The Baltimore City Grand Jury indicted Devren Deshazo, 20, for first-degree murder and a handgun count. Court documents allege that on June 19 police responded to the 300 block of Dennison Street after hearing gunshots. Police observed the victim, Ryan Mills, 23, attempting to gain entry to the house and the suspect, Deshazo, firing at Mills. Deshazo fled the scene and police caught him a short time later without incident.
On July 7 the Baltimore City Grand Jury harshed the mellow of one John Arbuckle, 33, of the 1900 block of East Pratt Street, indicting him for "manufacturing" (aka growing) Righteous Bushes and possession with the intent to distribute in excess of 50 pounds, plus other giggle-weed-related counts. Court documents allege that on June 9 someone snitched to the Man that a white male, later identified as John Arbuckle, was selling boucoup de wacky terbacky from a premise in the 1900 block of East Pratt Street and was using the premises to store said chiba. On June 13 5-0 was at the do' and police recovered suspected Mary Jane and other drug paraphernalia. If convicted, maximum penalties are as follows: growing the chronic: 5 years/$15,000; possession with intent to distribute: 5 years/$15,000; possession of the 420: 1 year/$1,000; possession with intent to distribute in excess of 50 pounds: 5 years without parole; paraphernalia: $500 fine; paraphernalia: $500 fine; paraphernalia: $500 and carrying a concealed jammy: 3 years/$1,000. On July 16, 2002 Donald Smothers and Anthony Wallace murdered Phillip Kent, 22, during a home invasion at 2218 Round Road. A Baltimore City jury convicted Smothers and Wallace of first-degree murder in January 2003, but the Court of Special Appeals vacated the guilty verdicts 21 months later due to the improper admission of both defendants' prior criminal convictions at trial. At a hearing today, Smothers, 29, pled guilty to second-degree murder and Wallace, 26, pled guilty to manslaughter. Judge Allen L. Schwait, sentenced Wallace to six years in prison. Smothers faces a maximum of 30 years in prison when he is sentenced September 12.
A triple shooting last night in the Southwestern.
Timothy Meadows, 17, got four years, and Kenneth George, 26, got three for involvement in the attempted murder of 21-year-old Paige Boyd in Remington.
Methadone mom Gina Camponeschi of Dundalk got eight years for the the OD death of her two-year-old daughter Adriana.
Evil son Zachary Neiman had been charged with assaulting his parents prior to shooting his mother, Rae Bajus.
Lt. Clarence W. Bell Jr., state police commander and candidate for County Executive, was struck by remote control, punched in eye by wife, neglected to pay mortgage. There were 1,735 assault incidents against Baltimore officers last year.
They're shroomin' at Hopkins!
Enjoy documentaries about violent Salvadorean gangs?
Then you'll ♥ "18 With a Bullet" tonight on PBS.
Keith Ray, the North Baltimore carjacker/robber, was released from a 14-year prison stint on April 7. Proof positive that our prison system truly works! Charges against him have increased to 10, with more to come.
Five people were chosen -- four of them Naval Academy grads -- to participate in the court martial process for Navy quarterback Lamar Owens.
Looks like there's an aspriring Sheila Dixon staffer working at the Maryland School for the Deaf.
Bmore living tip: Don't forget to go to 7-11 for your free Slurpee®!
21 comments:
"Timothy Meadows, 17, got four years, and Kenneth George, 26, got three for involvement in the murder of 21-year-old Paige Boyd in Remington."
that's attempted murder.
Keith Ray was denied bail. Poor baby, he's so misunderstood. He says he did all those rotten things for money to feed his addiction.
Oh, well, in that case,... I guess we'll just let him loose, huh? After all, pistolwhipping an elderly man who won't be kidnapped is quite excusable as long as you're on the stuff, right?
Here's a video for all of you that are fond of a certain mayorial nickname...
http://wjz.com/topstories/local_story_192160745.html
and heres another one, not surprising at all...
http://wjz.com/topstories/local_story_192155544.html
Was he on the stuff? I didn't see that anywhere in the article. You must have spoken with him. Certainly not all robberies are the result of being on the stuff, are they? Some people are just bad right? I think so. Not that I'm saying KR is just bad, I've never met him.
