Baltimore fire officials are planning a live burn demonstration on Tuesday in downtown Baltimore to demonstrate how well sprinklers work. I hope it works better than a similar demonstration in Washington this month when the fire got out of control and burned at least two firefighters.

It was particularly embarassing because in DC, the fire chief was there and tried to put out the spreading flames only to find out that there was no backup hose. In fact, the Washington Post reported that the fire officials there violated a series of safety regulations.

Sound familiar?

Remember two years ago when we reported that a fire academy student died in a live burn that Baltimore fire officials had set up in a vacant rowhouse. They too violated dozens of safety violations that included not having a backup hose.

Hopefully this burn goes better. For more details about the event:

Continue reading "Fire demo planned " »

Posted by Peter Hermann at 9:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Neighborhoods
        

After more than a year of debate, a failed effort by the liquor board and contant complaints by residents of Mid-Town Belvedere and Mount Vernon, Baltimore's police commissioner has issued a padlock order to Suite Ultralounge.

This bottle club has been a constant irritant for residents and defended by its owner and lawyer as a victim of misplaced community outrage. They say violence outside the club but attributed to patrons unfairly demonizes the nightspot that attracts teens.

The debate over crime outside Ultralounge grew into a citywide debate over crime downtown at aother nightclubs and led to talk about whether the city was safe at night. Police have been using the padlock law to hold bar and liquor store owners more accountable and have forced several to close or revise their security plans.

A double shooting and stabbing that police say began as disputes inside the club on East Chase Street, in the basement of the historic Belvedere hotel, are just the most public. Police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi gave some more examples:

-- 17-year-old patron held up at gunpoint at 12:58 a.m. on Jan. 18 outside the club, beaten and robbed of money and a cell phone.

-- A 15-year-old patron who robbed two 15-year-old male patrons at gunpoint as they left the club on Feb. 1

-- A male patron who was stabbed near the club and suffered life-threatening injuries on Oct. 11, which prompted a retaliatory shooting that left a female with a through and through gunshot wound to the thigh that same night. Police said the dispute started inside the club.

“The reality is there is no question you can tie a number of violent offenses to this club,” said City Councilman William H. Cole IV. “Whether or not the liquor board does what it needs to do, the city has its own tools it can use in the most egregious cases. The entire community has been begging for this for well over a year now.”

The attorney for the club, Peter A. Prevas, didn't return a call I made to his office this afternoon.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 5:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)
Categories: Confronting crime, Neighborhoods
        

So after waiting months for Baltimore Circuit Court Judge Kaye Allison to rule on whether Suite Ultraloung, a controversial bottle club in the basement of the Belvedere Hotel, can stay open, we finally get what amounts to a non-ruling.

The judge, in essence, decided that Baltimore's liquor board needs to formulate standard rules to shut the club before it shuts the club. The board had thought existing rules for closing troublesome night spots were good enough, but until late last year, the bottle club had been running under antiquated rules that allowed it to escape the scrutiny of the board. The city changed that because of complaints, and the judge said those changes require new standards before the lock can go on.

This means the club can stay open until the liquor board completes its new regulations for revoking licenses and then have another hearing on Suite Ultralounge. The easiest way for that to happen is November, when the club has its license up for renewal. That's a full year from when the board revoked its license, citing the club as a danger to the community.

Mayor Sheila Dixon had this to say in a statement:

“Today’s ruling was very disappointing news with respect to the Suites Ultralounge, which has not been a good neighbor. Unfortunately, this decision does not bring closure to the residents of Mt. Vernon, an area where we have seen too many violent incidents linked to this nightclub.

The Liquor Board should act quickly to address the concerns raised in the judge's opinion. We are hopeful that bureaucracy and red tape will not prevent the board from finally shutting down this nuisance club.”

There's a good chance this whole episode could be prolonged even further. If the liquor board, as expected, yanks the club's license again in November, its owners will most certainly appeal to Circuit Court again. A judge could again take months to rule, find the board's new regulations inadequate and send it back yet again or decide it can or cannot be shuttered. Either way, more appeals are likely.

The only reprieve residents have is that because Allison took so long to rule in this case, liquor board chairman Stepan Fogleman has told me he would no longer grant shuttered bars a stay pending their appeal to court, as they did with Club Ultralounge. Fogleman said he had expected a ruling within 30 days, not three months. That would mean club owners would have to make an extra trip to court to seek a stay from a judge if they want to remain open pending appeal.

For now, Club Ultralounge, linked to several violence acts including shootings and maurading youths in Mount Vernon and Mid-Town Belvedere, will get to stay open. It's attorney, Peter A. Prevas, told The Sun's Julie Bykowicz and Sam Sessa (see his nightlife blog, Midnight Sun, for yet another story about violence in the area), "It's certainly a victory. We won the battle but not necessarily the war."

Posted by Peter Hermann at 7:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)
Categories: Neighborhoods
        

Sophia Litrenta, the 9-year-old girl who ran a lemonade stand to raise money to save the Baltimore Police Department's Mounted Unit, handed the city's police commissioner a check for $2,319 this morning at the horse stables.

Sophia's at left, petting a horse with Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III, at her lemonade stand on Tuesday. The photo was taken by The Sun's Lloyd Fox.

The little girl from Lutherville served the lemonade and cookies earlier this week after seeing reports that the horse unit might be disbanded if the city can't come up with about $200,000 in private funds. Budget cuts forced the city to take away funds and the department is seeking donations through a private foundation.

Anthony Guglielmi, the city's police spokesman, said the foundation has raised nearly $60,000 so far.

Here's how to donate money to the horse unit: Contact Laurie Crosley at the Baltimore Community Foundation for the Police Foundation. Donations can be mailed to her at: Baltimore Community Foundation; 2 E Read St # 9; Baltimore, MD 21202-6903. Checks should be made out to: Baltimore Community Foundation, Police Foundation Fund. The cover letter or check should specify that the funds are to used to support the Mounted Unit. The phone number there is: (410) 332-4171.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 9:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Neighborhoods
        

Another weekend and more crime at the Inner Harbor.

I thought we had a respite after the early summer stabbings, attacks and large crowds of youths terrorizing the visitors (at left, Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III patrols the downtown area after a spate of crime in June). But Saturday night, after members of a Bloods gang passed members of a Crips gang in the Light Street pavilion, at least one person took out a gun and opened fire. Another shot was fired near an outside ice cream stand.

One reader wrote to me that he was at the Harbor Friday and Saturday nights but didn't seen any police. That's a bit much, even though the heavy contingent assigned to the downtown area earlier this summer has dispersed. The city couldn't keep that going with all the other violence in the city, but now that its no longer at full strength we see what happens.

On Sunday, both the mayor and the police commissioner said they wanted cops to take a tougher stance, even rousting suspected gang members who come downtown. "Some people might not like it," Sheila Dixon told The Sun's Annie Linskey. "Some radicals are going to speak out about it. Our officers are going to have to become more aggressive."

No mayor wants to lose the Inner Harbor to crime on his or her watch.

Here is the mayor's statement from Sunday night (though it pales in comparison to what Dixon told The Sun in the interview:

“I am outraged by the shootings that occurred yesterday evening in the Pratt Street Pavilion.  The Inner Harbor is for everyone.  It is the premier destination for Baltimore’s families and millions of visitors. We will do everything in our power to make sure it stays that way.   
 
We will not tolerate the Inner Harbor being a “hangout” for those who break the law, intimidate, or create a nuisance of any kind.   We have a lot of police deployed in the Inner Harbor. The Commissioner and I will continue to work dilligently and swiftly to improve security.

This incident is yet another reminder of the need for zero tolerance for illegal guns. We must all agree and ensure that if you carry a loaded, illegal gun in Baltimore -- you go to jail.”

Here is what a resident wrote me on Sunday:

Continue reading "Shooting at Inner Harbor" »

Posted by Peter Hermann at 6:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (58)
Categories: Confronting crime, Neighborhoods
        

The woman hit by a stray bullet inside her Cherry Hill home Tuesday night is a community activist and has headed the Cherry Hill Tenant Council for the past five years. She's well known in her community, and when I stopped by this morning, two police cars were parked out front and neighbors slowed as they drove by and waved and made sure she's ok.

"I'm blessed," Shirley Foulks (in photo next to the bullet hole) shouted back, pausing between conversations on the phone, with the officers and with me. A crime lab tech came to the house to photograph a bullet casing found on her walkway.

Shirley had spent most of Tuesday visiting businesses to make sure they will donate back-to-school items for a fair on Saturday at the community center on Spellman Road. It is the kind of work that Shirely does tirelessly for her community.

Jack Baker, the head of the Southern District Police Community Relations Council, sent me this e-mail:

The wonderful lady who was hit is Ms. Shirley Foulks, President of the Cherry Hill Homes Tenant Council. Shirley has worked tirelessly for many years for all of the tenants of Cherry Hill Homes but especially the children. I have worked with Shirley for over five years on safety issues along with my teammates, the Southern District Police officers. I have been blessed to know Shirley, but working with her is an even greater blessing. The woman gives not just her time, but anything she owns, especially her love, to anyone who needs it. Let's all pray for her speedy recovery.

I'll have more on this shooting in Thursday's Crime Scene article.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 12:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Breaking crime, Confronting crime, Neighborhoods
        

Most of the letters I find in my mail slot start with a prison ID number. So it was refreshing to open one today from Sophia Litrenta, a 9-year-old girl who is donating proceeds from her lemonade stand to the Baltimore Police Department's Mounted Unit.

As we've reported, the city cut the budget for the six police horses and it needs at least $150,000 in private donations to make it another year. Police are trying to find a corporate sponsor to pick up the tab, but regular citizens, and now even children, are doing what they can.

The event is Tuesday, Aug. 18, from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. at 8609 Countrybrooke Way, Lutherville, 21093.

Sophia's letter is priceless:

Posted by Peter Hermann at 4:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Confronting crime, Neighborhoods
        

An important community cop walk is coming up Wednesday in Carrollton Ridge. Lest we forget, this is the neighbhorhood where the 5-year-old was shot and critically wounded, and where hundreds came for a walk to join the mayor and just about every other public official (Gene Sweeney Jr. captures the walk, with Mayor Sheila Dixon chatting with community activist Steve Herlth).

That was the easy one.

Now comes the test. Do the people the mayor and the police commissioner and the longtime community president, Connie Fowler, implored to help out actually show up? Or will this be another example of how we react to crime only to forget and move on a few weeks later.

Community activist Steve Herlth put out this e-mail as a challenge:

Carrollton Ridge, Wednesday, Wednesday, August 12 at 6:30 PM.  Meet up will be at the Recreation Parking lot, S. Pulaski and Ashton Streets.

Now, this Carrollton Ride walk will be an interesting walk, for some of us who participated in the Mega walk last month.  We all know how hard the Carrollton Ride Connie Fowler, The Mayor, the City employee's, the various community Walkers, and our fantastic Southwestern and Southern Officers were in participating in that walk to get the community residents out. Now is their chance to come out and join us in making their community safe and clean. 

All who participated in the last walk threw out the challenge to the community residents.  Many of the residents promised to be there on this Wednesday.  This is where I say, "We must have faith in the community" so let us back that faith up with a little pray that they keep their word.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 9:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Confronting crime, Neighborhoods
        

All across the Baltimore last night, community groups held events to mark National Night Out. At Easterwood Park and Stadium Place, residents chatted and ate food. Near the Gilmore Homes housing project, rap and R&B acts performed on a big stage as part of an event promoted on radio station 92Q and sponsored by the Mayor’s Office on Criminal Justice.

But in Highlandtown, one Baltimore Police Commander took National Night Out to new heights, as The Sun's police reporter, Justin Fenton, reports:

More than 100 residents rocked out to a band made up of city police officers, including Southeastern District Maj. Roger Bergeron and his brother, Mark, who is a sergeant in the southern district.

The band, named “Damn Shame,” was making its first public appearance and the event was outside, on the property of the Abbott Memorial Presbyterian Church on Bank Street, so the concert attracted a fair amount of curious cops. They were treated to a full light show, a fog machine and plenty of rock poses. 

“There’s a lot of thugs in the neighborhood, who think these streets are theirs. Well I don’t know about y’all, but we’re not going to take it anymore,” Roger Bergeron yelled before the band launched into Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It.”

The set list for the first half of the show also included Black Crowes’ “Hard to Handle,” ZZ Top’s “Sharp Dressed Man,” Tommy Tutone’s “867-5309/Jenny” and Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Gimme Three Steps”

Dep. Maj. William Davis was among the spectators. His review? “Not bad.”

Posted by Peter Hermann at 11:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)
Categories: Confronting crime, Neighborhoods
        

At her news conference last week after a dozen people had been shot at a party (18 overall on the city's Eastside), Mayor Shelia Dixon clearly had enough. She didn't want to talk about programs, and certainly not stop snitching, and she even got into it on prayer vigils (topic seems appropriate on the eve of National Night Out:

"People hae to be outrage, you know. Standing on a corner and having a candlelight vigil, that's fine and good. But what happens to those families in the midst of what happened? What are they going to do for those children so they don't get exposed? It comes down to personal responsibility. My concern, what are we going to do, how are we going to beef up that effort? What are we going to do if they (gunmen) decide to come over to the west side? I don't want innocent bystanders to be involved. If they want to take it out between themselves, fine and good, but that shouldn't impact our communities."

I mention this because on Monday, Marvin 'Doc' Cheatham, the head of Baltimore's NAACP branch, sent out a plea for a vigil and for men to meet children when they come home from their first day of school this fall. That brought an interesting response from City Councilam James B. Kraft (which follows Mr. Cheatham's request:

Dear Mayor Dixon, President Rawlings Blake & City Council Members:

Yes, we are in a crisis situation as it relates to crime in our community.  We are asking for and seeking out support and leadership from each and every member of the Baltimore City Council.

As you may know we have asked for the faith based community to significantly increase their community involvement.  It has come to our attention that the faith based community has met and has also scheduled a significant meeting.

We are now asking our Baltimore City Council members, along with the Mayor and Faith Based Community to hold a city-wide, simultaneous in each council district.

James, Nicholas, Robert, Bill, ‘Rikki’, Sharon, Belinda, Helen, Agnes, Edward, William, ‘Jack’, Warren and Mary Pat.

The date of August 28th has been selected as it is the Anniversary Date of the 1963 March on Washington.  If each of our council people were to bring together leaders in each of our city council districts we could have a significant impact on Baltimore City.  Churches, Mosques and Synagogues can be asked to adopt at least one elementary school, middle school and high school.  Community groups can be encouraged to significantly increase their activities and parents can be strongly encouraged to support their local school/parent group.  Businesses can be encouraged to financially help as much as they can.

On Monday, August 31, 2009 we are encouraging men of Baltimore to welcome the children back to school, but as a strong precaution we have advised them not to endanger the children by going in.  Just welcome them back.  We will be encouraging school supply drives in the next few days.

The Paul Robeson Institute, headed up by Executive Director Michael Johnson, will be coordinating the training that men will get to proactive deal with crime in our neighborhoods.  ‘The Men In Black’ will be recruiting David Muhammad and Imam Earl El Amin for they are experts in getting men in the communities.

We need every city agency involved in some what to help us make August 28th come to fruition.  Our community is crying-out for leadership as it relates to crime in our neighborhood and we are reaching out to those elected and paid to do such.  Let’s make  August 28th the real beginning of Stopping the Killing and Ending the Violence.

Larry Young, Michael Johnson and I would appreciate from each of you immediately.  We will share with the media what responses we get on Thursday, August 6, 2009.

Here is Mr. Kraft's response:

Continue reading "Prayer vigils and crime" »

Posted by Peter Hermann at 10:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Categories: Confronting crime, Neighborhoods
        

Operation Safe Streets is one of those programs copied from somewhere else that has merit but also raises questions. Mediators, many once from the street, thus giving them credibility, mediate disputes between rival drug dealers and gangs to stop them from shooting at each other.

But what happens, as did Sunday night, when one of the mediators gets shot while attending a backyard cookout targeted by a gunman who shot 12 people and once again thrust the city into a new debate over violence.

Was the victim at the party to work sources or did he know something was about to go down? And if he did know violence might break out, should he have notified his superiors and thus law enforcement? The whole  idea behind the program is to stop violence without involving the cops, which are mistrusted by suspects, victims, witnesses and just about everybody else.

