Baltimore Sun police reporter Justin Fenton has created a stir with his detailed posting on an earlier blog about being confronted by an angry man while trying to report on a murder in South Baltimore. I was particularly heartened that readers seemed to get it -- that reporters like Justin and all the others at this newspaper work hard to get original stories only to have them passed around and commented on in blogs and on Twitter.

(At left, Baltimore Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III testifies in Annapolis on a bill to give longer prison sentences in gun crimes. The photo was taken by Glenn Fawcett).

That's not necessarily a bad thing -- it's simply the way the information world works today. But it is nice that people recognize the difficulties of obtaining original news -- as one of my newsroom colleagues described, the difference between reporting and journalism. That said, Justin and others, such as Julie Bykowicz in Annapolis, worked overtime yesterday on the cop beat, providing a dizzying array of stories from a Senate hearing room to the streets of Baltimore.

Justin noted that homicide detectives made arrests in six separate murder cases in one day -- a confluence of events that certainly helps boost the morale of the detectives and their clearance rate. It's what cops should be in the news for; the cases ranged from the killing during a robbery of a Vietnam veteran who had received two Purple Hearts and the slaying of a pizza deliverer during a robbery.

But Justin also had to write about an officer who was arrested and charged with shooting at a man during a fight outside a Canton bar. Justin also notes that another bar owner is accusing the officer of threatening him with a gun hours earlier; this officer spent the night at Central Booking on his sixth wedding anniversary.

In the same paper, we have Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III testifying before a senate committee urging longer sentences in gun convictions, with the mayor using last year's killing of former City Councilman Kenneth N. Harris Sr. as the prime example. One of the men accused in his killing had been convicted of a gun crime and was sentenced to time served. And the debate over restrictions on imposing the death penalty still rages.

In my column today, I discuss the difficulties of policing under budget constraints and compare that to a time several years ago when police had the free-will to spend as they pleased. All in all, a busy day for Baltimore police, one that showcased the bad side, the good side their struggle to make the city safer despite laws that allow people convicted of gun crimes to serve minimal prison time and funds that keep shrinking.

The morning brought more misery: a man killed early Thursday in Northeast Baltimore.