A career criminal convicted of armed robbery shows up for a meeting with his probation agent with a .50 caliber handgun -- a small cannon -- in his car. A convicted murderer with a long criminal record but few years in prison shoots two people outside a city courthouse.

In both cases, on successive days, police officers shot and killed the suspected gunmen. And the circumstances has drawn outrage from Baltimore Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III, who has raced to both scenes and publicly slammed the judicial system.

His harsh, blunt rhetoric is sharply increasing as the year draws to a close with the city on pace to meet or exceed last year's murder count of 234, which was a 20-year low. In both cases, Bealefeld could not understand why the suspects were not in prison. Above, in a picture by the Baltimore Sun's Gene Sweeney Jr. police investigate Tuesday's shooting on Mount Hope Drive that involved the .50 caliber handgun

Here's what he told the Associated Press:

"These last 24 hours, (with) these maniacs running around our streets, one in the shadow of a courthouse and this guy comes to his probation office, what does it say about our criminal justice system? I think it says a lot. ... We need people to step up and stop being so creative about suspended sentences ... and put people in jail."

Here's what he told the Baltimore Sun, just moments before the latest shooting on Tuesday:

"It raises a lot of questions in my mind about the value of life, and the sentences that people in this city serve compared to what people in Baltimore County and surrounding jurisdictions get. We can't ignore that, and the citizens of Baltimore shouldn't ignore that. This is not some new revelation that Fred Bealefeld is drawing attention to - it's something that every cop and every citizen in this city knows. I don't expect citizens to be marching in the streets or the judges to run out of the Patapsco courthouse and say, 'Damn you for firing these shots.' If we're really gonna get serious about it, we need many, many more people to get really serious about this one issue. You don't hear me crusading about drugs in America, or about a lot of other stuff. But damn it, if we're gonna make this city safe, every single person with a love or passion for this place has to be serious about bad guys with guns. If there's zero tolerance for anything, it's got to be around guns."

The commissioner has clearly been frustrated over the past few days and he's not afraid to show it. He's going to crime scenes, returning phone calls from reporters and sounding off. The issues certainly aren't new, as he himself told us, but it could be an attempt to blunt disappointment and criticism when the year concludes without a dent in the homicide numbers. The reason: the judicial system failed by returning bad guys with guns to the streets.

But that doesn't make his statements wrong. Bealefeld is right -- rarely do we see a suspect or a victim who is not well versed in the criminal justice system. And by that I don't mean they're lawyers. It's like a bad, recurring dream. In Bealefeld's mind, his cops should never have had to confront the people they've shot in the past two days. They should've been in jail.

In the latest case on Tuesday, police tell us that Baltimore County detectives followed a man to the probation office in Northwest Baltimore because he was wanted in armed robberies in the county. When he emerged, they confronted him and he grabbed his gun from his car and opened fire. County officers shot him dead.

On Monday afternoon, outside the Hargrove District Court building on East Patapsco Avenue, police said Michael Sidney Guest Jr., 32, shot two people in the legs and then shot by a city officer. Guest, when was 15, he shot another youth in the head and pleaded guilty, but spent just under five years in prison. Guest died later at a hospital.

Guest had a convoluted series of prison stints. In 1994, a judge delayed imposing a 13 year sentence for the murder and instead put him away for three years for a handgun violation to give him a break. He served one year for the gun but in 1999 he got arrested on a drug distribution charge. Another judge then reimposed the 13 year sentence for the killing and folded an 8 year term for the drugs into that. The judge suspended four years, meaning Guest's total sentence was nine years. He got out after serving 4 and a half years because of credits earned while incarcerated. Later, he got sentenced to another three years on a drug conviction but was out in one.

Earlier this month, a police officer shot and wounded a man as he held up a liquor store in Hampden. The man had a previous record for armed robbery but had gotten out after getting a suspended three year sentence.

Police officers in Baltimore have shot four people in the past 11 days, killing three of them. Two of those killed and the one who was wounded had long criminal records.