That creates an uneasy relationship in that the Safe Streets advisors know a lot about what's going on but are essentially off-limits to cops and detectives trying to gather intelligence. They can't do  their jobs if they run to the cops but the cops can't do theirs if they don't have information.

So you sacrifice arrests for quiet.

It's all fine until the quiet goes away.

And then you have the city's police commissioner questioning why his cops didn't know about the cookout, held on the anniversary of the shooting deaths of two gang members. These are dates someone in the police community should be aware of. Someone at Safe Streets knew but that wasn't enough this time.

Safe Streets has been successful -- they went more than a year without a homicide in the neighborhood next to where the cookout shooting occurred, though there were several shootings within a block of the boundaries. That didn't hold into this year and now the whole place as exploded.

Can Safe Streets and the cops hold it together?

Posted by Peter Hermann at 7:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Confronting crime, Neighborhoods
        

Commentators to the Crime Beat blog and to the Baltimore Sun's Talk Forum overwhelmingly support city cops for locking up three kids, agest 7, 8 and 11, for stealing a wagon, a scooter and bicycle parts.

The children's parents thought the treatment too harsh, but most readers and television viewers thought the punishment was either just right or not harsh enough. Baltimore Police defended handcuffing the youths and sending them to detention (no criminal charges were filed) though the mayor said that because the offedners' parents were home, she might have written the reports in the house and let the children stay there.

Seems to me we need to go back to basics. You hear time and again from older community residents, both here and across the country, that in their day when children misbehaved, they could count on being disciplined by their neighbors, then dragged home to be disciplined again by their parents. Word of your childhood transgressions typically reached home before you did.

Before a recent community walk in Southwest Baltimore's Carrollton Ridge neighborhood, in response to a 5-year-old girl caught in the crossfire and critically wounded, association leader Connie Fowler, who has lived there 46 years, lamented at the loss of old-fashion values. "If my son was caught doing something, the person corrected him and came to us to say something. You can't do that here today. If you correct a child, the parents are ready to beat you up. So I don't say anything to the parents. Most of the kids around here are raising themselves."

I know, today is different than yesterday. We can no longer trust each other enough to let children have the run of the neighborhood, confident that the entire neigbhorhood helps raise the neighborhood children. Now we have to screen friends and the parents of friends, worried that a child molester or a drug dealer might lurk around the corner. Perhaps in Connie Fowler's day, these kids who stole the bikes would've been dealt with by the residents and there would've been no need to get police involved.

Here is an e-mail I got this morning from a resident of Medfield, where the young offenders live:

I live in Medfield and have see the two boys that were arrested roaming the neighborhood on a daily basis.  They, along with a large number of other neighborhood kids, are always unsupervised and are left to entertain themselves. They jump neighbors fences, bully other kids, tease neighbors dogs, place empty trash cans in the middle of the street, litter, skateboard in the middle of the street and challenge cars to try to pass them. Until yesterday’s piece of news, calling the police was useless. City police response time to a 911 call, let alone a call to 311, is outrageously long. By the time the police arrive the kids are long gone and if the kids find out you called the police, the harassment begins. Please don’t misunderstand, the parents are to blame in this situation.  These kids need some focus and discipline in their lives. They need adults that care about what they are doing, where they are going, who they are hanging with.  They need their parents attention otherwise they will end up like many of the teens in the neighborhood – another young victim of the drug/alcohol scene.

Here is a sampling of comments:

Continue reading "Cops right to arrest kids: readers" »

Posted by Peter Hermann at 7:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (12)
Categories: Confronting crime, Neighborhoods
        

Three boys, ages 7, 8 and 11, were arrested after a neighbor spied them stealing bicycle parts from Northeast Baltimore's Medfield community, according to a report on WBAL-TV last night. Their parents complained cops put them in handcuffs, into a wagon and to jail.

They weren't charged but were put into a program; they were held about two hours, the television station said.

Baltimore police defended the arrests. I know that handcuffs are usually required when an arrest is made both for the safety of the officers and the suspect. I'm all for teaching these kids a lesson, but is it necessary to put someone this young in handcuffs?

Back in 2007, Mayor Sheila Dixon apologized for police officers who arrested and handcuffed a 7-year-old boy who had been seen riding a motorized dirt bike. She said then that officers had "better options" than to handcuffing and detaining such a small child. The mayor called it "a bad choice."

But police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi told WBAL: "We are just going to hold people accountable for their actions -- whether it's a 7-year-old who's taken property or not. If it was your property, you would want some justice for that."

Posted by Peter Hermann at 7:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (12)
Categories: Confronting crime, Neighborhoods
        

Steve Herlth in Southwest Baltimore, whom I met on a police community ride-along, is one of the expert organizers of community crime walks, called Citizens On Patrol. Earlier this month, about 100 people swarmed over Carrollton Ridge after a child was hit and critically wounded by a stray bullet. The mayor and practically everyone in City Hall, as well as residents from across the city, turned out.

But the real test is what comes after the walks and then who shows up when there's no tragedy to mobilize and outrage a community. I was heartened to get this e-mail from Steve last night, and a picture, though grainy, of a good deed by residents who combined the walks with a trash detail, and the helpful hand of a city police officer:

Hi Friends, 

It has been a while since I wrote one of these Walk Status Reports, as you know, we have fun and communication between the communities is getting better all the time. However, tonight was a little better than usual.

Hunting Ridge came out with a plan tonight. Their walkers were armed with trash bags, what in the world are they going to do. Well, as soon as we got started, it became obvious. They started picking up trash as they walked. Well, that was cool all by itself, but the walk leader who I will name Dana, has a young child in the stroller.  She cannot pick up trash and push the stroller. Who came to the rescue?  The picture is worth a thousand words.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 7:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)
Categories: Confronting crime, Heroes, Neighborhoods
        

With talk of a revival of the Old York and Cator Avenue Boys and the McCabe Avenue Boys in the North Baltimore area, I got this e-mail this morning from a many who says he was there when it all started. At left, in a photo from the Baltimore Sun's Chiaki Kawajiri, is a scene from Pen Lucy in 2000.

And of course it started with a fight over a girl.

The gangs fought it out on city streets for years, culminating in the 1990s with a spate of shootings. Now, police and neighborhood leaders say the groups are all but gone, and talks of them returning are nothing more than young wannabees using the names of the storied groups.

Here is a bit of history from one reader:

Continue reading "Gangs in Pen Lucy -- how it all began" »

Posted by Peter Hermann at 8:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)
Categories: Confronting crime, Neighborhoods
        

North Baltimore's Pen Lucy neighborhood has always intrigued me. It's one of those places off the beaten-path (York Road), next to the upscale Guilford community (separated by a wall) and away from the traditional drug neighborhoods in on the east and west sides. Yet is has always been one of the most volatile spots on the city map.

Stories going back to the early 1990s documet fights and shootings associated with two neighborhood groups, which evolved into gangs, called the Old York and Cator Avenue Boys and the McCabe Avenue Boys (a memorial to the neighborhood's dead is at left).

One of the early leaders, involved in a shooting in 1992 that left two people dead, became, according to police, the leader of a notorious prison gang that was recently brought up on federal charges (the very one that smuggled crab meat into their cells and recruited corrections officers to the payroll). Another recent stabbing near McCabe Avenue turf has raised questions of whether the old gangs are returning.

One of the long-time activists, Robert Nowlin, has always been outspoken. He's a blind man who recently lost his son to a car accident in Georgia last year shortly after he had returned from two tours in Iraq as part of the Army. Nowlin told me this week that the neighborhood is better now but he's frustrated by what he sees as police shackled by the mayor and unable to clamp down the way they should.

Still, I saw a different Pen Lucy then I remember, back in the mid-1990s when a South Korean merchant was killed in his store (though for some reason his name is not on the memorial), back when a young man who just got out of jail for a shooting was himself shot by friends of the man he had wounded. "It's the same people over and over again," the major of the Northern District told me in 2000. Now some of those same names are popping up in bigger and bolder crimes (the federal drug indictment, not to mention a man convicted last year of killing a police officer was a member of the old Pen Lucy gangs).

A makeshift memorial honoring the neighborhood's dead is gone, replaced by a more tasteful monument in a park that lists the names of the shooting victims. The neighborhood still looks shabby and dangerous, even if the violence is down. But it's a start.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 8:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Confronting crime, Neighborhoods
        

It was a show of force and another wake up call.

A routine community cop walk (pictures here by the Baltimore Sun's Gene Sweeney Jr.), scheduled a year ago, attracted more than a 100 participants from several city neighborhoods Wednesday night. The place: Carrollton Ridge in Southwest Baltimore. The reason: the shooting last week of Raven Wyatt, a 5-year-old girl caught in the crossfire of a dispute and the latest symbol of Baltimore's violence.

Here's what a tragedy brings: the mayor, the police commissioner, the fire chief, the heads of public works, recreation and health. The NAACP and the Guardian Angels showed. When the chief trash enforcer spotted three abandoned trash bags, he immediately called it in and got someone to take them away. When a 5-year-old boy expressed interest in a summer rec program, the director was there to sign him up. When a woman complained about police response, the commissioner was there to listen.

The head of the Carrollton Ridge association, Connie Fowler, repeated to everyone who would listen that this was a scheduled walk, planned before the little girl was shot and remains clinging to life at Johns Hopkins, and that while she was grateful for the outpouring, she would like to see this showing on every excursion. A walk without a tragedy as a backdrop draws perhaps seven people from her community and a smattering of others from beyond.

I thinks it's great that so many people showed for the walk and managed to shut down streets as they paraded through, talking to residents and kids who spilled from cramped rowhouses to snap pictures of the mayor. City officials signed up dozens of people to go to rec centers or help at the community association meetings, but it remains to be seen whether the people follow through.

The community walks are great and the mayor and her department heads can't be at each one, and I don't begrudge them for coming out after a little girl is shot. And to be fair, the mayor and police commissioner go on a lot of walks that don't draw media attention. The groundwork invested, now it's time for residents to stand up and take their community back.

Just 20 minutes before Mayor Sheila Dixon pulled up to the rec center at Pulaski and Ashton streets, city cops boxed in a car just up the street and searched it and its occupants for drugs. The idea is to get people involved, and as Jack Baker, a community leader from South Baltimore told the crowd, "We want this community to heal."

At a table, children from the rec center displayed get-well cards to Raven. "Get well soon," one said. "Feel better Raven," said another. "Everyone is praying for your total healing," said a third.

Away from the neighborhood, questions are still being asked about how the suspect, a 17-year-old with a long juvenile record who officials say cut off his home monitoring bracelet to join a gun fight, was allowed to serve his sentence at home instead of behind bars.

"No one wants to accept responsibility," said the city NAACP's vice president, Josephy Armstead. "That boy should never have been on the street."

Posted by Peter Hermann at 7:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Categories: Confronting crime, Neighborhoods
        

I return from a short vacation to deal with yet another shooting of another innocent child -- a 5-year-old hit by a stray bullet in Southwest Baltimore, apparently during an argument between two teens who should've been behind bars in the first place.

First, as I pointed out last year, it seems that every child shooting comes with its own image -- the sister of  10-year-old boy killed in 1993 holding the cap he had been wearing, fingering the bullet holes on each side; two grapefruits left on rowhouse steps, which had been carried by a boy to an elderly neighbor when a bullet cut him down last year. Now, we have this haunting picture of Raven Wyatt's sandals left behind on the street after the attack.

The suspect, a 17-year-old, had been on home detention as a juvenile offender and apparently cut off his electronic home monitoring ankle bracelet to get back onto the street. We also learn that the intended target of the shooting also was in juvenile court to face charges, but a judge evicted reporters from the courtroom.

State juvenile officials say they were searching for the 17-year-old within 15 minutes of him cutting off his monitoring device, but that was plenty of time for a little girl to get shot. The status of the suspect and his intended victim will eventually come out, but too much remains shrouded in secrecy -- their backgrounds, why and how they remain on the street despite lengthy criminal records, and their complete criminal history. We are rightfully upset they were out, but we don't know the full circumstances, and the criminal justice system will argue that we shouldn't to protect their privacy.

This shooting occurred in the area covered by the Southwest Police District where I spent time with an officer during a community ride-along. We went out with a member of the neighborhood association who does community walks and watched officer speed from call to call and make several arrests.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 8:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Categories: Confronting crime, Neighborhoods
        

Baltimore Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III (at left talking about a drug bust, in a picture by The Sun's Barbara Haddock Taylor) went in front of the City Council Tuesday night to talk about how to best inform the public about crime through the Internet. The department through its new spokesman, Anthony Guglielmi, has been experimenting with Facebook, Twitter and Nixle, a texting program in which breaking crime and other news alerts can be sent to resident's cell phones and emails in their neighborhoods.

During his discussion, Bealefeld also talked about the still-under-review policy of when and how to name officers who discharge their weapons. Baltimore Sun reporter Justin Fenton was at the hearing and here is his story:

The hearing was called by City Council President Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, who wants the city to provide citywide text or email alerts about robberies, missing persons, auto theft and violent crimes (shootings, etc.). But she also wanted the department to talk transparency when it comes to police involved shootings, an issue that has simmered in recent months.

Rawlings-Blake pointed to Chicago, where an independent police oversight commission posts investigative reports of police-involved shootings on a web site. She held up one report that was 12 pages in length and went into detail about what investigators found when they looked into one particular shooting.

Rawlings-Blake wants Baltimore police to do something similar. Bealefeld noted that his staff looked into the Chicago commission and found it had 53 investigators, 11 supervisors and a budget of $7 million. But Rawlings-Blake noted that the commission and its budget are irrelevant - she said such reports are compiled in Baltimore already by homicide investigators and later, prosecutors, and that the only issue at play here was whether to post them on the Internet or not.

"If we're already doing it, is there some reason why redacted reports are not made available?" she asked.

Bealefeld said he endorsed the idea of posting them online but stopped short of saying the department would do it. He noted that many police-involved shootings become the basis for civil lawsuits.

"That's all possible. That's where we should head. I support doing that, but we need to make sure we're covering the legal bases," he said.

Bealefeld also gave an update on the city's policy regarding naming officers who shoot or kill citizens. The department sparked controversy earlier in the year when it said it would no longer identify the officers, ending a decades-long policy citing safety concerns for the officers. Several other large cities do not name officers who shoot or kill citizens, though others continue to do so, including most Maryland jurisdictions. The department was also unable to support the notion that any officers had faced threats after their names were disclosed following a shooting.

At the urging of Mayor Sheila Dixon, Bealefeld said he would re-consider the policy. On Tuesday evening at the council hearing he said that he had met with community leaders and sought their feedback on the policy, and asked them to gather opinions from their neighbors. He also consulted a group of leaders from the faith-based community. He said he received "considerable" feedback but is still contemplating the policy; in the meantime, disclosure of officer's names remain on a case-by-case basis. It's perhaps worth noting that there hasn't been a police shooting since Bealefeld said he would rethink the policy, after a flurry of such shootings to start the year.

Also, on the notion of crime alerts and providing statistics, Bealefeld said he was all about sharing information in new and better ways, but he had serious concerns and in some cases seemed downright paranoid about posting statistics or getting too specific.  Rawlings-Blake said many cities post daily or monthly crime numbers; the department has such data at its fingertips and is shared daily in police stations among commanders. But it has yet to post it online.

Bealefeld said the danger with posting statistics is that things change. He said the department "upgrades" five times as many crimes as it "downgrades," but he said all it takes is one crime being downgraded for the public to become convinced that the department is hiding crimes.

"This police department will not get any credit for" upgrading a crime. "If we change a dot on a map, it would be more damning than opposed to having" provided no information at all, he said. The comment was similar to those he made while discussing the department's use of Twitter, the social networking site, to disseminate breaking information about crime. He said that if police initially believe 6 people have been shot and later determine after an investigation that four people were shot, some will say the police department is "yet again manipulating data."

"We don't want to create problems for ourselves," he said.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 6:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Confronting crime, Neighborhoods, Police shootings, Top brass
        

So, it's midnight and I'm at The Block (for work, of course!)

Steve Cook, the owner of Oasis, invited me to see what he describes as police overkill (at left is a picture he shot of the street Monday at 12:45 a.m.) that he says is killing business. After reports of random attacks and roving groups of youths causing havoc and intimidating visitors, police sent a small army of cops to downtown. That includes the famed strip of strip clubs on East Baltimore Street.

