driver and his passenger. The driver ducked to avoid the shots, at which time his vehicle crashed into a parked car. The driver fled from the scene from the passenger door - presumably climbing over Taylor's body. The driver, who miraculously was unharmed, later came back and observed that his friend, Taylor, had been shot in the head.
The driver identified Parker through a photo array. Parker, of the 7200 block of Fairbrook Road in Gwynn Oak, has been charged with first-degree murder and was ordered held without bond. Now he heads to court.

Posted by Justin Fenton at 5:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
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The Independent last week ran blog comments and e-mails in a package to show the array of opinions we've been hearing since we launched this project. Check it out here to see if your comment was picked up.

Posted by Justin Fenton at 9:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
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"The Wire" was a cult hit in the UK - it aired every night at 11 p.m., meaning the series whizzed by in just a few months - but events like this show how much traction it gained: A "Wire" conference in Leeds, featuring two days of presentations by European and American professors on lessons centered around themes from the show.

There's an entire session on Omar:
Session 201- Omar: Ethics, Power and Perfomativity
201-a:"No shame in my game": Examining Omar's Challenge to Systems of Power, Aidan Condron (University of Sussex)
201-b: “A man gotta live what he knows, right?”: Omar and ‘Performativity, Kerstin Mueller
201-c: A Man Must Have a Code: The Masculine Ethics of Snitching and Not-snitching, Thomas Ugelvik (University of Oslo)
201-d: Omar Little: An Obituary, Juliet Brown & Nilam McGrath (University of Leeds)

Posted by Justin Fenton at 11:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)
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Mark and I are brainstorming some things that we saw while abroad. Obviously, I didn't need to travel thousands of miles to know that Baltimore and London are very different cities with very different challenges. But based on your experiences, and the dispatches that Mark and I have posted on this blog, what do you think our cities can learn from each other?

Posted by Justin Fenton at 8:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
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In Baltimore, and pretty much every American city, the mayor wields incredible power when it comes to policing. Most new mayors want their own person at the top, and they have priorities and initiatives that they would like to see carried out. Things can get ugly: Almost every Baltimore police commissioner in recent years has not been able to leave on their own terms, sacked amid bad publicity, soaring crime, or friction with City Hall.

In London, the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Department has always been appointed by the national government, and its oversight and budget were set by an independent authority. The Mayor of London, though the city's top public official, had basically no official say.

Not so anymore. New mayor Boris Johnson last year placed himself as the chairman of the Metropolitan Police Authority and has been issuing directives, a shakeup that made waves here - and which City Hall said is finally holding the Met accountable to the people. One of Johnson's first acts as the head of the authority was to chase out the then-police commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, a move that was impossible as mayor but done through his position on the authority.

"From our point of view, the mayor is the overwhelming voice of the customer, and they've been asking for certain things for a long time, and we want the police to focus on those things," Deputy Mayor Kit Malthouse told me.

He said the national government, referred to here as the Home Office, had been focused mainly on the Met's counterterrorism efforts, letting day-to-day street crime lag behind as a priority. While Johnson still has no formal powers as mayor to control the police department, as chair of the police authority he's tasked police with focusing on issues ranging from gangs and knives to crime mapping and dog fighting.

"Londoners respond to it - to knowing somebody cares and is responsible for crime," Malthouse said. "Our postbag on crime went from 30 or 40 letters to 400 a week, just because finally, there's somebody who's responsible and will take political responsibility for [police] performance."

From my perspective, not fully knowing the political controversy this move caused, I think its refreshing that Johnson wants to "take political responsibility" for crime, because he's not only afforded himself the opportunity to take credit when things go right but to be left holding the bag when things go wrong. Of course, such an active role can also become meddling, and disruptive. Either way, this is a turning point of sorts in the history of the Met, for better or for worse.

