Not the best timing.

A spate of weekend shootings and a third of the Baltimore Police Department's patrol cars sputtered to a stop after mistakenly getting fed diesel. Playing off the mayor's desire to give city workers unpaid leave to fill a hole in the budget, one cop told me, "They've furloughed the cars."

Patrol cars were being fixed Monday and last night but it's safe to say this could cost the city thousands in overtime and other costs (at left, a pump as a crime scene at the Fallsway station in a photo by The Sun's Barbara Haddock Taylor). Just a mistake the city didn't need. Cops have about 1,200 vehicles in their fleet and at least 70 went down because of this mistake. Most were marked patrol cars, the type used to keep neighborhood safe.

Coming soon in the newspaper, I'll take a look at nonfatal shootings in the city, which have dropped about 25 percent since last year and more than 60 percent over the past decade. Even with homicides going up a bit this year over last, city police say the years-long trend bodes well and shows that violence is ebbing.