Authorities many months ago banned parking on the street to help control the crowds. Now, to enforce that, they set orange cones along the curb and at 1 a.m. they block the street off to vehicles entirely. Then, police line the street and walk, ordering people who even pause for a second move on or face arrest.

Cook argued that his venue is being policed more harshly than at the Harbor. Imagine, he told me, if cops ordered tourists to keep walking instead of pausing to take a picture of the Constellation. But of course at the Harbor, you're expected to stop and take in the scene. At The Block, stopping on the sidewalk attracts attention and trouble. So police say, go into a club or move along.

I was coming out of Oasis and shaking hands with Cook when an officer walked by and said, "Can't stand out here gentlemen." That apparently includes the club owners.

Cook is proposing gating the street as an adult enterntainment district to keep underage people out entirely, so that they don't mix with others going from club to club. It's never easy. First cops were criticized for not having enough enforcement downtown, and now they're getting flak for too much.

I'll write about this more in Friday's paper with some answers from police and the liquor board.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 10:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (12)
Categories: Confronting crime, Neighborhoods
        

A story today in the Detroit News says that city's police department has routinely underreported slayings. It's worth taking a look, especially since numbers they had provided to the FBI put Baltimore in first place with the highest per-capita murder rate for city's with more than a half-million people. That ranking changed to No. 2 when Detroit police added a bunch of slayings to their total.

Now, the newspaper has found that the cops there did this often. It comes as Baltimore residents continue to question the veracity of crime stats here. While it appears Baltimore's murder numbers are accurate, I did find the Detroit story interesting in that it makes clear that the FBI wants cities to report even justified homicides. Baltimore's numbers only count unjustified killings.

I still think that for our purposes, counting only unjustified slayings makes sense in that we're trying to get an accurate count of violence. But it could be that Baltimore is underreporting its numbers to the feds. But as you'll see in the Detroit News article, what they're cops did was far worse -- misclassifying slayings as accidents and writing up as suicides cases the Medical Examiner had ruled homicides.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 11:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Categories: Confronting crime, Mapping crime, Neighborhoods
        

Louis Wood was, by his own admission, the most hated man in the room. The manager of Suite Ultralounge waited at Tuesday night's community meeting on crime to address an angry crowd, which had spent the better part of an hour complaining about crime downtown and at his club in the basement of the historic Belvedere.

Wood (seen at far right in Baltimore Sun's Karl Ferron's photo talking with former Maj. John Bailey and an official from the parking authority) told them he wanted to go last so he could listen to their concerns. His club, in the basement of the very building in which they were meeting, has been called the source and cause of neighborhood violence for months. Up until recently, the club routinely held teen-themed nights that attracted hundreds of underaged kids who when they left mixed with adult patrons of other clubs where alcohol is served.

"We also are concerned with people's safey," Wood said. The crowed booed and hissed. They weren't interested in his explanations but turned their anger on public officials, including the mayor, and demanded to know when a Circuit Court judge would rule on the club's appeal of a liquor board ruling yanking his license. The board allowed Wood to remain open pending his appeal; the judge has had the case for a month and is expected to rule any day.

"Why a month?" more than one person yelled.

"I'm probably the most unliked person in the room today," Wood said, which might have been the understatement of the evening. "If we have to, we can make changes."

Residents said it was too little too late. They complained of assaults, of kids terrorizing their neighborhood, of unprovoked attacks and intimidation, of being too scared to walk their dogs at night. I write more about those concerns in Thursday's paper. Baltimore's police commissioner walked the harbor area last weekend.

Mayor Sheila Dixon said that the liquor board "needs to be brought to the table" to hear the complaints and an assistant to City Councilman William H. Cole IV said police should have the power to close clubs for being a public nuisance, just as the health department can close restaurants and clubs for violating health standards.

Dixon called Mount Vernon "a jewel. We want people to live here. We want people to live here and work here in a safe enviroment."

Residents said that will only happen once Suite Ultralounge is shut for good.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 10:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (30)
Categories: Confronting crime, Neighborhoods
        

Earlier this month, Baltimore Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III came to the Inner Harbor to proclaim it safe and to urge people to visit the tourist attraction. He recited numbers -- assaults were down, even as people complained of more random attacks and more out-of-control kids than in year's past.

This morning on the Ed Norris show -- a former top cop interviewing another top cop on the radio -- Bealefeld finally admitted that perception might count more than stats. He also admitted what I had heard from the now former commander of the Central District, that the cops at the harbor were walking around but not doing much else. That commander ousted many long-time officers assigned there and replaced them with others.

"I think there are some real problems," Bealefeld told Norris, a more candid admission than he gave to television cameras a few weeks ago. "Certainly there are some gangs that have dome down there, but that's not new. I think there are some juvenile issues to be concerned with. But's it's a whole spectrum of problems."

Of the cops at the harbor, Bealefeld said they need to confront juveniles and talk to them, especially if they're out there at night after everything has closed. "They didn't do that out of the box," the commissioner said, noting that "perception has snowballed" that crime is out of control. "I'm not going to recite a bunch of stats about the Inner Harbor. I cannot ignore the incredible importance and significance to the entire region of Baltimore's Inner Harbor. We have to turn people's perception back around on the Harbor."

Bealefeld is batting perception and it's good that he gets that. People who are robbed aren't interested in goverment officials telling them crime is down. At the same time, Bealefeld said he goes to the Harbor a lot and has heard from business owners that they feel safer now than ever before and that he recently met a visitor who comes every year with his yacht and his grandchild. "He told me, 'I think it's the safest place in the world.' He travels the world. He doesn't have to come to Baltimore's Inner Harbor."

Eric from Baltimore asked Bealefeld whether he's confident in the accuracy of his crime stats and if crime really is down. The commissioner noted a good number, nonfatal shootings down 71 from this time last year (homicides are up slightly this year). He attributed it to having cops focus not so much on seizing guns but on arresting people with guns -- his campaign is called "bad guys with guns."

Bealefeld said he goes after cops who ignore crime, saying he's handed out 30-day suspensions to officers "who tank reports" (he ousted a commander last week after a robbery report wasn't taken). He said commanders get a daily alert on "all significant calls for service in the past 24 hours" allowing the bosses to track 911 calls through to completion. "Someone calls 911 and says, 'I got robbed.' Then we can see what the cop did. ... Why would we do that if we were tanking the number?"

Bealefeld addressed one issue that is out of his control -- the state Medical Examiner classifies many deaths as undetermined, raising questions that he's indefinitely holding off calling them murders to keep the city's numbers low. The ME has told me he rules that way in many drug overdose cases -- unlike his colleagues in many states who rule them accidental.

The commissioner said his dedicated group of homicide detectives work hard, "I don't think their agenda is to do anything less than justice. No body will tell you that Fred Bealefeld comes to roll call and tells them to bury bodies in Leakin Park."

Posted by Peter Hermann at 8:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)
Categories: Confronting crime, Neighborhoods, Top brass
        

Sunday's column on various ways to beautify boarded rowhouses makes me think of one of my first stories I did in Israel when I covered the Middle East -- the Israeli Army hired a public relations firm to beautify the battle scenes.

The company urged soldiers to paint weapons that shot rubber bullets, to differentiate between live rounds, and to clean up debris left behind after firefights. It doesn't make the battles less severe or less deadly, but looks better on television.

That's what Baltimore did five years ago when the housing department hired a company called Creative Camouflage to glue pictures of windows and doors to boards covering entrances on thousands of vacant rowhouses. Only a few got done and now the city appears to be backing off its enthusiasm for the project.

I spent some time out in the city photographing various ways to board up houses and some neat decorations. Here are a few examples. The first is from Creative Camouflage, showing what they can do; next to that is a scene from a boarded house on East North Avenue; to the right is a house that Creative Camouflage did five years ago, showing how neglect has taken over; then there is an example of simply bricking up a house permanently; then there's a painted scene of a boy and girl I saw in Wyman Park.

Below the pics, Bill Coleman of Creative Camouflage responds.

Continue reading "Beautifying boarded houses" »

Posted by Peter Hermann at 9:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)
Categories: Neighborhoods
        

The ousting on Friday of the commander of Baltimore's Central District (Maj. John Bailey, left) following a spate of crime, some of it random attacks, and the bad handling of an assault on a nanny in Bolton Hill, shows the department is serious about confronting problems.

Though it's somewhat confounding that police for weeks have said crime is down in the Inner Harbor and downtown, with the commissioner playing tourist-in-chief during an appearance last week at the harbor to urge people to come and shop, while at the same time flooding the area with cops and removing a top commander.

Bailey, who appeared in a column I wrote a couple weeks ago on the downtown scene and was pictured talking with a city councilman outside the Belvedere Hotel, where a club has given residents and police problems, has been replaced.

It was, according to a report by Baltimore Sun police reporter Justin Fenton, an attack on a nanny in Bolton Hill that closed the coffin on Bailey. His officers responded to a call that the nanny, from China, was choked, beaten, separated from her baby and then had her iPod stolen, but wrote it up as a "police information." The department then told The Sun they had recorded the incident as a larceny, only to upgrade it to an assault and robbery after the newspaper inquired.

The department said officers had trouble understanding the victim; the victim said she was given a choice -- a report could be filed or the officer's could search for suspects. That this occurred barely a half hour after Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III complained to television cameras that citizens don't believe him when he says crime is down, that he's accused of "fuzzy math" when crime stats are concerned, didn't help Bailey's future.

The officers who responded to the call either purposely downgraded the call, by not reporting it all, or they were too lazy to properly investigate. Either way, Bealefeld doesn't tolerate such inaction, and that's a good thing. Mayor Sheila Dixon told me on Friday, "The officer and his supervisor need to be held accountable for the way they handled the Bolton Hill incident."

Hiding crime doesn't make it go away, and the department can't fight crime if it doesn't know it occurred. There are lots of great police officers out there -- we met on on Friday, Syreeta Teel, who rescued the pit bull that was set on fire in West Baltimore last month. The commissioner, his command staff and the mayor joined in to celebrate her work.

Too bad they had to turn around a few hours later and deal with a problem.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 9:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Confronting crime, Neighborhoods, Top brass
        

A Mid-town venture capital firm announced in an e-mail to the mayor last week that it was moving out of Baltimore because of crime. The mayor expressed doubts that was the true reason, but either way it's an economic loss for the city at a time when people are fearing a series of random attacks from Federal Hill to Bolton Hill.

While city leaders scramble to downplay the incidents and repeat stastics that crime is down, they are moving up to 50 cops, including undercover detectives, to the Inner Harbor and downtown areas.

Mayor Sheila Dixon, talking with me on Friday, noted that a recent reported attack on a youth at the Inner Harbor turned out to be staged as a gang initiation ceremony. The kids are from Federal Hill's Digital Harbor school, and while the scenario shows that this attack wasn't random, it doesn't do much to alleviate concerns that gangs are not downtown.

Here is the e-mail from New Enterprise Associates' general counsel, Louis Citron:

Dear Mayor Dixon,
 
My name is Louis Citron and I am the General Counsel at New Enterprise Associates.  We are a venture capital firm located at 1119 St. Paul Street and have been located in the mid town/Belvedere hotel area for nearly 30 years.  We have approximately 35 employees located at this office.  I also live in Roland Park.
 
We would like you to know that New Enterprise Associates has decided to move its Baltimore city office to Timonium.  We calculated that our decision will cost the merchants in this neighborhood at least $200,000 per year in revenue as we are terminating, among others, our cleaning service and security guard, and will no longer be paying for parking spaces in the local garages, and no longer buying our lunches from local restaurants and the Maryland Club.
 
Our decision was a result of the high level of crime in our neighborhood.  Over the last several years, many of our cars have been broken into resulting in very expensive repairs, our employees have been robbed at gun point, drug needles and used condoms have been left on our front stoop, and psychotic homeless people have menaced our employees and threatened to kill them.  We have voiced our frustrations to the local community leaders and police, but the environment has only worsened.  The recent local beatings by roving teenagers during the day in this neighborhood, the raucous club in the basement of the Belvedere, and other gang violence throughout the city reinforces the appropriateness of New Enterprise Associates’ decision to move in order to protect its employees.
 
At this point, our decision is set in motion and cannot be reversed.  However, we sincerely hope that you and the city council are able to rectify these problems as we are certain other businesses also will leave the city over time.  Further, now that I no longer work in the city, I might move my family out of the city too if violence and crime continue to increase in the Roland Park area.  I pay too much in taxes now to live in fear and to have sewer lines back up on a regular basis into my home.
 
We wish you and the city only the best of luck in addressing these issues and hope that you are successful.  It is in no one’s interest to see Baltimore be viewed by the nation as a crime ridden and violent city that is totally out of control.
 
I would be happy to further discuss at your convenience.

A day after that e-mail was sent, on Thursday, the Downtown Partnership, the Baltimore Area Convention and Visitors Association and the Waterfront Partnership of Baltimore sent out a statement about crime:

Continue reading "Business says crime forcing it out of city" »

Posted by Peter Hermann at 9:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (19)
Categories: Confronting crime, Neighborhoods
        

Monday's attack on a nanny in Bolton Hill is scary for many reasons -- it happened in broad daylight, a woman was approached by two men, one of whom put her in a choke hold, the other separated her from the 8-month-old girl she was watching and rifled through the baby carriage, and the police response was questionable.

I spoke with the victim, Siwei Yao, on Tuesday and wrote about her experience in today's paper. The Chineses national has only been in this country for six months, and what struck me was when I asked her what she told her friends and family back home about what had happened.

It was that her neighbors flocked to the home after the attack, offered to help her and invited her to joint their group as they took babies for walks. That wouldn't happen in China, the 25-year nanny told me, and that, was the message she sent home.

Last night, the baby's father, Travis Hardaway, sent me this summary of events. It's long, but I think important to hear from people directly impacted by crime:

Continue reading "Nanny mugged in Bolton Hill" »

Posted by Peter Hermann at 7:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (12)
Categories: Breaking crime, Confronting crime, Neighborhoods
        

I last wrote about an experiment at Johns Hopkins University in which 93 sound sensors were set up to detect gunshots. The location is then projected onto a computer screen in the security office. Washington D.C. police have a similar program -- Baltimore's is called SECURES Gunshot Detection System -- and laud it as a great tool for responding quickly to gunfire.

Baltimore police have been skeptical but the free Hopkins trial allows them to test the system. I've questioned it's location in a relatively safe area of town -- from November to December of last year, only two noises registered as possible gunshot and one of those was a firecracker.

I asked Hopkins for an update from spokeswoman Tracey A. Reeves and she told me: "It’s still too early to make a case for or against the SECURES system or whether it should or will be expanded. But we can say that  anytime you have a tool that can help you with investigations and provide another layer of security, it’s worthwhile.”

Here are some details:

Continue reading "Gunshot detection" »

Posted by Peter Hermann at 12:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Mapping crime, Neighborhoods
        

In May 2000, Douglas I. Miles, then the head of a group of Baltimore churches, stood on the steps of a East Baltimore rowhouse and called for a renewed effort by faith leaders reduce violence and help the police.

On Wednesday, eight years and more than 2,000 murders later, Miles joined another inter-faith group, including Archbishop Edwin F. O'Brien, to again call for an end to violence, particularly among the city's youth.

This time, the clergy has more of a plan, including asking for school building to remain open in the summer to serve as safe havens and for a weekend Sabbath next month in which people will be asked to donate $1 to help fund Operation Safe Streets, a project run by the city's health department in which street counselors mediate gang disputes. They also pledged to hold more job fairs and work closely with neighborhood groups.

The religious leaders, in unison, called on Mayor Sheila Dixon to restore funds to keep rec centers, pools and libraries open. Miles, who now heads the advocacy group Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development, was the most forceful critic of budget cuts (the City Council has to vote on the budget before July 1). "Whether we stand under the cross, bow to the Star of David or kiss the stone of Mecca, we stand together and say the violence must end," Miles said.

Budget cuts mean difficult decisions must be made, but I'm not sure we can describe the $65 million shortfall in the terms used by Dixon's spokesman, Scott Peterson, who told me "we're racing against a global meltdown" and we're facing "economic catastrophe." He added that "no one wants to shut down a rec center or anything for a kid," and I believe that, but the message being sent by shuttering any when people are still getting killed is a bad one.