Posted by Justin Fenton at 11:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
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Mark Hughes, a crime correspondent from The Independent, blogged here occasionally as he visited sites throughout Baltimore. Now that he's been back in the UK for a few days, his pieces are starting to appear in the papers here. If you'd like to see how he took all that he saw and packaged it for the readers there, check out today's story.
This article is mainly about the community efforts he observed; the title is about Sonja Sohn's "ReWired for Change," but the article is actually quite more comprehensive. He covered a lot of ground.

Posted by Justin Fenton at 3:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
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Just off Coldharbour Lane in South London's Lambeth neighborhood, a group of men are standing around at the mouth of an alley, steps from an 10-foot high steel gate being manned by three people.

In other parts of this neighborhood, these images might be ominous. But above the gate are letters spelling out "Love." The walls are painted with images of peacocks and trees, an explosion of warm colors that assure the children streaming into the Kids Company support center that this is a safe haven. Inside, children are eating hot meals, sculpting clay figures and playing games together. Adults are reading to them, or showing them how to use a computer.

"For a lot of our kids, this their last resort," said Derrick "Anthony" Mitchell, the duty manager at Kids Company who said he once ran with a gang.

The center was started 11 years ago by Camila Batmanghelidjh, a psychotherapist who mortgaged her own home to start the organization and keep it going. An overwhelming percentage of the kids who visit have come on their own, hearing about the program through word of mouth. Many of them have trouble getting a meal at home, or may not even have a home, and have been exposed to or involved with gang violence.

Mitchell said the challenges are nothing new to London's impoverished neighborhoods. He sold drugs, and lost a family member to violence at age 19 when his sister bled to death after being stabbed in the leg. He says the problems are only recently emerging to the forefront.

But Zievrina Wilson, the center manager for Kids Company, said she's seen a shift in the recent years. On Nov. 5, she said she was riding on a city bus when a bullet crashed through the window, nearly missing her head. At the center, newspaper clippings of three teens who lost their lives to violence are posted in a dimly-lit alcove.

In recent years, headlines in the national papers have been dominated by stories about youth violence, including a rise in shootings and a spate of stabbings that claimed the lives of school-age children. Stories were picked up by the media about parents equipping their young children with body armor as a precaution. With a homicide rate of only 2 per 100,000 people, killings of teens still cause national outrage, though some worry that the flurry of news stories is making the public numb to the problem.

"They go to schools in failing areas, there's not any aspirations, and the teachers don't care," Wilson said. "No one fights anymore. Kids are shooting each other over post codes because they have nothing else to aspire to. It's a mask, so no one can hurt them again."

Wilson said Kids Company is about "empowering young people, by any means necessary." On one corner of the building, volunteer Ibrahim Mohammed, 23, is watching kids fiddle on computers. In the next room, a 9-year-old girl has made a whimsical half-human, half-animal creature out of clay. “Lots of people tell me I’m good,” the girl says of her art. And in the back, 17-year-old Kayann Lewis is singing an original song and strumming a guitar inside a fully functional music studio.

What appears to be a thriving after-school center is actually much more, said David Gustave, an educational motivator. Kids are screened at the outset, and are offered therapy and counseling. Some need guidance to find housing or work their way back into school, all of which the group can assist with.

“Young people carry a lot of stuff – they’re victims, really,” Gustave said. “Through loving and stable relationships, they can get gain empathy and trust. The kind of things we take for granted.”

Posted by Justin Fenton at 3:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
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Baltimore really has become a punching bag here. London's mayor weighed in yesterday on months-old comments from a politician that parts of Britain were becoming like the Baltimore depicted in "The Wire." Not sure what sparked this response so long after the original comment, though it should be noted that pieces by Mark Hughes about his stay in Baltimore began running this week in the Independent.

"It is far, far more dangerous in Baltimore than it is in London, especially for gun crime," Johnson said. Of course, he's absolutely right - guns are scarce in the UK and the blight and poverty are not nearly as pervasive as in Baltimore. But it says something about politics here that such a comparison would even be made in the first place, and that officials feel compelled to dignify it with a response.

