Monday, January 30, 2006

January 30

At a hearing today, John William Smith, 40, pled guilty to voluntary manslaughter. Judge Wanda K. Heard sentenced Smith to eight years in prison. On June 18, 2005 Smith stabbed Rodney Dickerson, 42, once in the chest at Mount Vernon Place United Methodist Church. Smith and Dickerson began arguing in the church's dining area while eating dinner.

A man was shot in the stomach during a robbery in the Western. Also, robbery at a White Marsh McDonald's and attempted robbery at the Little Tavern on Eastern Avenue.

In HoCo jury selection is underway in the first-degree murder trial of Melissa Harton, accused of strangling fellow grad student Natasha Bacchus.

An inmate hanged himself in a police holding cell in Annapolis.

A preliminary hearing for Michael Anthony Jolin, 28, is scheduled for 8:30 a.m. tomorrow. Court documents allege that the victim of Jolin's intimidation was also the victim of a robbery in December 2005. Since the date of the robbery incident, the witness reports that Jolin has continuously threatened to kill he, his family, his girlfriend and three children if the robbery was reported to the police.

Mayor: The violent crime rate is at its lowest point since the 60's.

8 comments:

taotechuck said...

From the "State of the City" link on WMAR:

"(Voters) also say they want to here about what's been done to improve education in the city and how the battle against crime is going."

Nothing beats hereing (or is that hering?) about how great our city's educational system is.

Maurice Bradbury said...

oh, that is too rich.

InsiderOut said...

I'm listening to the Mayor's address from a link in wbal.com and all he talks about is the statistics about how crime has reduced from 10 years ago! I think a lot of people are upset about the crime statistics compared to 2-3 years ago.

Anonymous said...

What unadulterated bullsh*t!

O'Malley:
"That year, the high school graduation rate stood at 42 percent. Through hard work, our city's high school graduation rate now stands at nearly 60 percent."

Yes, the graduation rate is higher because the denominator decreases with each grade as more and more members of a class drop out. The teachers failed a test of their capacities, relative to other places in the country. Keep in mind that 60% graduated means that the other enrolled 40% failed.

O'Malley claims he's got the city running like a well-oiled machine because he's got a statistical reporting system. I'll testify that the reports going into the system are nowhere near truthful. When you measure performance, the workers focus on exactly what is reported. If it was a proxy for another related result, that result will perform poorly while the statistic performs well.

In this respect, O'Malley's citistat measures THE WRONG THING. Further, all such systems presume that workers don't write the reports. O'Malley's staff write their own statistics, so results are favorable. Duh!

I suspect crime is actually down a bit, but definitely not to the degree Citistat says. I can tell you it's totally out of control in MY neighborhood. And I'm personally aware of many crimes reported to the police which never got entered into Citistat. Since these include violent crimes, I don't place much faith in that claim, either. The FBI found a 2.6% understatement in last year's murder stat, which is pretty damning. Bodies don't lie (well, yeah, flat, y'know), but Mayors do.

The man just lies. He just lies.

InsiderOut said...

"There are three kinds of lies: lie; damned lies; and statistics."
Benjamin Disraeli.

Malnurtured Snay said...

Hey, completely unrelated question but I figured you might now ... how might an individual learn how much probabation time they have on a PBJ traffic penalty awarded in BaltCo?

Maurice Bradbury said...

No clue, Snay, I don't even know what that is (you were eating a sandwich when you should have been driving?).. maybe the MVA would know?

Anonymous said...

Go to the clerk's office at Towson's traffic court (District Court for Balto. County). Give them the case and request the disposition.