The city's top cop can't sing (see earlier post) but he does have a marvelous way with words.

Last month, columnist Jean Marbella put some of Fred Bealefeld's favorite sayings to poetry -- such as "Don't come to Baltimore to act like a moron." He coined "bad guys with guns" and "staying in your lanes," and he keep other catchy phrases on hand to sum up the city's crime scenes: maniacs, jerks, skunks, cretins, idiots, cowards, fools and knuckleheads.

It's plain, simple and welcome talk out of a government bureaucrat to describe things the way he, and a lot of other people, see it. That's Bealefeld above talking to the media in a photo by the Baltimore's Sun's Barbara Haddock Taylor.

Today, Baltimore Sun reporter Julie Bykowicz heard the commish add another phrase to his repertoire of Bealefeldisms. At a hearing in Annapolis talking about juvenile violence, he noted "Baltimore's pyramid scheme of youth violence."

Julie tells me he went on to explain that one kid gets shot, and that kid gets his friends involved to do shootings, and then those guys get more people involved, and so on.