There is an effort underway to save the Police Athletic Leage Centers -- two are being closed and others are being folded into Rec and Parks -- and I've stated before that I think the PAL Centers started with good intentions but have now been largely abandoned by the city (starting several police commissioners ago).

Peterson send me a link to an interesting report by the PEW Foundation that compares the budgets from several cities, including Baltimore's, and what each are doing while facing budget problems.

Miles' organization is holding a meeting tonight to press the issue of PAL Centers:

Continue reading "Clergy wants rec money restored" »

Posted by Peter Hermann at 1:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Categories: Confronting crime, Neighborhoods
        

Baltimore Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III gave an interview to the Internet site Exhibit A, in which he talks about crime, police overtime and staffing and frustrated officers and citizens.

It comes as the top cop releases figures showing that crime has dropped in Baltimore this year, good news for the city and the department. In Friday's paper, I'll be examining whether a 9 percent crime drop or a 5 percent crime increase really mean anything to anybody. We have a disconnect between cops saying crime is dropping and people reporting that crime is out of control.

Here is an exerpt of the interview with Bealefeld (the entire interview can be reached through the link above):

They [people] get bombarded with the negative. And it’s not smoke and mirrors. People perceive that. They say, “It’s just fuzzy math – the crime rate’s not really going down, look at all this unreported crime.” There was a big push on that when I first got here, there was a lot of noise about all the numbers, and [people saying] it’s a lie, and part of that is fed by disgruntled people. We had people working against us inside the police department. I had to get rid of them. And there were people who focused on the anecdotal and, God bless them, here’s a reality: You think cops up here in the early 1980s weren’t taking reports? You think cops in the ’90s weren’t taking reports? And so, in 2008 when people say “Oh, my gosh, they didn’t take a report!” It’s happened before.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 12:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Confronting crime, Neighborhoods, Top brass
        

At tonight's meeting of the Central District Police Community Relations Council (at MICA's main building, Room 110, at 7 p.m.), residents will be able to sign up to ride with a cop for an evening on June 26. I'm pleased city police are giving people an opportunity to see what it's like from the point of view of a squad car and I encourage people living in the neighborhood to sign up -- it's a great opportunity.

Here are some details from Sgt. Charlie Hess, the neighborhood services officer for the Central District:

One item I was going to bring up at our meeting is a Citywide ridealong on Friday, June 26, 2009 on the 4-12 shift. The ridealong is meant to make citizens aware of normal  patrol officers activities and to enhance communication and  citizen involvement in community relations activities. At 8:00 pm the citizens will be brought to H.Q.`s Atrium for a discussion about the evening`s events. Refreshments will be served

The Central District will be able to accommodate twenty five participants in the ridealong. Any Central District community leader, neighborhood crime and safety coordinator or concerned citizen interested in going on the ridealong can contact me by phone or e-mail and I`ll add your name to the participants list until the twenty five spaces are filled.

News reporters used to be able to accompany cops on a routine basis but that practice has all but ended with requirements that include mandating a public affairs official to be in the car and other obstacles. We at The Sun would love to see the gun squad in action, spend an evening with officers at the Inner Harbor, but we'll have to rely on participants to let us know what happens.

I'd love to hear from people who took part in this program and for you to write me your experiences, thoughts and perceptions. One of the biggest complaints I hear at every community meeting is that people call 911 for nuisance crimes (including prostitution, which I wrote about today) and the cops simply does a "drive-by." For you spending time with an officer, I'd like to know if your perception changes after a few hours in a patrol car.

In a post yesterday, I discussed how I spent time in downtown, Mount Vernon and Bolton Hill on Saturday night, touring with a city councilman, and I didn't get any feedback. Please let me know about crime, especially on weekend nights when the clubs are full and the Masonic lodges on Eutaw Street rent out their spaces to partiers. 

Posted by Peter Hermann at 7:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Categories: Neighborhoods
        

Just when you thought the crooks in this city had stolen everything they possibly could, the ante gets upped: overnight, someone stole four teddy bears that were among 80 put on display at the city's NAACP office to honor victims of homicide.

I had written a column on the artist, Faith Bocian, a student at the Maryland Institute, College of Art, and blogged about the ceremony. I headed up to the building  to see what happened. At left, Officer Michael Gordon of the Northern District looks at the display with Joseph Armstead of the NAACP. "Who could have the indeciency to do somthing like this," Gordon said (I'll have a fuller story on this issue in tomorrow's column).

Armstead told me that one of the executive committee members noticed this morning that a tarp put over the display had been torn and that four plastic links securing the bears to a railing had been cut. Each bear had a nametag on it with the name of a person who had been killed this year.

Just why would anyone steal a bear that honors a murder victim?

"It's a real touching memorial," Armstead told me. "Times are hard. Maybe a junkie would figure he could get a bag of dope for four teeddy bears. A parent with some crazy thinking might think her babdy might like this. Or maybe someone anti-establishment wanted to destroy the piece. Who knows?”

At 1 p.m., Armstead was headed back into the city to call police -- "For the statistic, I guess" -- he told me. Meanwhile, the "I Can't, We Can" drug rehab group has vowed to help Faith keep the project going so that by the end of the year there is a bear for every person killed in Baltimore.

Faith told me she might move the exhibit to a museum or even to a rolling display so that everyone in the city could see it. I was touched that one of the city police officer's who responded to investigate the theft took the time to actually look at the display and find names of victims from cases he investigated.

In that way, Faith's idea to provoke thought worked, even it if took something bad to get it going. Armstead said he thinks students from nearby Margaret Brent Elementary School took the bears and he told me the vice principal is going to make an announcement tomorrow to get the bears returned. Armstead said he wouldn't press charges if a child took them; he even agreed to help mentor kids and to take 50 of them to an Orioles game.

Maybe something good can from this after all.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 1:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Breaking crime, Neighborhoods
        

The recent and latest attacks in Mount Vernon on Saturday, May 9, has sparked more people to write in about violence in the area. Chris Brown, who works at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, wrote me about an attack May 17 on her son's roommate.

She questioned how Baltimore police responded to this and I'm checking with the department's chief spokesman, Anthony Guglielmi, to see if a report was written on the incicent. It happened a week after a man and a woman were brutally attacked just before a Circuit Court judge heard an appeal from the owners of Suite Ultralonge, located in the basement of the Belvedere, a number of blocks south of where this latest attack occurred, who are appealing a decision by the liquor board to pull their license to sell alcohol after a scuffle led to a shooting on the street outside earlier this year.

City Councilman William H. Cole represents the area and wrote this in response to the complaints:

There have been a number of attacks in recent weeks that match the MO you describe. Unfortunately, we are not dealing with one group. For example, the attackers on Charles Street two weekends ago were all female; the attackers on Calvert Street were a mixture of males and females.

Councilman Young and I have both been in direct contact with Central District Major John Bailey and with Police Commissioner Frederick Bealefeld. The police department has deployed a number of additional resources in the area until this recent wave of assaults is extinguished. I was out last Saturday night between 10PM and 1AM riding through the area to see the police coverage and it was definitely visible. While the largest concentration is around the Belvedere (which is likely the source of these teenagers), they are also canvassing the area and keeping a close eye on large gatherings.

If the Circuit Court upholds the decision of the liquor board regarding the club in the basement of the Belvedere, I firmly believe that we will rid the area of a true nuisance establishment. The appeal hearing was last week and we expect the judge will rule within the next 2-3 weeks.

Here is the e-mail Chris Brown sent me:

Continue reading "More violence in Charles Village" »

Posted by Peter Hermann at 9:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (14)
Categories: Confronting crime, Neighborhoods
        

I spent some time Monday night with members of the Old Goucher Community Association, who are fed up with transgender prostitutes that proliferate Calvert and St. Paul streets between East 20 and 25 streets.

The met with Northern District Police Officer Douglas C. Gibson Jr. who explained the difficulties of cleaning the area up, and ones I'll explore in a column this week. One woman, a public health nurse who moved here from Portland, wrote an e-mail saying she was tired of finding used condoms out back and "of being picked up on when ever I go out and sit on the steps on St. Paul -- the first time a guy asked me if I was working I didn't even know what he was asking -- I said -- 'Yeah, I work, I'm a nurse.'"

Residents asked the officer if the city could establish a Prostitution Free Zone, as allowed for under the city charter. But Gibson said those laws, good-intentioned as they may have been when formed, don't work that well. As with Drug-Free Zones, police can't simply sweep the area of loiterers; they have to prove the people were loitering for the purpose of selling drugs or engaging in prostitution. And if they can prove that, then they can charge with with the underlying offenses.

I walked the streets with a community association member for a bit last night and two prostitutes passed my car as soon as I parked on East 21st Street. I saw several, including one man wearing a thong and little else standing on a corner next to Lovely Lane United Methodist Church (where hours later the community meeting had been held).

None of the women "working" were loud or obnoxious, though several were talking on their cell phones. I saw no pickups, but I was only out for about 20 minutes. Residents describe loud arguments, shouting and a coordinated effort by the workers to vaporize as soon as a police car drives by. One police commander told me the area is noted on Craigslist as the place to come for a male prostitute dressed as a woman.

Other neighborhoods have tried various ways eradicate the problem -- Curitis Bay and Brooklyn want police to send letters to men who circle blocks looking for women to scare them away; Gibson said the Northern District major and deputy major hit the streets recently and stopped four cars, but one driver was single ("a letter wouldn't do much good") and two others were from out of state and in rental cars, so the letter would go to the car company, not their homes.

In Pigtown, residents hit the streets armed with video cameras and photograph women and men, and their license plates, and post the information on the Internet. But I just noticed today that Baltimore John Watch has been removed, so that might not even be up and running anymore.

Residents also demanded that officers who respond to their calls get out of their cars instead of just driving by; Gibson said it's hard to move people who are just standing around, as they aren't breaking any laws. To get a good arrest takes a sting operation in which cops pose as johns and get the workers to admit they are exchanging sex for money. It's takes a lot of work and time, and even then the workers escape with probation.

Here are some e-mails from concerned residents:

Continue reading "Prostitutes in Charles Village" »

Posted by Peter Hermann at 7:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (10)
Categories: Confronting crime, Neighborhoods
        

Last night's City Council hearing on the Baltimore police budget focused in part on plans by the city to shutter the Police Athletic League program and turn centers run by cops for years to Rec and Parks.

I've been writing a lot about this issue here and in my column, mainly because this program was once hailed as the centerpiece of police administrations past. As I discovered when the city first announced the program, once copied all over the country, was being shut down, the city hasn't cared about PAL in a long time. They shut down the nonprofit that used to be used to raise money, more than $1.7 million a year at one point, and the centers are shadows of their former selves.

Baltimore Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III doesn't want PAL Centers. Fair enough, and given their current state, I agree the children need something better. The commissioner last night quoted from one of my columns in which a girl told me she liked the cop at her PAL center but not the ones who patrol the streets. Bealefeld doesn't want that division.

The Baltimore Sun's Justin Fenton was at the hearing and here is his report:

Councilman Warren M. Branch challenged the police department and mayor’s office on criminal justice as to why they weren’t pursuing grant money to keep the PAL centers open. He noted that with summer rapidly approaching, his 13th District had very few safe recreational options for children.

Bealefeld gently mocked the idea that PAL centers had been promoted as the “backbone” of the police department’s outreach efforts, saying that it represented only 24 of the 2,400 officers in the agency. He said most beat cops “don’t even know that PAL centers exist” and said the children who attend them “might as well be anonymous,” and said the notion that they were a major outreach effort had been “excellent cover” for his predecessors.

He quoted from my column, in which I visited a PAL center and a young girl said the officer at the PAL center was nice, but the ones she sees on the streets were “different” and hassle people for no reason.

“I gotta tell you, that right there, that paragraph made the point in a way that I struggled with trying to make throughout this process,” Bealefeld said. “I cannot have kids in this city seeing one officer at a time as a good guy, and the other 2,400 as the ‘other guys.’  I have to figure out a way, to close that gap.”

To solve that problem, Bealefeld said police on day and night shifts will now be required to visit all recreational centers, not just PAL centers. “As long as those centers are open, cops will be required to go there throughout the day. And their supervisors will be required to make sure that they go there,” he said.

Branch wasn’t convinced.  He said his daughter will have to travel further to get to the nearest recreational center, and he worries that she will encounter gangs and could be hurt, or even worse, killed.

Bealefeld acknowledged the point, and noted that police are actively involved in the Eastern District – including the Police Explorers program, a “young girls to ladies” program, and other efforts. He also said the district had achieved the biggest drop in homicides, on a percentage basis, of any district in the city last year.

“We are tasking our police commands to maximize the programs that they are involved in,” he said.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 9:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Neighborhoods
        

The Baltimore Sun's Justin Fenton attended this morning's hearing on Club Ultralounge, whose owners are asking a city judge to overturn a liquor board ruling to revoke the nightclub's license to sell alcohol.

And lest I forget, a helpful reader reminded me that in a previous story, we noted that a Bloods gang was caught in a police wiretap using the Belvedere as a meeting place to talk about drugs and other business. This is the same gang whose jailed members complained they couldn't get lobster smuggled inside.

Here is the account:

About 70 people – including two who were attacked over the weekend near the Belvedere hotel in Mount Vernon – attended a hearing Wednesday morning where the owners of a club linked to area violence asked a Baltimore Circuit Court judge to reverse the liquor board’s decision to revoke the club’s license.

Peter A. Prevas, an attorney for Louis V. Wood, the owner of Suite Ultralounge, argued that a new law governing BYOB “bottle clubs” that went into effect last year was “sloppy” and unclear, and said the club’s due process rights had been violated at a revocation hearing. The club operates from the basement of the historic Belvedere hotel and attracts a hip-hop crowd that sometimes swells to hundreds, though the hotel houses other bars as well.

But attorneys for the city and neighborhood association said the liquor board was within its rights to shut down the bottle club. At a hearing last fall, police and community members said the club had been linked to an uptick in violence in the trendy neighborhood, including a double shooting and a stabbing on Oct. 11. The club’s license was revoked in November, but it has remained open pending the appeal. Since then, the violence and noise complaints have only gotten worse, residents said.

“The liquor board has to ensure the safety,” said Alice G. Pinderhughes, representing the liquor board. “There is a danger to this community, and [the board] has to be able to do something.”

In attendance were two people who said they were attacked in separate incidents on Saturday night that residents believe stem from the club. Both said they were passing through the area on their way home when they became victims of unprovoked attacks.

A female victim sporting a black eye said she was attacked from behind by a group of young females who choked and struck her, and a 30-year-old man said he was also attacked while walking in the area. He did not remember the incident, due to a concussion, but his wounds told the story:  cuts above and below his eye, which was nearly swollen shut, two missing teeth and 14 stitches to his lip.

“I don’t want this to happen to any of my friends or co-workers,” he told reporters outside the courthouse.

Judge Kaye A. Allison said she would issue a written decision following the hearing.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 1:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)
Categories: Confronting crime, Neighborhoods
        

Justin Fenton just returned from the hearing on whether the basement Belvedere club Ultralounge can stay open. A Baltimore Circuit Court Judge will rule within 30 days; the hearing itself went back and forth with bar representatives arguing over liquor laws and Mount Vernon residents saying the situation has gotten worse since a shooting a few months ago.

I've posted several stories from victims here; a man and woman who were beaten up Saturday night attended this morning's hearing. The Liquor Board revoked the club's license but it has remained open pending its appeal, which was heard this morning.

I'll keep you up to date.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 12:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (14)
Categories: Confronting crime, Neighborhoods
        

The Baltimore Sun's police reporter, Justin Fenton, is still at the Circuit Court hearing where the owners for basement Belvedere club Ultralounge is fighting its liquor license revocation. Several people have asked for an update and I'll provide one as soon as he returns.

Meanwhile, more people have e-mailed me stories of violence and other problems. There were two more attacks on Saturday that I posted this morning. Here are some additional stories:

"Thank you so much for keeping us informed of the situation with this club. I live in the neighborhood and have become increasingly worried about the crowd on Saturday nights. And now I read your recent posting and realize that my worst fears have been realized. I witnessed the crowd of “club-goers” out on the corner of Saint Paul and Chase that evening and am just glad that I wasn’t one of those who were assaulted. 

I was not able to attend the hearing this morning but would greatly appreciate it if you could keep us all up-to-date on what is going on with this club. The club-owners have proven that they are utterly irresponsible and I hope that they are shut down permanently. In fact, I hope that they are never allowed to open a club anywhere ever again. They and their patrons have complete disregard for the neighborhood, not to mention the historic building that they are “partying” in.