By the way, Mark and I did a round of radio appearances today, on six different stations, including the BBC's Today program, the most influential radio show in the country. Here is the link to that interview (scroll down to the very bottom).

Posted by Justin Fenton at 8:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Just hours before I arrived in the London neighborhood of Kentish Town on Thursday, a transgender prostitute named Destiny Lauren was found dead in a front yard a few streets away from where I was staying. But the news wouldn't spread until today, when police announced that an unidentified man had been jailed "in connection" with the crime and released on bail.

The police here typically wait until an arrest has been made, or until they're stuck and need the public's help, to publicize major crimes. One press officer told me that informing the public about the crime in their neighborhood would lead to irrational fear and that they should only know about crimes when police need to get the information out. I can't tell you how many times a crime falls through the cracks in Baltimore and we get flak from people accusing us of covering things up for police. People demand to know what is happening in their neighborhood, and the backlash is swift when officials fail to inform the community about a major incident.

As far as the process when someone is arrested, there are some interesting differences. First off, you can be arrested merely for suspicion of a crime and placed on "police bail", in which police can impose restrictions on the suspects while they work to investigate the crime. After a suspect is booked, their fingerprints are taken and an officer takes a swab for their DNA, which is logged into a database. This is different from the process in Maryland, where until recently DNA was only collected upon conviction and which currently occurs only when someone is charged with a violent crime. Those who are charged are placed in their own private cell, which has a door for privacy and a toilet, and they are drug tested. If they fail the drug test, they are hooked up with a drug counselor and can be required to attend drug counseling while they are out on bail. The only time the criminal justice system can impose such requirements in Maryland is upon a conviction, at least in my experience.

Off to do a radio interview. Spent today with a homicide squad in the throes of a new case, and will be blogging about it whenever I get the chance.

Posted by Justin Fenton at 2:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)
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Yesterday, as suggested, I attended one of Mayor Sheila Dixon’s public events. It was a tree-planting ceremony at Dewees park, in the north of the city. It did not go well.

I arrived just before 9am, ahead of the mayor, and told her spokesman that, if possible, I would like to speak with her about crime and the issues I have witnessed during my visit. He took the message to her and I was told that it may be possible at the end.

An hour later the spokesman again raised the subject with the mayor and she made it clear there would be no interview. “What does he want?” she asked her spokesman. She said she did not want to speak about crime and added: “I’m planting trees today.”

So there will be no voice from the mayor in anything I write back home.

I leave Baltimore this evening after a spending a week here. I would like to think I have seen many sides of the city. Because of the nature of this exchange, I spent most of my week in neighbourhoods with high crime rates.

But many people throughout my trip had urged me to make sure I also visited the good parts of Baltimore. Yesterday I did that. I walked around Fort McHenry and the inner harbour and then went to some bars in Fells Point.

The city, due to its high homicide rate, is inextricably linked with crime, something which has no doubt been exacerbated by The Wire. But throughout my stay I have also witnessed the many good things the city has to offer.

While certain parts of the city are intimidating, I can assure fellow Brits that the whole of the city is not the murderous, drug dealing haven as is portrayed on the television.

The blog will continue over the next week or so, but most of the updates will now come from Justin who is in the UK until Thursday.

However, The Independent will be running articles from Justin and I throughout the week. I will post the links as and when they are published for those of you who may wish to read them.

The first of these ran in Saturday’s edition, and can be found here.
There is a link to Justin’s first article within the story.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the first part of this exchange. Thanks for reading and thanks for having me.

Posted by Mark Hughes at 3:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (35)
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I knew going in to this trip that any comparisons between Baltimore and London, and the UK as a whole, would have to be kept in proper context. They are very different places with very different challenges and very different ways of dealing with them.

