A drug suspect was shot in the chest at N. Lindwood and McElderry by an officer on Friday.
Erin Loube, a 16-year-old-student at School for the Arts, disappeared a week ago the from the Morgan State University campus.
Speaking of arresting dealers, this Messenger story never answers its own question, but does note: "in November 2004 that the number of marijuana arrests in Maryland had reached a five-year high ... much of the rise was in Baltimore." (I guess The Pot is a narcotic, I'd always just assumed the bacon was after the White Drugs. Maybe that's the substory with all the "abated by arrest" arrests: the prosecutors are declining to prosecute the MJ)
The president of the City Council once again appears to be linked to a fishy deal.
This just in: Sailors like to drink.
6 comments:
I read the Messenger article on York Road policing. (please embed the link here.) There's a basic problem.
Let's not get bogged down in arguing which laws are correct. Given a set of laws, what on earth would justify a police commissioner's choosing which laws to enforce ? The problem, more particularly, is with his choosing which NOT to enforce.
But is it not ok if a community group signs off on it? Not really. If a community group ok's shooting my wife, does that make it so ?
The whole value of law from the time of Hammurabi has been that it's codified and objective. Vorschrift ist Vorschrift.
The executive branch is charged with enforcing not those laws it favors, nor those which some particular constituency favors. It is to enforce them uniformly, or not at all. To do otherwise would be a grant of legislative power which is denied the executive by charter.
This why the BCPD cannot be permitted to have less manpower than the crime here warrants in a decent city. Otherwise, the deficiency in enforcement is distributed according to the Commissioner's whim, which in practice becomes a selective repeal of validly adopted law.
Police Commissioners are not authorized to repeal laws.
your last paragraph is the key. with limited and insufficient resources, you have to prioritze enforcement. Why take an officer off the street for an hour or so to make a marijuana arrest when there are so few officers out there to begin with and so much worse crime? Give more resources and more laws can be enforced better. (Just don't give so much resources that Baltimore City cops start enforcing traffic laws, my insurance will go up).
No. Wrong. If you choose as a society to not furnish sufficient resources to enforce a prohibition against MJ, which can be a reasonable choice, then yiu recognize that choice and arrange to repeal the law. Otherwise, you are structurally ensuring that the law applies to some peple and some places and times, but not in a predetermined way, so that it becomes arbitrary.
Why should murder be any more doable in Baltimore than in Kent Co.? Isn't it equally unlawful according to the Maryland legislature? Furnish the resources or admit that you don't intent the particular law to be enforced by repealing it, at least locally. Then the legal regime,... the real one,... is made known to all.
Jeez, my typing is great today, ain't it ?
Query in this regard: does the persistent failure of the executive in Baltimore to provide better policing in light of our long-term status as second-worst American city rise to the level of 'wilful neglect of duty, or misbehavior in office' ? If so, we can solve the problem by operation of law.
Dixon needs to be run out of town!
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