I cannot emphasize how much I am scared and disgusted by this. This is our neighborhood, our city and I refuse to let it get to the point where we’re afraid to simply step out of our front doors on a Saturday night. Hopefully the city will do what is right and protect the safety of its citizens.  The incidents mentioned in your blog obviously point to a much larger problem simmering up in Baltimore, but hopefully we can start by at least taking one step in the right direction. Thank you again for keeping us up-to-date, Colby Johnson."

From a resident who didn't want her name used:

"Thanks so much for again raising the crime factor and undesirable element generated by the bottle club at the Belvedere. While I can’t attest to the crime (which is indeed frightening) I can tell you how it affects me as a resident of the 1000 block of Charles Street.
 
I love living in Mt. Vernon -- except on nights when the Club is open. I live between two parking lots on Morton Street in a small condo on the fourth floor. The noise from the denizens of the Club (and yes, I know they are coming from the Ultrasuede rather than the Hippo or Grand Central) is unbearable.

They park (illegally) in the spaces around my building, drink bottles of whatever is left over after they leave the club (or before they get there) and dump the empties in the lot or the alley by my door, blare their urban hip hop trash music until I can’t get back to sleep, and shout to each other in ghetto speak that would defy even the Big Phat Morning Team.
 
I dodge broken glass, fast food wrappers, and urine just to get to my car (and yes, it has been rifled, too.)
 
I’m sure the club will contend that “anyone” could be the offenders, and I’m not going to confront them to publicly say otherwise.  But after more than a year, I have become fluent enough to translate their language, and that’s the sewer they’re coming from.
 
I’m a hostage in my own home.  Worse, I can’t say anything about it because they know where I live.
 
Please post this anonymously on your blog. I don’t mean to trivialize the crime aspect. But when that furor dies down, the nuisance factor is an ongoing, every night problem that people are afraid to address, lest they seem “insensitive” to other cultures, or even racist.  This isn’t a race issue – it’s the right of the taxpaying residents of this city to be able to sleep at night and not have their neighborhood trashed.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 12:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Confronting crime, Neighborhoods
        

The owners of Suite Ultralounge at the Belvedere in Mid-Town are appealing a decision by the liquor board to revoke their bottle license, even as reports of more violence are blamed on the night spot.

The hearing is scheduled for 9:30 a.m. today at Baltimore Circuit Court, 111 N. Calvert St., in Room 403.

The Liquor Board revoked its license after several incidents of violence, including a shooting, were linked to it. It is one of, if not the, last bottle club in the city, which essentially are BYOB bars. Residents of the condo and neighbors have long complained that the club didn't fit into the historic building and neighborhood.

Below are some chilling tales posted as neighborhood crime alerts. Both occurred Saturday night, according to the victims, and I have inquires into city police and will advise:

Continue reading "More violence from Belvedere?" »

Posted by Peter Hermann at 8:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (34)
Categories: Confronting crime, Neighborhoods
        

Want to know how many burglaries have occurred in your Baltimore County neighborhood? Or parking complaints? Now you can know with the Baltimore Sun's new crime map for Baltimore County, launched today.

It took a while, but now we have crime maps on line for Baltimore and Anne Arundel counties, along with a homicide map for the city. We hope to add more in the near future. It should be a great help in figuring out what is occurring where you live. Play around with it for a while and let us know what you think.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 10:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Breaking crime, Mapping crime, Neighborhoods
        

The year was 1999 and Baltimore police commanders were tired of seeing empty patrol cars sitting on lots as crime was spiraling out of control. The two chiefs of patrol put pen to paper and wrote a memo that for once owned up to the harsh reality:

It said staffing was "inadequate at best" and warned that "no shift, will, in the future, hit the streets without the required manpower to cover all posts." The commanders authorized overtime pay to fill the slots.

At that time, the force's strength was 3,188 officers (today it's 3,071) and police commanders were quick to criticize their underlings: "They are personnel managers," one colonel told me then. "They have to work around these obstacles and earn their money."

Countered the police union president at the time: "You can't have a job that requires 20 police officers, give commanders 10 and then blame them for not getting the job done."

It's a battle that is waged in virtually every job across the country. Only ones involving police involve public safety. And the cop who risked his career to take me out to show low staffing levels this week demonstrated just how bad it is. This cop jumped from call to call, often falling behind "in-progess" calls that ordinarily would require immediate response.

Police have tried all sorts of things to increase staffing. One commissioner even put two cops in every patrol car, introducing the old concept of "partners" for the very first time in Baltimore, but that experiment was short-lived when millions of dollars of overtime money ran out. Now the city doesn't even have enough overtime money to staff all the cars it needs with one officer.

Police say they are only 15 officers down and that will change when the next academy class begins next month. Back in 1998, police had 200 openings but also had another 200 officers out on long-term medical leave. If the numbers city police are giving me are correct, they've solve that problem. But each district still has officers out on sick leave, suspension, vacation, military duty, etc. That's how you get empty patrol cars while still being "fully staffed."

But no matter how bad it seems now, the past is worse. In 1999, the comander of the Northeastern District on Argonne Drive shut his station to the public from midnight to 7 a.m., putting up a sign directing people to a payphone if they needed to call 911. Interesting, because in the district I visited this week, the commander did call two cops in on overtime to help fill spots, but one of those officers had to work the desk.

I heard this from a police officer this morning:

Continue reading "Baltimore cops have always felt short-staffed" »

Posted by Peter Hermann at 1:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)
        

"It's not even summer yet."

That's the lament this morning from Richard Mosley in the aftermath of a double shooting Saturday night that left a teenager dead and another teen seriously wounded in Southwest Baltimore's Rosemont community.

The shooting occurred on Normount Avenue, just two blocks from where Mosley's son, Sean, lives, who last weekend graciously gave me a tour of his neighborhood. The Rosemont Police Athletic League Center, a block away from the shooting scene, is scheduled to close July 1 and Sean, a starter for the University of Maryland basketball team, grew up playing at the center. At left, in a photo taken by the Baltimore Sun's Chiaki Kawajiri, Sean walks by a playground near his home in Rosemont.

As I walked with Sean and his father, both talked about the importance of role models and the burden that Sean, a star in the community as well as in the state, has in mentoring young kids. Both think closing the PAL center -- along with others -- is a terrible idea. I watched Sean talk with kids on a basketball court and look at graffiti next to the court that mourned young men lost to the drug wars. "I probably know some of them," he told me.

This morning, after the shooting Saturday night, I called Richard Mosley and he told me his son knew both young men who had been shot, including Maurice Toomer, 17, who was killed. "He was distraught," the elder Mosley said. He said his son stayed on campus this past weekend and wasn't home. The shootings occurred about 8:30 p.m.

Richard Mosley said that police both on foot and in patrol cars were all over the neighborhood Saturday night and all day Sunday. He was happy to see them, but said, "Why do they always come after-the-fact? They know what goes on in this neighborhood."

With the PAL center closing, there will be even fewer cops in the community. Mosley is reaching out to nonprofits in hopes of getting money not only to keep the center open, but to hire off-duty officers to staff it.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 9:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Neighborhoods
        

A reader raised a good question yesterday about why city prosecutors went after a man accused of forging a parking pass and selling it on the Internet under what seemed an obscure state law when the city statute appears to be much clearer and more on point.

Prosecutors worked out a plea deal in which the suspect agreed to 100 hours of community service and forfeit his parking rights in South Baltimore's Otterbein neighborhood in exchange for getting the charges dropped.

His lawyer had been prepared to argue that the state law didn't apply because it covered the forging of "tokens" that needed to be inserted into the box, which doesn't seem to cover passes put on dashboards or affixed to windshields. Prosecutors disagreed, but the plea agreement allowed both sides to avoid the argument. I wrote in my column that the law should be clearer and Bob Harkum, the chair of the Residential Parking Permit Board, pointed out that the city statue is indeed clear:

"No person may copy, create, or otherwise produce any counterfeit or facsimile of a residential area parking permit."

So why, Harkum asked, didn't prosecutors charge under this statute instead of the state one?

I got an answer today. Prosecutors told me they still believe the state statute applies but could've easily charged the suspect with violating the city code as well. Either way, a spokeswoman told me they believe the deal they struck was appropriate.

Assistant State's Attorney Lauren Poke wrote: "I could have added the the city code charge and I may have done so if it had gone to trial. However I believed the best resolution for the defendant with no prior record of arrests or convictions was to have him forfeit his privileges and serve the community he was defrauding."

Posted by Peter Hermann at 11:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Neighborhoods
        

Today's column on a plea deal in a forged parking pass case raised an interesting question: Why did the State's Attorney's Office charge a man accused of trying to sell a fake pass on the Internet under a seemingly obtuse state statute when they could've used a more clearly written city law?

The attorney for the suspect argued that his client was charged under the wrong law because it made illegal the use of fake "tokens" that need to be inserted into a box. That obviously isn't the way parking passes put on dashboards or attached to windshields work. His client agreed to community service and to forfeit his parking rights in exchange for criminal charges being dropped.

Bob Harkum, the chair of the Residential Parking Permit Board, wrote me this about the city law, and I'm awaiting an answer from prosecutors:

§ 10-42.  Counterfeiting or altering permit.
 
 No person may:
 
  (1) copy, create, or otherwise produce any counterfeit or facsimile of a residential area parking permit; or
 
  (2) alter any permit issued under this subtitle to change its expiration date or any condition of its use.
 
You also may not show an invalid permit, sell or require use of a valid one, falsify information or help someone falsify information or get a permit to which they are not entitled. I was expecting, on this Craigslist caper, the $500 Civil Citation, as criminal charges on first time, etc. seemed stiff, BUT is doable under CITY Law:
 
§ 10-52.  Prohibited conduct – Criminal penalties.
 
 Any person who violates any provision of Part VII {"Prohibited Conduct"} of this subtitle is guilty of a misdemeanor and, on conviction, is subject to fine of not more than $1,000 or to imprisonment for not more than 12 months or to both fine and imprisonment for each offense.
(Ord. 06-316,)
 
The Civil Citation:
 
§ 10-51.  Prohibited conduct – Enforcement by citation.
 
 (a)  In general.
 
  In addition to any other civil or criminal remedy or enforcement procedure, Part VII {"Prohibited Conduct"} of this subtitle may be enforced by issuance of a civil citation under City Code Article 1, Subtitle 41 {"Civil Citations"}.
 
 (b)  Process not exclusive.
 
  The issuance of a citation to enforce Part VII of this subtitle does not preclude pursuing any other civil or criminal remedy or enforcement action authorized by law.
(Ord. 06-316,)
 
We  worked very hard to make all the element that naturally follow out of your "common sense tells you..." a reality in the City Law. I checked RPP Laws all around the country (check how stiff LA's "Preferred Parking" -- their RPP- fines and rules are) before presenting to Council a request to add sections to RPP re: Prohibited Conduct and Penalties.
 
Why States Attys decided to use that section of code to charge Foster is beyond me. 
 
We had hoped that compliance with the law really would rely on the stiff Civil fines that were put in place.
 
Be nice if you added a follow up: "For those of you cranking up the Printer/Scanners because of Foster case"..., know that CITY law does prohibit "screwing with the program."  PCA's are now testing marking the 2 hour window via computer-equipped vehicles with OTR and GPS.  We are working on the link to MOIT/PA for updates re: who has moved out and no longer has valid decal/permits. 
 
City residents who live in RPP areas should have as much a right to expect a possible parking space on their return from 8 hours as much as anyone who lives with a 20' foot curb cut giving them exclusive street space rights to a driveway to pull in right next to his house.
 
We're trying to make that happen.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 12:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Neighborhoods
        

It appears that the Baltimore Police Department is embarking on a test-run to text crime alerts to residents' cell phones. After saying the idea, which is used by many departments around the country including the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, was being studied, officials launched it today in the Southeastern District.

No announcement was made but for an e-mail sent out by the head of the Southeastern Police District's Community Relations Council, copying a statement from the district commander, Maj. Roger Bergeron.

I confirmed the start of this new program with the Police Department's chief spokesman, Anthony Guglielmi, who told me it's a 30-day pilot run and if it works it will be implemented across the city: "If we're going to be successful in further lowering crime, the community needs to be a partner. Part of Frederick Bealefeld's strategy is not only to get cops out of cars to interact with residents and business owners, but arming the community with information so they can help us help them."

Here is the statement from Bergeron:

"I am proud to announce that the SED will be the pilot district for a community alert system. The system will go online today, Friday, April 17. We will run this pilot for 30 days and evaluate its effectiveness at the end. If successful it is anticipated that we will continue its use. This program will allow subscriber's to receive alerts via cell phone text message or email as they wish. The information put out will include information as to major crime within a quarter mile of an incident. We will include information as to significant arrests, community meetings, missing persons, and any other idea that we can think of that would benefit the community. A citizen may become a subscriber by logging on to www.nixle.com and follow the sign up instructions. This is a free program, however, costs may be incurred by their cell phone company depending on how they set up their contract with the phone provider (e.g. Pay per text message, etc...). I would encourage EVERYONE to sign up asap. Please alert as many residents as possible. I am excited about this new program and can't wait to see how it works out. Thank you!"

Posted by Peter Hermann at 6:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)
Categories: Confronting crime, Mapping crime, Neighborhoods
        

Consider it a victory for the little person.

Ever since Baltimore's police commissioner and recreation and parks director announced that the Police Athletic League centers would close, with most of them taken over by the rec department, it had sounded like a done deal.

There was a news conference and officials talked about how this was good for the city, a way of consolidating centers under one department and putting more cops on the street. The news took residents by surprise.

Robert Hunt, the head of the Rosemont Improvement Association, found out his center was on the chopping block when he saw television cameras outside. Even at a forum at Rosemont Thursday night, residents said  they were not properly informed. Hunt called me just a few hours before the hearing to tell me about it -- the city gave me a schedule of 17 hearings but didn't give him one. City Councilwoman Agnes Welch said she too learned of the closures from the media.

Now, many people felt Thursday's forum was a waste of time, that their input was only sought after the decision had been made. "If you take it out, take it out," Rosemont resident Robert Brunt said at the hearing. "But don't do it behind our backs."

Recreation officials said they informed the public as quickly as they could but on Thursday night in the gym at the Rosemont PAL, Rec and Parks director Wanda S. Durden backpedaled. In her opening remarks to a hostile crowd, she nodded to Leticia Fitts, who helps run a nonprofit that is parterning with a PAL Center on Pennsylvania Avenue, Robert C. Marshal, and is fighting city bureaucracy. She is monitoring the hearings.

"This is not a done deal," Durden emphasized, noting Fitts' victorious smile.

Is the very point Fitts has been trying to make. She's flooded city officials with e-mails demanding they announce scheduled votes and stop talking as if these cuts due to budget constraints are in fact set in stone. She is distributing a pamphlet explaining the city's budget process noting exactly where we are in, and on her chart we are no where near the end. She's titled her presentation, "It's not a 'Done Deal.'"

At least on this point it appears she has beaten City Hall. Whether this means she can save PAL is another matter. Rec and Parks is holding a series of hearings this month and next -- one at each PAL Center -- and if they go as the last three have, and resemble the e-mails I'm getting -- the city will have a mound of testimony supporting PAL and decrying the cuts.

But the City Council is not voting on PAL in June. Lawmakers are voting on the entire budget, and whether opposition to this one issue will be enough to hold up the budget remains to be seen. But at least the discussion is where it should be -- with the residents. And their words can still mean something. Here is a complete schedule of hearings on PAL centers:

Continue reading "Citizen scores victory over police rec centers" »

Posted by Peter Hermann at 11:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Categories: Neighborhoods
        

The owner of Club 410 is hopping mad that the city's police department has padlocked their Northeast Baltimore establishment, citing shootings and other crime. Police are taking a strong stance against businesses that they say tolerate crime. But Tomeka Harris, the operator and manager of Club 410, feels they countered every argument at a public hearing last month.

The padlock went on yesterday at 5 p.m.

Harris told the Baltimore Sun's police reporter, Justin Fenton, that several incidents cited by police happened outside or even blocks away, and presented evidence that the perpetrators and suspects had likely come from elsewhere. As for a fight that occurred inside the club, she said club security handled it and that extra safety measures were implemented to ensure it wouldn't happen again. The deputy major of the Northeastern District, Darryl DeSousa, testified that the club was cooperating with police and that conditions had improved.
 