But the lack of action on my ridealongs has been quite a bit ridiculous, especially since the press and the officers I rode around with in Manchester and South London's Brixton insist that these are tough streets. Indeed, during roll call, when officers are apprised of recent events in the neighborhood, they outlined some gritty stuff taking place. However, after 14 hours on the streets, here's what I witnessed firsthand:

Manchester (dubbed "Gunchester"):
-A car full of teens who had just finished smoking marijuana
-A kid whose bike furious bike riding raised suspicions but turned out to be nothing

Brixton (referred to as London's drug and gun capital):
-A man suspected of drunk driving (his blood alcohol level was below the legal limit)
-A fruitless search by car for a man with a vegetable knife
-A check on a home believed to be burglarized (it was not)

Of course, 14 hours on the street is hardly enough time to get a full view of any area, just like the action-packed five hours experienced by Independent journalist Mark Hughes in West Baltimore wasn't indicative of every night in the city. My challenge is determining just what constitutes a tough area here and putting that in the proper context. Crime, and particularly perception of crime, is all relative, but then again, many of the locals who have e-mailed me told me that most of the crime here was completely blown out of proportion. I personally haven't witnessed much to tell them otherwise.

Posted by Justin Fenton at 1:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (12)
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The headquarters of the Greater Manchester police force's X-Calibre squad could pass for any Baltimore police district station. Their second-floor office in center of the city's highest crime area, the Moss Side, was wallpapered with dozens and dozens of mug shots of young men identified as gang members, with names like "Tree Frog," "Baby Soldier," "Screwface" and "Dirt Star." Red and blue bandanas hanging over each group's section on the wall signaled their affiliation. Two of the major gangs even have started affiliating themselves with the Bloods and Crips.

"Many of these gangs are family members - it's almost as if you're born into that family, you're under that umbrella [of a gang]," said Detective Sgt. Rob Cousen. "It's difficult for lads to get out of that."

But Baltimore this is not. While Manchester's underbelly has drawn terrifying headlines in recent years and was compared by a British politician to inner city Baltimore, I drove around with officers for seven hours and saw clean streets and alleys, well-kept (and inhabited) homes and saw very few people out, on a Friday night no less. It rained intermittently, which could have been a factor, but the young men whose shocking crimes were explained to me in detail were nowhere to be found. I didn't even see a uniformed police presence, except for a few officers on foot patrol in the downtown nightlife hub (Literally. We didn't come across a uniformed officer until the end of the night when the officers kindly dropped me off at my downtown hotel).

It could have just been one of those slow nights, as there continue to be shootings and other gang-related activity (Cousen is due in court Monday to testify in an attempted murder trial for two men linked to a shooting inside a crowded club). But the city also went the entire month of August without a shooting - a feat that officials believed was a first, at least in recent memory.

That may be due to the work of the X-Calibre team, which has been targeting their efforts on intelligence gathering and intervention into gang activity. Gang-related firearms "discharges" were down 81 percent in the past fiscal year, something officials hope can help the city shed its nickname of "Gunchester."

I have much more to share about Manchester, but I've got to zip over to a ridealong in Brixton, an area of South London which over the years has been referred to as London's gun and drugs capital. More later.

Posted by Justin Fenton at 11:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)
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During my time in Baltimore I have endeavored to look at the whole spectrum of crime in the city. I have spoken to people who have taken and sold the drugs which have fuelled much of the murder.

I have spent evenings with uniformed police officers on the front line whose job it is to prevent and solve crime and I have chatted with detectives at murder scenes.

I have spoken to whole host of community groups who are working to try and resolve the issues in their neighborhood, which, depending on the area of the city, can include poverty, drug dealing, gun crime, gang-affiliation and murder.

And I have visited the court system and met with federal and state prosecutors who are charged with bringing Baltimore’s criminals to justice and have heard the problems they face.

Unfortunately I have not been granted an audience with, arguably, the two people ultimately responsible for rectifying Baltimore’s high crime rate.

Both the Mayor and the Police Commissioner have refused to be interviewed during this week-long exchange. The official reason is scheduling issues. Neither of them have had the time to speak with me.

