You can be casual about locating Baltimore restaurants by neighborhood, but you had better be careful in locating crimes. Yesterday’s post, “Not my neighborhood’s keeper,” about the difficulty in establishing the boundaries and names of the city’s neighborhoods, generated some vigorous responses, including this one from Summer Gonter, which she has graciously permitted me to publish:

The most recent issue was with an article by Stephen Kiehl on a stabbing that occurred on Eastern Avenue at Conkling. It was mentioned as being "near Patterson Park". While we, as a neighborhood, recognize that the Park is a major landmark, the stabbing ACTUALLY happened on the dividing line of Highlandtown, Canton and Brewer's Hill. It was several blocks from the park and even farther from our neighborhood, which the map may identify as Baltimore -Linwood, but everyone knows as "Patterson Park". The Baltimore-Linwood Association was renamed The Patterson Park Neighborhood Association several years ago.

With the loss of the Patterson Park CDC, the neighborhood association, led by many, many volunteers from the neighborhood, is taking up the slack on promoting and marketing the neighborhood. There was actually a great article about it in this week's City Paper. We are fighting a tough battle here and to have the Sun report crime with references to the Park that anchors our neighborhood only hurts us. If the murder had been reported as occurring "near Canton" I'm sure you would have had quite an uproar on your hands. May I note this ALSO happened with the Zach Sowers case as he was reported to be a resident of Patterson Park but his home was in Highlandtown. We're still fighting the effects of that.

My neighbors did send in several responses to Mr. Kiehl because we were all upset about it and it made the rounds on our listserv, but we were essentially told that the suburban readers don't know neighborhoods and the park was a "good landmark". That's the gist of what you said in your blog post yesterday as well. Well, that doesn't really fly with me. If the suburban readers don't know neighborhoods, you can take the time to educate them on the subject. That's what a newspaper is supposed to do. Don't take the lazy way out.

And the same issue has been addressed by my valued colleague Peter Hermann, in “Neighborhoods and crime” at his Baltimore Crime Beat blog, in which he discusses the difficulties from the perspective of the police reporter. And from that of a resident — he has some options for identifying where he lives.

The naming of neighborhoods in crime stories is a matter of great moment for the people who live in those areas. A jocular response about identifying where a restaurant can be found is one thing, but these neighborhood names in crime story, however difficult they may be to pin down, deserve careful attention from our reporters and copy editors.