But DeSousa's superior, Maj. Delmar Dickson, said things were only better because police were directing disproportionate resources to the area. On Tuesday, a hearing examiner ruled for the police department, and the club was padlocked at 5 p.m. yesterday.
 
"We addressed every situation," said Harris, of Havre de Grace. "We don't condone violence. It just shows that the cops can do whatever they want."
 
Harris claims that her club was under no pressure until a shooting occurred outside. Since then, she said, a detective has been harassing employees and patrons, seeking information. She claims that the detective told her that he would have her shut down if she did not provide a name of the shooter. Not long after, the department initiated the padlock proceedings.
 
"I told them over and over, the victim was not a patron of my business. I have no information."

Police did not counter this claim at the hearing but have taken what a department spokesman says is a "zero-tolerance" position on violence. Police say the club serves as a catalyst for violence and cited several shootings nearby as evidence. Authorities are trying to get clubs and other businesses to take more responsibility fighting violence.

Harris said she wants to fight the police's padlock powers, but is not in a financial position to do so. "I've been draining capital, just trying to survive," Harris said. "But I'm gonna fight, because it's wrong."

Posted by Peter Hermann at 11:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)
Categories: Neighborhoods
        

My in-box is still filling up fast with complaints and complements over coverage of two shootings in Fells Point over the weekend. Several people are still complaining that the fatal shooting of a woman Sunday afternoon didn't occur in Upper Fells Point and my column today arguing one or two blocks doesn't make much of a difference in terms of safety.

First off, my intent was not to say that accuracy doesn't matter and if I'm one or two blocks off in naming a correct neighborhood for a crime that I don't care. I do care, and it is necessary to be accurate. One reader who has complained several times sent me a map, with an x on it, clearly showing the shooting right where police said it occurred -- on Gough Street just before Broadway -- in Upper Fells Point:

I'll upload the relevant part of the map here, since accuracy IS important, and somehow we can't seem to agree on how to read the map. The shooting, according to this "Live Baltimore" map, occurred in a thumb of Fells Point (not Upper Fells) ... and of course even this is a technicality, since it was Perkins Homes-involved. See the green "X" on the map I've created at this link:http://www.beaumonde.net/images/shootinglocation.jpg

So now it's the "thumb" of Fells Point but not really Fells Point, or Upper Fells Point?

Christian Dunn, who works for a residential brokerage on South Broadway, wrote: The details do matter in this story... If this was drug related or street justice it does matter. The headline was of "shock and awe" value. Judging by the comments the vast majority of people paid attention to the headline and associated it with the touristy section of Fells Point. Correct me if I am wrong but this sounds a lot more like a targeting and turf thing. The driver was probably not the intended target.  But somebody was after someone in that car."

I understand the need to keep crime out of neigbhorhoods and yes this unfortunate shooting probably did, as police say, stem from some dispute or incident in neighborhing Perkins Homes, a public housing complex. But as I noted in my column, the fact that the shooting may be 'turf' thing or that the victim may not have been the intended target or even that the dispute may have began in public housing, does that somehow make the area safer?

Remember, on Saturday someone fired up to 12 bullets on Lancaster Street, in the touristy section of Fells Point, and police say the men responsible came from West Baltimore. Do the residents who woke up with bullets in their walls sigh in relief that the thugs weren't their neighbors?

Dunn continued: "The reason why this matters is something you may not completely understand.  As you can tell some communities care a great deal about what happens, Fells Point especially and has a long history doing so. This area has new and old residents that care greatly about their community. It also has negative pressures from the north and Perkins homes (local government & press historically), exactly what this article describes.

"In general, you will find that people in the area know what's going on, keep an eye out and do not tolerate crime within their borders. By the little information provided it is clear that this is not an Upper Fells Point crime. What people are taking offense to is the Headline, because Fells Point is a good and safe place to live.

"These were not Upper Fells Point residents, tourists etc... They are life long beneficiaries of taxpayer dollars in the area... The Upper Fells Point residents are taxed highly and the other tragedy of this story that isn't being covered showing a lack of empathy. You probably know that 15 shots aren't fired at a car without provocation (street, thug justice), you know this if you are crime reporter.  Perhaps you have not visited Upper Fells in a while or know how active the 6-8 nearby associations are working to improve things to invite new residents in, expand the tax base, create jobs, start new businesses, live more sustain ably, less divisive, socially and community oriented. This is all about a headline."

Do we ignore this shooting, or is it that the shooting doesn't matter, because it's "not a Fells Point crime." It's a city crime and we should all care. One reader did jump to my defense:

Continue reading "Crime and community -- the details matter" »

Posted by Peter Hermann at 12:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)
Categories: Neighborhoods
        

Today's column on crime in Fells Point and whether the boundaries make a difference got several responses, mostly from people who understand what truly matters is the shooting and the victim:

I just wanted to drop you a quick note to express my support for your most recent column. The fact that the concern stems from whether or not the shooting occurred in Fells Point sickens me. Not only does it demonstrate abject disregard for human life, specifically a life which appears to have belonged to a loving mother and honest citizen, but it also exposes one of the nastiest by-products of gentrification: class-based racism. Invisibile lines which carve out distinct social stratas make it possible that Ms. Wright could be murdered "just a few feet" outside of the Fells Point limit.

I am appalled.
 
I accept that Baltimore is a city of neighborhoods. I am a citizen of one of them, and a born-and-bred child of another. But lord knows that we can be something more. We can be one city. I know that in my heart. But it can't happen until we stop promoting these racist attitudes through inequitable, government-sponsored gentrification and redevelopment.
 
Thank you for this column, and the many others you produce. They mean something to me.
 
Very respectfully,
Dennis Robinson
J.D./M.B.A. Candidate, 2010
University of Maryland

Thank you for writing what you did today!!! I have live in Fells Point ... or fells Prospect ... or whatever the "name of the day" is - and have been here for about 12 years. It is appalling that people are responding to you about what part of the city she was actually killed in rather than responding to how she died.  Unfortunately it represents the classism and racism that is pervasive in this city. I am just as concerned as the next person - I have a young son in school a block from where Ms. Wright was shot - but to focus on where it happened (and to whom) rather than the fact that it DID happen at all is alrming to say the least.  Thank you again. Lauri

Dear Mr. Herman,

I totally agree with the point of your article today about the shooting of an innocent lady driving down Broadway in Fells Point.

I was riding my bicycle that very afternoon across that very intersection just about an hour before the shooting happened.  The irony is that I was riding back from a truly "bad" neighborhood over on Pulaski and Pratt streets in West Baltimore. I was helping a friend pack and move her apartment.  I was a bit concerned to be bicycling through her rather seedy neighborhood, but she needed my help.

I bicycle through the Perkins Homes neighborhood on Gough St. every morning and every evening on my commute to and from work. I think about all the crimes I read about there (the discovery of that poor young girl who ran away from Alexandria, VA behind a dumpster, for instance), and I search the faces of the people I see on the streets there, wondering if any of them are murderers.  But to be honest, they all seem just like family and friends, living their lives. In fact, I see a lot more human interaction (of the positive kind) on those streets than I do on my own street (I live on "Washington Hill" at S. Ann and Lombard streets.)

So your point is right on the money. No matter on whose street someone is being shot, it is everybody's problem. If President Obama can go to Turkey and proclaim, "We are not at war with Islam," then surely Baltimoreans can understand that everyone who lives here is part of the same community, no matter how hard we try not to recognize that we are all neighbors.

Sincerely,

Joanne Stato
"Fells Point"

Posted by Peter Hermann at 10:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)
Categories: Neighborhoods
        

The Los Angeles Times published a great story on Sunday on errors on crime maps, which are proliferating not only there but throughout the country and in Baltimore. Police agencies have complained about various maps, such as CrimeReports.com, which has marked wrong spots for crime in and around Baltimore.

We've had our own problems at the Baltimore Sun. We get calls about our homicide map showing murders in impossible locations, and even in different countries, and attempts to put up a map for Baltimore County crime has been thwarted because of bad locations. Every department gives us crime locations differently, and the computer has trouble matching them up with actual spots on the map. Earlier, a mistake put an inordinate number of plane crashes (zero would've been closer to the truth) in Essex.

The maps are fun and popular -- the Baltimore Sun has one showing homicides in the city and crime in Anne Arundel County -- but as with anything you have to be careful. The LA Times story is interesting -- the Police Department's map put too much crime in front of the newspaper building and its own headquarters.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 10:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Neighborhoods
        

At first, even the cops thought a man had been shot in the head on Lancaster Street in the heart of Fells Point, on a narrow street lined with rowhouses. Then came the clarification -- shots were fired but no one was hit -- a man twisted his ankle, fell and hit his head on the pavement. But now residents are worried that the police are downplaying the incident.

First, police had said it occurred about 11 p.m. on Friday, but in fact it happened a few hours later, 1:50 a.m. on Saturday, just shy of closing times for the bars. Two groups of men were arguing after leaving nearby Moby's bar. Police officers told them to quiet down and moments later gunshots erupted. One man fell down bleeding.

That's all police would say about the shooting -- a woman was shot and killed on Sunday afternoon in Upper Fells Point, an unrelated attack, but the back-to-back shootings have enraged a neighbhorhood where residents are more used to battling tourists for parking spaces than gunmen.

Residents of Lancaster Street have bombarded my blog with vivid accounts of this shooting, which police don't classify as a shooting at all, but rather a discharging, or an aggravated assault. The major of the Southeastern District, Roger Bergeron, did post several items about the shootings on Southeast District's Community Relations Council blog, but they didn't go into a lot of detail. That has sparked accusations of a coverup.

Residents describe more than a gunshot fired into the air in anger, but an attack that makes you wonder how no one was actually hit:

The most easterly bullet hole circled with white-out is in the west lower stoop of 1604. This was found on Saturday morning at around 10am. The next bullet, going west is in the gray wood basement covering. The next one went throught the upper right corner of the door of 1602 and into the living room wall of that resident. Take the tour for the other bullets.

I'd like to clarify a few points about the early Saturday shooting in Fells Point.
The 1600 block of Lancaster St. has no bars. It is a residential side street with virtually no crime. At 1:50 am Saturday morning my neighbors and I were awoken to the sound of 10 rapid gun shots. The police conducted their investigation until 3:30. The next day we found eight bullets had pierced the houses on the north side of the street. One couple has a baby.  A bullet had gone through their door and was lodged in their hall wall. With the large amount of foot traffic on Lancaster St. on the weekends it is a miracle no one was killed. Minimizing the seriousness of the crime because the shooter missed his intended target only delays any real action by the city to protect one of it's last great neighborhoods (and tax bases). We need real resources and we need them now.

I have no idea why the Friday night incident on Lancaster Street should be downplayed as "not a shooting."  Someone was shooting a gun wildly while running down the street, endangering residents and visitors. That the shooter missed his intended target (and hit doors and a vehicle) doesn't make me feel much better about walking through the neighborhood late at night.

I talked with Baltimore police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi this morning and he confirmed that 8 to 12 shots were fired but that no one was arrested. He also said Bergeron has redeployed officers to address concerns from both shootings. Here are two of Bergeron's blog postings:

Continue reading "Fells Point residents say police are downplaying gunfire" »

Posted by Peter Hermann at 7:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
        

I knew as soon I came to work this morning and saw there had been a shooting on Sunday in Fells Point that somebody would contest the location. Sure enough, I got this e-mail Monday afternoon:

Peter, if this was west of Broadway, as the story indicates, the shooting was not in Upper Fells Point, which begins EAST of Broadway. The neighborhood was either Fells Point proper (if this was in the 1600 block of Gough, most likely) or Perkins Homes if in the 1500 or 1400 block.

I thought some earlier blogs by not only myself but the Baltimore Sun's copy desk chief, John McIntyre, author of You Don't Say, written after a reader took Elizabeth Large of Dining@Large to task over putting a restaurant in the wrong neighborhood, would be the end of this discussion.

But sensitivities are hard to suppress.

First off, I want to say that does it really matter if someone gets killed in Fells Point or Upper Fells Point or in neighboring Perkins Homes? Are you really that much safer? It's not like there are fences around our communities. If you live on Broadway and Gough in Upper Fells Point and someone gets shot on Gough Street in Perkins Homes, you are at best two blocks away! That's too close in my book. But I also understand that a shooting at Gough and Broadway in Upper Fells Point seems a world away from a shooting at Lancaster Street in lower Fells Point, which is where the tourists go.

But we at this newspaper need to be correct. And both the map the reader provided and the city neighborhood map we use in the newsroom show that Broadway at Gough Street is not the boundary separating Upper Fells Point from Perkins Homes (public housing). It's actually a block further to the west, Bethel Street, and that puts Sunday's shooting on Gough Street near Broadway in Upper Fells Point.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 4:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)
Categories: Neighborhoods
        

The Maryland State Police are having a soccer tournament in Western Maryland this weekend to raise money for charity. Here are the details:

Posted by Peter Hermann at 8:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Neighborhoods
        

As the Baltimore Police Athletic League prepares to end because of budget cuts and transfer centers to the city's Department of Recreation and Parks, community activists, residents and others are starting to rise up. I got this e-mail from retired Baltimore police Lt. Osborne B. McCarter:

It has been quite some time since I talked to someone from the media, but after reading your article and reflecting on my 32.5 years as a public servant with the Baltimore Police Department, connecting with the present situations that are occurring, I can only conclude that the powers to be has finally gotten their wish.

Peter, as the last Operation Lieutenant running The PAL program and in furtherance of my professional career I elected to become a commander as a Deputy Mayor, I have been either directly or indirectly involved in four youth programs that have met some form of demised because of politics within the City of Baltimore.

First was the Boys Club, then The Explorer Program, followed by the Walbrook Academy, now the P.A.L.  Each program fostered a partnership between cops and kids, it was an investment being made in our youth and the feature of our city. I challenge anyone who has been involved with any of the youth programs to state different.

For example, let's look at the Northeast District. But first let look back to the inner parts of the city where thousand of residents were displaced, like the construction of a highway to no-where, built from Pulaski Street to M L K Blvd. so that workers at SS building could get into the city faster and get out at the end of the tour of duty quickly, then there was the implosion of the High Rises all of those residents were displaced through out the city some into areas we officers used to call "Country Club Districts."

But as the displacement occurred so did the crime, crimes such as vandalism and graffiti, were all to common in areas once consider crime free, compared to some districts where a part one crime was expected at least one per day if not one per shift per sector.

The Goodnow area of the Northeast soon fell victim of the vandalism and graffiti followed by street robbers, gang and drug activities. The Goodnow PAL center which started off being a 7-Eleven closed not too long after opening, because of the crime in and around the store. Mrs Army Mock, Sgt. R. Gibbson, Officers Lorie & Creg dedications and support from the community soon turned that area around from one of blight, to being one of the premier centers in the city. Thanks to the partnership between Mrs. Mock, Police Commissioner Thomas Frazier, Officer Lorie, and Officer Creg.

But who really benefited form what when on at the center? first were the kids from the community, then the community, its citizens and the city benefited from the partnership that had been fostered between kids and cops. Well O'Malley finally got his wish. Hermann, I pray that the youth of the city become enlighten as to the over all goals of the political official who are eliminating avenues for kids to avoid at-risk behavior and that voters see that as programs are being eliminated for the youth that there are more detention facilities being build and slated to be built. One can only conclude that the youth of the city are being targeted. I am thankful for having touched thousand of lives positively in one way or another over the 32 1/2 years of service within the Police department.

In Memory to Police Officer Troy Lewis Jr. who was a true and dedicated PAL officer died March 28, 2009. 

Retired
Ob-X-50

Posted by Peter Hermann at 7:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Neighborhoods
        

Baltimore officials announced last month that budget cuts are forcing them to shutter the popular Police Athletic League centers and that the Department of Recreation and Parks would take over most of them starting July 1. The closings are part of the mayor's budget proposal that doesn't get voted on until June.

So community activists who are trying to rally support to save the centers are angry that the city is making the closing look like a done deal. Rec and Parks has announced a series of visits to the soon-to-be-theirs PAL Centers starting April 6 to assess needs. And letters from the head of Rec and Parks to residents calling or e-mailing in complaints do indeed indicate the decision has been made.