However I can’t help but think that, because the ostensible reason for my trip is The Wire, they could be disinclined to meet with me for fear that I will focus on nothing but the negative image of the city as portrayed on the show.

Ultimately I do not think their refusal or inability to co-operate has impacted too much upon my ability to get a good impression of the city’s crime picture. Although perhaps their input would have lifted my coverage and informed my views and observations.

I am aware that the mayor has a public schedule and I have been told that I am more than welcome to turn up and attempt to speak with her. I may attempt this tomorrow but there is a caveat. Her office says there is no guarantee she will speak with me.

Posted by Mark Hughes at 4:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (14)
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I sat down this morning with Sir Paul Stephenson, the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Department, for a rare one-on-one interview. Stephenson commands a force of 34,000 officers and more than 50,000 total staff, and is responsible for areas of law enforcement that in America might be handled by federal or other authorities.

I will post later tonight, after touring Manchester's Moss Side with the Xcalibre gang unit, but generally, Stephenson said he was "pleased, not delighted," about crime reductions in London while discussing an uptick in gun incidents and his agency's efforts to tackle youth gangs. He also talked, with some depth, about a recent controversy in which he ordered specialized units to stop armed patrols in high crime areas. The Metropolitan police force is not armed other than a very small number of special initiatives (representing less than 500 officers), and he wants to keep it that way. It's the will of the public and of the police officers themselves, he said. The unit that was carrying out the patrols are used to carrying weapons and didn't realize the gravity of the situation, he said.

At the end of our chat, he told me to pass along that he wished well for Baltimore officers.

Posted by Justin Fenton at 9:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)
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Drugs, I am told, are the main cause of crime in Baltimore. Not only are they responsible for much of the theft and burglary but most of the murders too.

Tens of thousands of people in the city are addicted to narcotics such as heroin and crack cocaine. They buy their fixes from dealers in open-air drug markets such as the busy one I walked past yesterday at the corner of Park Heights Avenue and Cold Spring Lane in West Baltimore.

As well as the many drug dealers on that corner there is also a building which is home to the ‘I Can’t We Can’ rehabilitation progam. Inside the building is a large room where men sit on one side, women the other, and share their experiences of addiction with each other.

I spoke to people like Karen Royster, a 46-year-old woman who became homeless and lost custody of her six children because of her addiction to crack cocaine. Terry Bullock, a 36-year-old man who has admitted he would steal and attack people to fund his habit. And Kathalene, a 48-year-old who had been taking drugs since 11 and has been arrested ten times.

All of them are now clean and have been for varying periods of between five years, in Kathalene’s case, to just a month, in Terry’s.

Yet they did it not through a government-funded initiative, but through a group run on a shoestring budget from inside a run-down building behind a supermarket.

Not because they wanted to, but because the I Can’t We Can program is, according to everyone I spoke to there, the only one in the city which offers treatment on demand. In other words, users can turn up at any time during the day or night and be seen instantly.

Other programs involve a waiting list. This is unappealing because if drug addicts turn up asking for treatment and are told to return at a later date the chances are that, in the intervening period, they will return to using drugs.

The I Can’t We Can program attempts to wean people off drugs by introducing spirituality. It does not offer its subscribers a drug substitute, such as methadone. The organizers say that simply giving users another drug does not solve the problem.

They would no doubt disagree with a government-backed pilot scheme currently being run in the UK. It involves giving heroin addicts two injections a day of actual heroin, not the usual methadone subsitute. It is highly controversial but, after three years, those running it claim that they have seen a huge drop in crime by those taking part.

Posted by Mark Hughes at 11:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)
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Catching some rest after my overnight flight, I woke up to the sound of police sirens and a constant pop-pop-popping outside the Kentish Town apartment where I'm staying. Gunfire? Nope. It's Guy Fawkes Night in the UK, marking the downfall of a plot to destroy the House of Parliament in 1605. The fireworks celebrations will last all weekend.

