Mayor Sheila Dixon is scheduled to meet with the Southwestern District's Police Community Relations Council this evening, an event that was on her public schedule earlier this week but is even more appropriate now after four people were shot in a house last night.

A gunman broke into the home in Irvington and shot four teens in a bedroom, one of them in the head. All are expected to survive, but it's the latest violence in what has been an unrelenting week. Since Sunday, Nov. 16, police say 11 people have been killed in Baltimore. That's 11 in the past 10 days. Slayings are still down in the city -- 206 this year compared with 265 at this time last year, but November is nothing to smile about, with 20 killings in 25 days, more than half of them in the last week and a half.

I was at a meeting in Park Heights last night where a group of dedicated residents is trying to organize a youth summit. Before they discussed ways of getting kids off the corners and into schools, group leader Ken Morrison asked for a "moment of silence for the young man who was killed last week at Lemmel."

Community leader Deborah Welford quickly added, "Not only for him, but for the young man who took his life. Too many of our children think that taking a life is the only way to solve their problems, and they end up spending the rest of their lives in jail."

The headlines have been horrific. A 14-year-old boy collapses at a fire station in Brooklyn and later dies; a 14-year-old charged with fatally stabbing a 15-year-old at William H. Lemmel Middle School, a man accused of fatally stabbing his wife outside the courthouse on North Avenue, and is shot by a police officer in the process; a pizza deliveryman shot in a robbery. Just two hours after the Ravens finished playing at M&T Bank Stadium, a  man killed in the Sharp-Leadenall neighborhood, which is between the stadium and Federal Hill and usually filled with fans walking to their cars.

Last night it was the four people shot in a house and this morning we learn another man was killed in Better Waverly, near a laundry on Greenmount Avenue.

And that doesn't even include the four people who were shot outside a bar in Odenton in Anne Arundel County, another man who was shot in Annapolis and a woman who had her throat slashed inside a Catonsville liquor store. The victim of that attack, Aysha Dawn Ring, had worked at Cristo Rey Jesuit High School in Baltimore and had planned a career in the Navy.

About the only good news this week was that the first detected gunshot by new sensors put up around Charles Village and Homewood wasn't a gunshot at all. The sensors, designed to pinpoint within 10 feet the location of a shot, alerted police to an address on East 29th Street, but officials now say the noise wasn't a gunshot but apparently was loud enough to register. The sensors noted it was probably a false alarm, but police went anyway and found nothing.