It is an uphill battle. The activists would have to convince the City Council to hold up the entire budget to save one program, and that's doubtful. And I think the city could decide to shut PAL with or without a budget. But still, the tone of the letter bothers people who believe there's still a chance to keep the PALs open. Leticia Fitts, who runs a nonprofit that is partnering with the Robert C. Marshal PAL Center on Pennsylvania Avenue, which I visited last week, sent me a letter another community resident received from the director of Recreation and Parks, Wanda S. Durden.

The name of the receiver was deleted, Fitts said to protect the person protesting, but Michele Speaks, a rec and parks spokeswoman, confirmed the letter is from Durden and is a form sent out to people who are protesting the closures. She said aout 10 people have called thus far. "We understand how painful this is," Speaks told me.

Here is the letter Durden is sending out (it references Cruspus Attucks but Speaks told me they change the name depending on the center being referred to in the complaint): 

Continue reading "Closing PAL a done deal?" »

Posted by Peter Hermann at 7:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Neighborhoods
        

Today's column about bodies in the Harbor brought bad memories -- for me and my readers.

I too have had the experience of falling in the Inner Harbor, near Fells Point while covering a fire back in the early 1990s. It was dark and I followed a firefighter onto a pier. He turned right, I walked straight, and fell more than 20 feet into the water. Firefighters saw me go down and fished me out of the murky water. I was saved from further humiliation -- my colleagues gave me an autographed life-preserver -- given that the TV cameras were on the other side of the fire.

This morning, reader Jim Astrachan, a law school teacher, wrote me his account: 

Read your "in the water" column. Live on a pier in canton. 3 yrs ago wife jumped off pier to save our dog who fell in. There was no way out. Thankfully, neighbors heard screams and came to rescue. Wrote to city and asked for ladders along waterfront. Refused with no reason stated. Just "considered, and will not" or words to that effect. Fall in harbor in winter and it's a death sentance. That's not being dramatic. Water deep and cold. Heavy clothes. No way out. Look at canton waterfront where we live. Long expanses of bulk head. No way out. Bodies go down in winter, come up in spring. Lost client this way in 01, don baker, pres of food brokerage and resident penthouse harbor view. Disapeared jan; reappeared april. As if the city maintains what lawyers call an attractive nusance. Not a good reponse from the city re ladders or even life rings. And every year, some die for no good reason.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Neighborhoods
        

The end of the Baltimore Police Athletic Leagues I wrote about on Sunday may have been a forgone conclusion based on the level of funding recently -- $161,000 -- compared to $1.6 million back when the program was run as a nonprofit, but judging from comments I received this weekend, residents still think it is one of the few things that works in Baltimore. Fourteen PAL Centers are to be handed over to the Department of Recreation and Parks on July 1; two are closing and two others are being given to the city school system. Here are some responses:

My name is Stephanie McKee and I am a student at the Maryland Institute College of Art. I need your help.

I know of a captivating story that requires the attention of local Baltimore residents: In a month, the city is planning on closing an after school Police Athletic League center that is a thriving, pro-active necessity to my neighborhood. The PAL center hosts 150-200 people (kids to adults) every day, and is run by Edna Price (a retired officer) and Terry Grahm, (an active officer). The mayor and the Baltimore City Police want to close the PAL center, or put it under the care of Recreation and Parks (which charges for everything - even the after-school program that is currently free)
The PAL center's small bank account is comprised of donated money, which the Police want to use (along with officer Terry) on the streets, in the reactive police force.  Edna would be out of a job, and almost a hundred kids would go home to parent-less homes (or worse) after school.

Some local residents are organizing a petition, but I fear that It won't be enough. I have emailed Mayor Shelia Dixon about this, hoping to discuss it further.

And another form Leticia Fitts, a nonprofit that is partnering with a the William C. Marshal PAL on Pennsylvania Avenue:

UPTON COMMUNITY CALL FOR ACTION

Last week Mayor Dixon proposed budget cuts in city services which include closing recreation centers and swimming pools and reduce library hours.  The Robert C. Marshall Recreation Center , located at1201 Pennsylvania Avenue , is proposed as a one of the recreation centers to be managed by the Baltimore City Department of Recreation and Parks.  This would conclude the current management performed by the Baltimore City Police Athletic League. 

The PAL center just recently partnered with the nonprofit organization, Noble Enrichment for Children and Youth, Inc. (NECY), to expand and broaden its services and meet the diverse need of the youth in the Central District of Baltimore City.

During the March 2009 Upton Planning Committee meeting we met and heard the mission of the NECY organization.  Additionally, UPC recognized the continued efforts from Officer Charles Lee and his assistant CSO Mary Douglas.

The Upton neighborhood organizations are encouraged to weigh the pros and cons and share your thoughts on this matter with our city councilman, William Cole no later than Tuesday, March 31st…if you have not already.  Please send your “neighborhood” input in writing and send to: William.cole@baltimorecity.gov and Anthony.jones2@baltimorecity.gov.

And a third:

Hi Peter – I was very sorry to see your article in today’s Sun that the PAL centers are changing hands and/or closing. In 2001, I was hired by the non-profit arm of PAL to do a study of the PAL Centers and found that the difference of having the police officers onsite was the key characteristic that made parents and youth feel safe about their attendance. There were also a variety of additional benefits as well, including seeing police officers in a positive light. In 2003, I worked with the Johns Hopkins Center for Adolescent Health to look further at the characteristics of each center. On each occasion, while there were recommendations for improvement of the program, the PAL center youth model was shown to be a productive and important one for youth development in some very dangerous communities. My work with Youth Crime Watch of America has also shown me that the presence and participation of police officers in some of these programs is crucial.

I realize that the program lost political interest in the period following my studies, but if there is an avenue to present any of the information again, I would be glad to do it. It seems pretty clear it is too late, but if you think there is any platform in which to share this information, I’d be glad to.

Thanks for your interest in the program,

Christy Olenik

For more information on the NECY program, please visit www.necy.org or contact Ms. Leticia Fitts, program coordinator and director of academic affairs at necy_inc@yahoo.com.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 7:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Neighborhoods
        

Police are notorious for spelling errors, especially on street names. But now that city cops are increasingly going on-line with information, those errors are making their way into the public domain.

Monday night, Baltimore police twittered a shooting in the "500 block of N. Elwood Ave." Of course, there is no such address in the city (one extra 'l' would've given the posting accuracy), which my counterpart crime blogger didn't hesitate to point out:

Tweets our Facebook friend the BPD: "SHOOTING: Police investigating @ 500 block of N ELWOOD AVE." Google maps says there's no such street in the city, though there's an Elwood Ave in Easton, making us wonder if ...

there are still unexplored, primordial and unGooglized parts of the city

the BPD is trying to fake out sloppy reporters

the BPD is getting Easton radio transmissions

an officer said some other street with a Baltimore accent to a NY PR firm that's handling the BPD's "social networking services."

The shooting occurred in the 500 block of N. Ellwood Ave., in the city's Ellwood Park/Monument neighborhood. For more information, see today's story in The Sun.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 10:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
        

Baltimore Sun police reporter Justin Fenton tried but failed to gather more information on a city killing. Here's why as part of a guest blog, in his own words:

Crime reporters are often asked why every death in the city isn't probed and explored in greater detail than the few lines most receive in the paper. There are a variety of reasons, from unreliable information to a newspaper's resources on any given day, and my experience today is one example.

Martie Williams, 20, was shot Saturday night while waiting to play video games at a "hangout house" in Westport. He fits the basic description of the majority of the city's homicide victims: a male, between ages 18 and 25, African-American, with pending drug charges and prior armed robbery charges that were dropped. He was awaiting a May trial on seven counts of drug dealing. He was the 47th victim of a homicide this year, and No. 48 would be found two miles away just a few hours later on Sunday morning.

But the circumstances of Williams' death - playing video games - intrigued me, and someone's death is not always the result of their criminal history or activity. So I decided to hit the street to find out more.

Active court records list Williams' address in the 2400 block of Dumfries Court, in a public housing complex and just a block away from where the fatal shooting took place. That was my first stop. After knocking on the door, a woman stuck her head out of a second floor window and said I had the wrong address. She didn't know anyone by that name and said her family had moved in within the past few months.

Strike one. But there was still the crime scene to visit, in the 2600 block of Maisel St. Two police officers were already there, going door to door to hand out fliers about "Operation Crime Watch." (The outdated fliers, by the way, note "Mayor Martin O'Malley's determination to ... allow citizens to take action and provide the highest level of personal protection"). I wasn't sure which house exactly was the crime scene, so I stopped to make a few calls. By the time I determined the house number, the officers were gone.

The house is down the street from a youth center and across the street from Westport Elementary School. Compared to some of the other houses on the street, it looked welcoming, with children's toys stacked in the front yard. There was also a front door lying in the grass, and a new front door had been attached.

It was wide open.

"Hello?" I said after stepping just inside the metal gate that enclosed the front yard. No response. I stepped up to the porch and called again, then knocked on the door. That's when I saw the blood spatter against the wall in front of me. The front room, decorated with numerous framed photos, had a TV propped up on a tray, and to the right on the wall was apparent blood spatter. Police said Williams had been shot as he waited to play video games, so the blood made sense.

I called again, knocking and knocking. As I turned to leave, an older man down the street wearing a tool belt noticed me and became enraged.

"Hey!" he boomed. "What the [expletive] are you doing inside my house!"

This was a simple misunderstanding, I thought. I've covered a couple hundred murders and sometimes these things didn't always start off well.

"I wasn't inside the house, sir," I offered. "I'm with the Baltimore Sun, and I'm here to do a story on the young man who was killed." The man was incredulous. He refused to believe that I had not been inside his house. He screamed repeatedly, threatening me and reaching several times for a hammer in his tool belt. A few times he also seemed to be reaching into his waistband. I don't know whether he had a gun, but that's certainly where many who carry weapons will store them. I've covered enough homicides to know that a bullet to the head can result from much less than what I was going through with him at the moment. Just last week, a woman was arrested in connection with shooting and killing another woman, and injuring two others, who accidentally bumped into her on a dance floor. Maybe Williams' death, too, was related to something seemingly trivial, like butting in line to play the video game.

"You have no idea the pain I have," the man said.

"That's why I'm here, sir."

"Gimme two dollars," he said, lightening up for a moment. "Gimme whatever you got." But I wasn't going to give him any money. I pull out my wallet, and the wallet might be gone, I figured.

He came toward me, and people on the street started to take notice. A window at the elementary school opened up, and children chanted. As I walked away, my hands outstretched in a "surrender" pose, he followed, still hollering threats and saying he should hurt me. No degree of explanation that I didn't go into his house changed his mind.

And then I realized I've walked past my car. Oops.

I made a step towards it, offering that I need to get back that way in order to comply with his demands and leave. No, that's not happening, he said. Don't let me see you around here again. Perhaps that was for the best, as I'm pretty sure pointing out my car was a good way to either get my window smashed or get full-out carjacked. Maybe he was all talk, but I wasn't going to take the risk.

So I did something I haven't done yet in my experience as a police reporter: I called the police for help. I dialed 911. I needed someone to just come to the area and help me get back to my car, I said. I don't want any trouble, but I needed to get the heck out of there. Down the street I could see the man, still angry, and now standing with some associates.

It took about 10 minutes for a patrol car to respond, and of course it felt a lot longer. The two-man car pulled up, and they let me hop into the backseat and drove me the 200 yards to my car.

"You're a reporter for the Sun?" said the officer behind the wheel, a huge grin on his face. He was highly entertained by this. I don't blame him - most police think the media are out to get them and second-guessing everything they do, and here I was, begging for help. Not so easy, huh? Of course, I don't carry a gun or wear a vest, either, but that's neither here nor there. I climbed into my car and drove away, passing the man with the hammer as school let out at Westport Elementary.

Obviously, I was a tad shaken by this series of events. But I think more importantly, as my job as a crime reporter goes, perhaps this offers a bit more insight into why not every victim gets a full writeup. For every family that wants to share their pain or see the victim given a spotlight in the newspaper, there's the family that begs us not to write anything out of fear for its safety, or those so overcome by emotions that the mere presence of a reporter is enough to send them over the edge.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 5:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (16)
        

Back in 1996, I met Darryl Parker, a 13-year-old who had a choice to make: “He can pocket $200 a week selling cocaine for his cousin or play soccer with Baltimore police officers.”

Then, he chose soccer. I have no idea what happened to Darryl, who I talked with a year after the first Police Athletic League opened as part of a sweeping take-over of failing recreation centers by the city’s police department. Now, 13 years later, the experiment is over. The city announced with great fanfare yesterday, as part of sweeping budget cuts, that 14 of 18 PAL centers still left (there used to 27) will be turned over to the Department of Recreation and Parks, two will go to the school system and two will close (more details are in my column today).

PAL centers were never a very popular idea with rank and file police. Former Commissioner Thomas C. Frazier hailed it as his signature program and at one point had assigned 87 officers to the centers, solicited grants and donations from city CEOs and from the White House and won accolades across the county for his innovative ideas (At left, Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III and Wanda K. Durden, director of the city's Recreation and Parks Department, announce end of the PAL program. The photo was taken by Baltimore Sun photographer Chiaki Kawajiri).

Back home, homicides continued unabated, district commanders had a hard time filling police cars and recreation center workers loudly complained they were victims of an armed coup. Who were cops to say they can mentor kids better than the people schooled to do so?

But their cries went unheard and, at the time, rightly so. The centers they ran were in dismal shape. Many closed when school closed, which defeated the whole purpose, they were dirty and dingy and overrun by crime and drug dealers. They were simply out of control, and the city’s top cop, who described himself as a “social worker with a gun,” felt that a paramilitary-run recreation league — registered as a nonprofit, tax-exempt organization — was the only way to go. Millions of dollars poured into PAL centers as the city slashed the budget for rec and parks.

Frazier described PAL centers as building “social capital” with youngsters such as Darryl, banking good-will at 13 that he hoped would be repaid by Darryl staying out of trouble when he reached 17. “Every time a cop helps a kid in a computer lab, I put $1 in social capital in the bank account,” Frazier told me back then. “That’s what PAL is. The theme of the Police Department is that we are part of the social fabric of the city.”

The former commissioner spent a lot of his time scouring the city for weights and exercise equipment, and in his first year he raised $217,000 in private funds. He bought television sets and popcorn machines and cops knew that a way to advance was to joint he PAL program. He sponsored a midnight basketball program that attracted 540 kids and put 70 new computers in the Canton Middle School.

His cops spoke frankly of the city’s problems. Maj. Frank Malcavage headed the PAL program in 1996 he told me that he “found that a lot of the recreation centers were closing early because people were afraid to open them. Well, police officers are not afraid to open them.”
At the time, the spokeswoman for the city’s recreation department, dismissed any notion that her agency was engaged in a “turf war” with the police. It was, she said then, a simple misunderstanding common when two partners combine efforts.

Now, we’re going back to the way it was:

Continue reading "Baltimore Police PAL cuts" »

Posted by Peter Hermann at 9:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

This afternoon, St. John Properties Inc. and the Middle River Business Center is presenting a $10,000 check to the Baltimore County Police Athletic League. The sizable donation is from the proceeds of last year's Baltimore Crossroads@95 5K Cross County Challenge Race. This year's race is scheduled for Oct. 31.

Today's ceremony is scheduled for 4 p.m. at the Woodmoor PAL Center at 7111 Croydon Road. Several officials, including the Baltimore County police chief and Nancy S. Grasmick, the Maryland state superintendent of schools, are scheduled to attend.

For more details:

Continue reading "Baltimore County police league gets donation" »

Posted by Peter Hermann at 10:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Neighborhoods
        

The conclusion of a six-week mock murder investigation designed to teach Baltimore teens the inner-workings of a criminal case came with a trial on Thursday inside a real city courtroom. Circuit Judge Althea M. Handy presided, helping the teens who played the roles of cops, witnesses, jurors and lawyers.

It was more than a simple exercise -- it taught the kids how to think on their feet, asking probing questions and see there is more to an investigation than a body and cops. For more detail, here is my column that ran Sunday. Here are some more photos from Sun photographer Elizabeth Malby from the Thursday night court session:

In the first photo, Shandria Robinson (left) and Mia Griffin, both playing the role of defense attorneys, get advice from public defender Thomas Kane. In the middle, Assistant State's Attorney Noelle Winder (center) advises Mia Griffin. In the foreground, Nicole Belle plays the role of defendant:

Continue reading "Baltimore mock murder photos" »

Posted by Peter Hermann at 7:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

We have an identity crisis in Baltimore.