Anyway, I'm working to get my feet set and haven't hit the streets yet, but in chatting with reporters here at the Independent, I'm already hearing some pretty significant differences in how reporters cover crime here.

In Baltimore, and the U.S. generally, an arrest in a criminal case marks a big moment in the reporting process. Authorities have to file charging documents with the court, requiring certain evidence to be laid out. With the suspect formally identified and charged, the digging then begins on trying to find out more about the case and the suspect.

Here, it is the opposite. Once an arrest is made, there is essentially a blackout on information. Reporters are prohibited by the government from publishing information about the case, particularly anything about the defendant, out of concern that it will influence potential jurors. Doing so runs the risks of fines and contempt of court charges. If a reporter gets major information on a case, but an arrest is made while they're putting their article together, they will have to sit on that info until the case has been adjudicated.

Of course, in America, our courts will call hundreds of people if necessary to find 12 who have not heard about the case, and they are instructed by the judge not to seek out information in newspapers or on TV during the proceedings. Reporters here couldn't believe what I was telling them about our access to court records and our ability to write about a case after arrest, and leading up to and during a trial. One expressed reservations that the media accounts would indeed sway a jury unfairly.

Another big difference is that police scanners, a fixture in U.S. newsrooms, aren't a factor here. They wait to hear from police about major crimes, and alerts can sometimes take days, reporters said. And remember, because of the contempt of court issues, if they find out about a crime after an arrest is made, they're essentially powerless to do any meaningful reporting because of the jury bias issues. I'm curious whether I'll be held to that standard as a visiting journalist attending courts next week, and I have no idea how I would get to a crime scene without the ridealongs I have scheduled in the coming days.

Posted by Justin Fenton at 2:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)
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East Baltimore seems to me to be the worst area of the city in terms of crime and violence. A quick look at the homicide stats shows that 85 of this year’s 189 homicides have taken place in the Eastern, Northeastern and Southeastern districts.

Residents obviously recognise this and yesterday I spent time with two groups who are working to reduce the violence.

Living Classrooms is an organisation which takes teenagers from East Baltimore who have been convicted of crimes and so are known to the Department of Juvenile Services. The programme then trains the children in certain practical skills (woodwork, electrical engineering, hairdressing etc…) to help them get a job at the end of a 10 month course.

Every child graduates with a job and I’m told that the current success rate is that 71 per cent of the kids are still in employment three years after graduation. I spoke with two of the newest recruits. They asked me not to name them.

One, who was 19, told me how, previously, he was selling marijuana to help raise his daughter. He explained that drug dealing put money in his pocket daily and instantly whereas in a job he would only receive a pay cheque once a month, fortnight or week. He said that he joined the Living Classrooms because: “I realised I needed to become a father for my daughter to look up to”.

The other said that he had previously had “problems” and said that his neighbourhood contained: “A lot of killing and violence. You can get trouble even if you don’t want it.” He said he wanted a “fresh start”.

The effort the boys were putting in to changing their lives around really impressed me. As did the work of the Safe Streets programme. They are a group of reformed criminals who include in their number men who have served prison sentences for murder and former drug dealers. They now mediate in disputes between rival gangs in the area in an effort to reduce murders and violence.

The aspect of their work that most intrigued me, however, was the fact that they do not share any of the information they receive with the police. The reason is understandable, I suppose. They feel that if they were to co-operate with the police it would damage their credibility and effectiveness.

I can’t help but wonder how homicide detectives feel about the situation whereby an anti-violence group may have valuable information about a murder but refuses to reveal it.

Posted by Mark Hughes at 12:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)
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Since I've been here many people have sent me emails pointing out that, while the murder rate in Baltimore is very high, the murder rate for people who are not involved in crime or in the drug trade is very low.

They point out that as a white professional man I am as unlikely to be murdered here as I am anywhere. What do the figures say, though?

Last year 234 people were murdered in Baltimore City. A rate of one in 2,700. But 194 of them had criminal records and 163 had been arrested for drug offences. That means that 82 per cent of murder victims are or were criminals themselves. And 70 per cent were involved in drugs.