I will say, I'm pleased to see the lock'em up and forget'em tactic is working though. If only they'd held him longer. A LOT longer. We need to do away with guidelines and just lock every one of 'em up for the remainder of their lives.
I believe he (Keith) told one of his victims that that's what his motive was.
There was a multiple car accident over a span of three or four blocks near the Courthouse on Patapsco in Brooklyn Park.
Around 5PM this afternoon.
I have an idea. Let's lock up all criminals, especially for petty crimes in a fuck you free for all where survival is based on allegiances to violent gangs, where sexual assault is often tolerated as normal behavior, where drug addiction that is fed by curropt guards is as bad as it is on the street and where there is no job training/capacitation/productive stimulation.
Then lets see how much it costs and what happens when people eventually get out.
I think Ray was wacked on the stuff but had a not so impossible and much more disturbing logical side. It takes effort to go out every night and lay in wait for victims. Have two cars, jump through neighborhoods without cameras getting you. Holding up the woman on Southway, he said to her if he were “on the street” they could be a thang. Well that must have sent her, but it’s a reality check of sorts. And when captured, his girl had a stolen watch on – something he ‘purchased’ in the House or since parole …unlikely, even from her point of view, so he must have explained it to her somehow. And robbing the two old men (63 & 57), he was pretty calmly asking what was more valuable, their lives or the gold bands on their fingers (Richard Bourne also had the ring taken off his hand and his old timex watch off his wrist on 6/25/06).
The jail time didn’t work. It’s supposed to be for Retribution, Rehabilitation or just Isolation from society, if I remember the crimlaw class reasoning. None worked here. And it would be nice to have a follow up to this story from the investigators. They clearly did their job well (though a ‘slew’ of them was required – god knows what we would do if the City went suddenly bizzerk). But why not bring in the dealer, who no doubt can afford a Mercedes on $500/night per transaction? Or bring in the pawn shop that took in a laptop or stolen gun? Or even his girlfriend who could not have been so stupid…...as CONSPIRATORS.
The events in my neighborhood sparked a mini arms race. People harassed until they thought better be prepared, no matter how risky; walking around with loaded weapons, hidden, with a range from some formal shooting practice to utterly no idea but more comfortable. Crazy. The whole thing was insane. And it’s only one event. It got sewn up so cleanly, given the number of tragic ones that do not in Baltimore, but what does that mean for people living here? The toll to society is not just the short term attacks (very bad), not just the long term cost (outlandish) or even the horrible prospect that the maniac re-emerges. It is an erosion of civility and society itself.
And let’s hope Ray gets prosecuted properly.
OK, Simon, so educate me. Given at the outset that an outcome involving aggregate criminality on the level of Baltimore's is out of the question, can you explain concretely how you would deter/prevent these crimes without 'lock 'em up'? Please accept for purposes of discussion the constraint that only a certain fraction of offenders will be deemed susceptible of drug treatment in the long run, so we agree that's no panacea.
Or were you just waxing utopian?
The concept of "Lock'em up" is waxing utopian, Galt.
The premise of "lock'em up" is to make the lives of offenders so miserable that they choose a different way of life, but what you and many others fail to see is that these people are already rock-bottom miserable. Simply putting them in jail only makes them into more vicious miscreants when they get out.
While I understand and agree that harsher sentences would help-- this would only incrementally change the crime level.
What are the things that really reduce crime? I think this is complex issue and no one has all the answers but the following helps:
1) Systematic gentrification. By making neighborhoods desireable to yuppies and dinks (dual income, no kids), you increase the tax base (more cops) and balance rentals with ownership (more people invested in community). It works and I've seen it happen over and over again.
2) Drug Treatment. Increase the number of slots-- no waiting list. Everyone on a waiting list is larcenist waiting to happen.
3) Juvenile services. Kids need things to do, structure, and positive role models. Otherwise, you literaly have a riot everytime more than a few are together.
4) Crack down on "petty crime". By the time someone is a felon, it really is too late. Its like cutting grass. If you wait until the grass is too high, you'll never be able to finish. If you mow it regularly early on, you'll have a nice lawn.