My good colleague over at Dining@Large found that out this week when a reader complained she had located Brasserie Tatin in Homewood instead of Tuscany-Canterbury. They're miffed that a restaurant got moved from one neighborhood to another? Try that with crime!

Nobody wants crime in their neighborhood and nobody gets more complaints about neighborhood boundaries than the police reporter. My first taste of this came a number of years ago when an unfortunate man met his demise on the most unfortunate of streets -- Southway, which according to the official city map is the boundary between Oakenshawe to the south and Guilford to the north.

I had put the body in Guilford but I confess I didn't check to see on which side of the yellow line the body fell. Callers insisted it was on the south side of the street, putting the murder firmly in Oakenshawe. To this day I fail to see how anyone in Guilford, especially those whose manicured lawns greet Southway, are any safer with the body a few feet and a neighborhood name away. But we ran a correction anyway.

This theme repeats itself almost every week, sometimes more. I've discovered living in Baltimore that these lines are a state of mind. When I returned from an overseas reporting stint and started looking for a house in the city in 2005, I discovered that Highlandtown had been replaced, by the realators anyway, with something called Upper Canton.

I settled on a rowhouse on East Fort Avenue, only to have Jenna Bush become a neighbor. Only she wasn't really a neighbor. All the press put her in Federal Hill, even though she lived well south of the line; had there been a homicide instead of a president's daughter there, the crime would've been South Baltimore.

Here's how confusing it can be: my neighbors call where we live South Baltimore, though the city map calls it smack dab in the middle of Riverside. But the Riverside Neighborhood Association starts on the south side (odd numbered houses) on Fort Avenue. Being on the even side of the street, I'm in the Federal Hill South Community Association. But tell that to anybody on Montgomery Street or further south on William Street and Battery Avenue (where the house prices rise even as the houses get smaller) and you'll get a scornful look, as if we were trying to appropriate their good name and historic trademark. My house is often confused as being in Locust Point, even though I'm a mile west of the marker.

Topping it all off, there's a sign on a building on South Hanover Street, a mile from Federal Hill, that says, "Welcome to the heart of Federal Hill."

The comments about the restaurant has sparked a vibrant debate over at another blog, John E. McIntyre's You Don't Say, where the subject, naturally, returned to crime.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

I really do hate to tell people, "I told you so," but Northeast Baltimore resident John G. Egger was nice enough to volunteer to be flogged. Back in October, he complained about columns I wrote about crime in Belair-Edison.

He wrote that my articles painted a picture "of a neighborhood quickly slipping away and does not highlight very much promise of hope." His remarks were longer than that, and thoughtful, and I posted them and moved on.

So I was surprised when Mr. Egger called me a few weeks ago. Two months after he wrote me, his house was broken into. Then, at the end of January, his house was broken into again. There have been nine burglaries in Belair-Edison in six weeks, before police arrested a suspect earlier this month who might be responsible for some if not all of the break-ins.

Thankfully, Mr. Egger has a sense of humor, in that he didn't blame me. He told me that when he read my column about crime, "It didn't seem like that to me. Sure enough, a couple months later, my house got broken into."

Burglaries are a persistent problem in Baltimore, and are on the rise this year, even as other violence crime holds pace or even falls. Maybe it's a sign of the economic times, or merely new opportunities. And typically, not just one house gets hit, but several in a cluster.

The first time Mr. Egger's house got broken into was Dec. 18. He was at work and got notified by his alarm company. He also admits he was partly at fault -- over Thanksgiving, he opened his kitchen window to air out the room while the turkey roasted, and he forgot to lock it. The intruder only had to slide the window up and crawl into the kitchen. There he ripped the alarm keypad off the wall and threw it to the floor. For some reason, he only stole a bread knife, which he used to cut an outdoor television cable he apparently mistook for the alarm wire. Egger doesn't use cable -- he has satellite -- so it took him a while to notice the damage.

A few weeks later, his girlfriend was home during the day and saw a man with no teeth peering in the window at her. She shouted and he shouted back, "Sorry, wrong house" and ran away.

On Jan. 27, Egger believes the same burglar returned. This time, his kitchen window was locked and the intruder broke it to get inside. Egger told me the intruder had 16 minutes from the time the alarm went off until he and police arrived at the house. In that time, the intruder had "gone through every drawer in my house," stolen numerous items and escaped.

Among the missing items, according to the police report: a Gateway laptop computer worth $2,000; an Olympus camera worth $450, a safe worth $80; keys to a 2000 Toyota Tundra, the safe and the grill; three necklaces; a diamond necklace; four pars of earrings; a gold bracelet; a silver Ann Klein watch; and a light blue pillow case with bleach stains used to haul away the loot. The TV set was moved but not taken.

Earlier, residents had reported seeing a man with a shovel walking around the neighborhood looking for walks to clear of freshly fallen snow. They now think the man was looking for empty houses. Police noted footprints around Egger's house and his neighbor's and a woman told police she saw a man in back of Egger's house with a bag and a shovel.

Police held community meetings to discuss safety tips and search for witnesses. Egger vowed to put up a camera in his backyard to catch the suspect. He said the man knocked his alarm key off the wall in both break-ins. His window was valued at $350.

Police Agent Donny Moses, a department spokesman, noted the problem in the Belair-Edison area and said that "most crimes like this are crimes of opportunity. A lot of times the suspect finds, 'Oh, that was easy,' and unfortunately they do return to the scene of the crime."

Moses also said that police did make an arrest after a woman on Chesterfield Avenue, who had attended one of the community meetings, confronted a burglar in his home. The spokesman said the man, identified as Maurice Kelvin Washington, 45, had a red and a blue screwdriver in his pants pocket and that officers found items taken in various burglaries in his home and at pawn shops.

Washington lives a block of Egger on Dudley Avenue. Details on his arrest are below:

Continue reading "Break-ins, and an arrest, in Baltimore's Belair-Edison" »

Posted by Peter Hermann at 6:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)
Categories: Confronting crime, Neighborhoods
        

Parking is so tight in South Baltimore's Otterbein neighborhood that residents had a gentleman's agreement with the parking police -- they'd be allowed to double-park without getting a ticket until a neighbor left a spot.

Sometime in the past several months, those unwritten rules disappeared. And now, the community's representative on parking matters, architect Robert R. Gisriel, says applications for visitor's permits has skyrocketed.

So board members took particular notice when they saw and ad posted on Craigslist from a guy offering to sell two visitor permits and letting the buyer make an offer: "You can park anywhere between 395-Conway-Light-Henrietta area. Pass is good for 1 year, expires 1-31-10. 2 block walk to TONS office buildings, 1 block to the harbor. Most parking places downtown are $100 plus a month, so this is worth ovr $1200. Email me your offer."

The Otterbein resident quickly got on the phone to another Otterbein resident, City Councilman William H. Cole IV, who quickly got on the phone to the cops in the Southern District. Two detectives contacted the man, arranged a deal outside the ESPN Zone at the Inner Harbor and made a bust. Nicholas Foster, 26, who lives on West Lee Street in Otterbein, was charged with one count of counterfeiting a city permit.

I wasn't able to reach Foster, but details of the charges he faces are below.

Parking rules vary from neighborhood to neighborhood, and Otterbein has among the city's most restrictive. Unlike neighboring Federal Hill and South Baltimore, where visitors can park up to two hours in residential neighborhhoods, drivers to Otterbein can't park there at all without a permit. Part of the reason is that the community is all residential; and it's prime location near the stadiums, the convention center, the Inner Harbor and Federal Hill makes it a magnet for people seeking free parking near the city's main attractions.

The commuity already has more housing units -- condos, appartments and town houses -- than parking spaces, and already limits residents on how many permits they can obtain. For example, a house with no off-street parking can get two parking permits, each costing $20; a house with two cars and one parking pad can only get one permit. Residents also are allowed two visitor permits -- also each costing $20 -- the kind that the suspect allegedly forged.

If everyone who is eligible actually applied for a parking permit and two visitor passes, "It would just blow us out of the water," Gisriel told me, noting that just recently he saw a car from Carroll County pull up and the occupants walk toward the Inner Harbor. He informed them they risked a ticket, and they told him they'd preper to pay than a parking garage. "They just didn't care."

Another problem is between homeowners and renters. Many of the renters are university students or young professionals, who Gisriel said "still have their cars registered to mommy and daddy" meaning they aren't eligible for a residential parking permit. But they are eligible for a visitor permit, which they place on their cars to permanently leave on the street.

It's illegal to not only forge a parking permit, but also to sell a real one, says Cole, who stated the obvious when asked about the problem: "Everybody is looking for a cheaper place to park downtown." He said believe the problem of forging the permits is more widespread than officials want people to believe.

Peter Little the executive director of the Parking Authority, said his agency takes forgery "very seriously" and said he's heard of people offering up to $500 for a parking permit.

The charging documents are below:

Continue reading "Forging parking permits" »

Posted by Peter Hermann at 6:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

It was February 1979, and an editor for the Baltimore News-American had an idea from Florida. He suggested a police blotter, and Richard Irwin, who covered cops and had worked at the paper from 1955 to 1958 and then again starting in 1965, was assigned the task with two other reporters. They split the city; Dick's job was to hit the precincts in Baltimore County.

Dick drove to a few of the station houses, not quick trips in the sprawling county that surrounds the city, and had managed to get to just a few when he was called away to a fire at Sparrows Point. It was the last time Dick drove; from then on, the Police Blotter was done by phone.

For years thereafter, Dick manned the overnight desk of the News-American, and then, when that closed in 1986, the Evening Sun, and when that closed, he came to the Baltimore Sun. He carried the blotter with him like a tattered suitcase.

Its format and type of crime changed, but Dick never did, and his compact style remains to this day -- as popular on the Internet as it is in its shortened form in the print edition. We've changed over the years -- Dick's early blotters are full of rich detail and names. It was Roger Crawford, 22, of Arbutus, who had a gun shoved in his back as he walked out of a bathroom of a BP gas station, the very first item in the very first of Dick's thousands of blotters.

A city police officer who shot a dog that was biting a child got named too -- Thomas Stein -- as did the 2-year-old child, Wallace Cordell. Today, names of victims are typically left out because people are scared of being identified as witnesses and victims.

Cops are more circumspect now -- most calls from reporters are handled by public affairs officers, or spokesmen, even for the most routine information. Irwin has usually been exempt from such rules -- I remember once in the 1990s when the department issued a blanket rule that homicide detectives could no longer talk to the news media. One detective said a hand shot up in the room, "What about the blotter?" and of course the command staff didn't mean that.

That doesn't mean there were never problems. Paul Scardina talked to Dick hundreds, perhaps thousands, of times over the seven years he spent on a desk at the Southeastern Police District. The now retired sergeant, who spent 32 years on the force, said he cringed when he picked up the paper and discovered a long list of break-ins, thefts and burglaries under the Southeast heading and only a handful scattered among the other, more violent districts. "Commanders and shift commanders didn't want us to give too much out," Scardina told me. "I'd be told to give out one robbery when we had twenty."

Dick developed a relationship with the cops on the often quiet overnight shifts. "Not only does the blotter provide a list of serious incidents of crime, but also funny ones," Dick says, just after learning someone had broken into a house in Parkville this week and taken a hot tub. "It's amazing what people steal. They get into a house and they feel they have to steal something no matter what it is."

Dick still takes notes on a torn notebook paper and keeps them by hand. Even though he works a night shift, getting off around midnight, he still makes his blotter calls in the early hours of the morning, to the cops he's been dealing with for years. They all know the drill.

Few newspapers have blotters anymore -- the New York Post still does -- and even fewer send reporters out to station houses to compile crime. Such lists typically come from headquarters, and are usually sanitized and contain only the most serious incidents, the incidents that command cares about and thinks everyone else cares about as well.

Community and neighborhood newspapers publish blotters. The one in the Baltimore Guide is very popular among residents, and I thought it was great timing when this week the New York Times wrote a brief sketch of a reporter for the Brooklyn Paper who still walks to the 94th Precinct in Greenpoint to compile a weekly blotter. The headline: "The Dying Art of the Crime Blotter."

What is surprising to me is that while newspapers shed features once thought sacrosanct, such as stock tables, the blotter remains one of the most popular items in both print and web formats. People complain when it's not in the paper, and the words "police blotter" are among the most searched for terms on our Internet site.

A sampling of crime in the blotter pales in comparison to the comprehensive lists available on the Internet -- the Baltimore Sun  offers a complete weekly tabulation of every crime in Anne Arundel County, complete with maps, derived from data sent directly to us from the county's 911 center. A similar map of Baltimore County crime is coming soon, and we already map homicides. It's all useful information and helps people figure out what is going on near their homes. But the blotter offers just a touch more narrative.

For example, the computer list will note a burglary between Jan. 4 and Jan. 23 at 4400 Old Court Road in Baltimore County. Dick's blotter will tell you that someone stole clothes worth $220 and then "poured ketchup, hand lotion and paint onto carpets, walls and floors."

Dick's favorite blotter item, and mine, made the Jay Leno show a few years ago: "Someone entered the rear yard of a house in the 5900 block of Johnson St. on Saturday morning and removed a tomato from a tomato plant. The tomato was valued at $3, police said."

If a blotter can be poetry, this is it. These are little stories, fun and useful to read in their own right, but taken collectively over time, it's a body of work that tells us something about ourselves and our community. We scan the list to see if anything happened to our neighbors or in our neighborhood, we learn intimate details of the people living down the street, we know about a string of burglaries in the next block and make sure our doors are locked, we read the blotter and feel we're connected.

There are many web sites that compile blotters from various newspapers around the country, and I remember a book that told the story of a small town in Maine by using only items from the local newspaper blotter. The Los Angeles Times wrote about a police blotter in Dutch Harbor, Alaska, where the blotter "documents what happens when thousands of fishermen" come to port.

In a small town, the blotter, like the neighborhood gossip, tells all. In a big city, the blotter makes us feel like a small town. Yes, in the big city we have murder and blood and guts headlines splashed across the front pages, but the blotter reminds us that we also have sheds that are broken into, purses that are snatched and tomatoes stolen from tomato plants. Somehow, it makes us feel like even the small things matter. Highlights of blotters past:

Continue reading "Baltimore Police Blotter turns 30" »

Posted by Peter Hermann at 6:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)
Categories: Neighborhoods
        

Here's a question from a Baltimore County resident:

"Hi, Peter--here's a question I've been pondering, and I thought you might want to consider it as something to explore in your blog.  How effective are citizen patrols?  In my position I've encountered many different philosophies, and I wonder if there is any hard evidence one way or another.

"Our neighborhood has only an email crime alert system, but nearby neighborhoods have organized COP groups, where people volunteer to patrol the neighborhood (typically for one day a month). Some have magnetic COP stickers you are supposed to slap on your car to make the COP presence more visible. One policeman who attended a neighborhood gathering said that patrolling incognito might actually be more effective. Some neighborhoods take the position that "if you live here, you are automatically part of our COP," but there are no organized patrols. They ask everyone to stay alert and report anything suspicious.

"One neighborhood that does perform patrols admitted to me that they hadn't seen much in terms of results--perhaps helping up a neighbor who had fallen, or getting newspapers off the front lawn.  My feeling is that people who volunteer to patrol make themselves feel good about "doing something," particularly when there is bad news that strikes close to home."

Continue reading "Community crime walks" »

Posted by Peter Hermann at 8:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Neighborhoods
        

The head of North Baltimore's Homeland Association wrote to me today to take issue with my column on Sunday on how his group distributes information about crime. Some residents of Homeland and others living in neighboring communities object to the association limiting its distribution list to dues-paying members.

They argue that the information should be more broadly published to help both keep people safe and catch those responsible. Amber Elburn, who refuses to join the Homeland Association, is taking information she gets from friends and reposting items on an alternative web site. That prompted Homeland to seek out attorneys regarding possible copyright violations.

I argue that crime information should be better distributed by the city to avoid each community posting separate blogs and email lists. But that would require a fundamental shift in the approach the city takes to giving out such information.

Here is the response from Homeland's president, Robert Fiore, reprinted with his permission:

Continue reading "Homeland Association and crime information" »

Posted by Peter Hermann at 3:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)
Categories: Neighborhoods