Forty people had no police record. That means that the likelihood of being murdered in Baltimore if you have no criminal history is one in 16,000. Slightly less panic-inducing, but those without criminal records are still more likley to be murdered here than in, say, Britain where the rate is about one in 85,000.

Addendum: Something I should have added. Of these 234 murders the police identified 107 suspects. Of these 94 had criminal records and 76 had drug arrest history. That's 87 per cent and 71 per cent respectively.

As people keep telling me, it seems like most of the murders are criminals killing criminals.

See The Sun's map of city homicides

Posted by Mark Hughes at 2:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (17)
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Shameless plugging here, but if anyone wants to hear Justin and I on Ed Norris' radio show you can do so here: http://tinyurl.com/yfyugj2

Similarly if you want to see us on Fox45 News you can do so here: http://tinyurl.com/yzjt7gq

And finally, my newspaper back home is also running a version of this blog. If you want to take a look you can at www.independent.co.uk/baltimore

Next week I will be publishing much lengthier articles about my time in Baltimore. I'll be sure to post a link here as well as on my own paper's site. If any of you are so inclined you can take a look.

Posted by Mark Hughes at 11:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

Last night I got to see crime in Baltimore up close. A little too close at times. Having been refused an official ridealong by the Police Department, Justin and I managed to arrange to go out on patrol with two union officials, Bob Cherry and Gene Ryan.

Given the fact that homicides in the city occur almost daily (and shootings even more frequently) I should not have been surprised that our first call was to a report of a man shot in a car in West Baltimore.

The victim, 28-year-old Joseph Leegreen Taylor, was not dead when we arrived. He died later in hospital.

The scene was one which must be familiar to officers, but was new to me. A car riddled with bullet-holes was crashed into another vehicle. Through the open passenger door I could see blood soaking the seat. And on the ground were multiple bullet casings, circled with red chalk and each marked with a yellow number.

After listening to detectives exchange theories on what might have happened we left and headed to a project block nearby. There we met two patrolmen who suspected some men in the projects of holding a drug stash. The four police officers split up, two went one side, two the other. Justin and I followed the union guys.

Two minutes later, amid the shouts of “five-0”, we heard a scream. The union cops ran in the direction of the shout. Justin and I, for some reason, ran too. When we reached the other side of the projects we learned that the scream was that of a man who was now in handcuffs. After some questioning and a search (no drugs were found) he was released and told to go home.

Our ridealong was coming to the end, but the most intense action was to come. The jovial chat in the car was interrupted by the announcement of a “signal 13” – officer in distress – on the police radio. That was followed by the shout of an officer who screamed: “I need another unit. Give me another unit”.

We switched on the lights and sirens and blazed through the streets. We did not know what we were attending at the time, but it later transpired that an officer making a car stop had requested the back-up when men in the car jumped out and fled.

Upon arriving at the scene the officers we were with jumped out of the car and, again, Justin and I followed. We ran into the back garden of a house where cops, some of whom had drawn their guns, were searching the bushes with a handgun.

As a helicopter shone a spotlight on the garden, the police radio declared: “The suspect is a black male wearing a blue hat and blue jeans,” And then added the following detail: “He is armed. Repeat, the suspect has a handgun.”

It was at this point I decided that, while I am keen to see crime in Baltimore, I don’t want to become a victim of it.

Despite its reputation, I have to say that, during the short time I have spent in the Baltimore, I have never once felt in any more danger than I do when walking the streets of London or any other large city.

But on hearing that radio announcement I realized that perhaps I had gotten a bit too close to the action. I was armed with nothing more than a notepad and was unwittingly involved in the search for a gunman. In any city that is a dangerous situation. One best observed from a safe distance like the back seat of police patrol car, which is where I watched the rest of the search.

Posted by Mark Hughes at 11:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (33)
Categories: Mark Hughes