5) Keep up appearances. The "broken window" theory of crime really works.
That's my two cents. I like it better than the simplistic "lock'em up".
Even if there isn’t a panacea for all crime, the Ray case offers a pretty clear case for “lock ‘em up.” It’s clear cut, it’s costly and hopefully it will be permanent. In these cases, work camps would be good, though after 14 years on the stuff maybe the State wouldn’t get full value for money spent. Often the prisoners are sick and in for years so long term care adds to society’s overall cost. Maybe outsourcing this industry would be a step forward? You know, one or two jumbo rendition flights to an allied country far away surrounded by water – Australia?
A few comments:
The other important function of 'lock 'em up' is to make it physically impossible for them to impact decent citizen. It's called incapacitation.
Gentrification: OK, but let us agree that this is not a strategy of changing the people who are here. We're not talking about transforming an ignorant misanthrope into a cappuccino sipper. Instead, we're talking about kicking the antisocial wretches out. Where out is, I don't know, but New York made it so expensive to live there that hoodlums need to get on a 747 if they want to mug you. My one objection on this score is that they not be kicked out of the gentrified Bolton Hill into the ghetto Reservoir Hill. Your policies cannot benefit some constituents while devastating others. You'd have to kick them straight to another jurisdiction. You'd have to kick them out of the entire area, which requires a much more robust demand for middleclass housing than this city can sustain. You'd also need to demo the uninhabitablke areas. Low-income advocates always argue 'Let's use them for the low-imcome people.', which positions hoodlums just outside yuppyville, which doesn't work. Baltimore is a disaster on this score. It's actions are arbitrary and and political, and they have no intestinal fortitude in saying 'yes, I did it and I'm unapologetic.' Baltimore tells everyone what they want to hear... and does nothing useful.
Mixed income neighborhoods sound great, but in fact making them work requires a tremendous number of police babysitters. If Big Brother is not carefully watching, behavior worsens and people begin to separate out into the 'good block' and the 'bad block'.
No disagreement on slots... but some offenders consume vast numbers of slots over the lifecycle. These need a cutoff. After three treatment cycles, YOU pay.
I recently had a young male tell me he was on the corner (dealing) at 3:00 am 'because I ain't got a job and the community center is too long a walk down the hill'. Bullsh!t. A job for someone like him is going to be at minimum wage at best, and he's told me he doesn't want that. The community center is four blocks away. Sorry, but we're not building them on every corner for maximum convenience. My point is, this is mostly an excuse. I've also heard adults object that 'what're the kids gonna do, stay in a hot house?' 'It's too hot outside.' Hey, when I was a kid, it was the same temperature. You sweat. Sorry. If the parents want to install air conditioning, fine, if they don't ... tough. Air conditioning is not a Constitutional right. And how does hanging on the corner become justified, anyhow? People need a clear message... You will NOT be allowed to appropriate to yourselves public space. It's NOT yours.
On 'broken windows', this is a common misperception. Your item # 5 is your item #4. It's really just a signal of how much crap will be tolerated here. If the signal is more than the reality, it won't fool anyone. If police really allow people to drink in public, harass pedestrians, and dump garbage everywhere, painting it pretty colors won't accomplish squat.
That prison colony on the water... it's called Baltimore.
Mr Galt says
"...Where out is, I don't know, but New York made it so expensive to live there that hoodlums need to get on a 747 if they want to mug you. My one objection on this score is that they not be kicked out of the gentrified Bolton Hill into the ghetto Reservoir Hill. Your policies cannot benefit some constituents while devastating others. You'd have to kick them straight to another jurisdiction. You'd have to kick them out of the entire area, which requires a much more robust demand for middleclass housing than this city can sustain...."
I think you have to get a reality check on NYC. There is plenty of poverty in NYC, plenty of mixed incomes, and still a lot of crime. One's preception of safety is just that -- a preception. I go to NYC regularly. It has largely improved, but not in the way that you described.
Gentrification does not have to completely kick out entire socioeconomic levels to work (like mcmansion communities do). The idea is to have a wider distribution of all income levels.
I do think you should really try to find more positive things in your community, Galt. People can't go on for very long with a negative seige-like mentality. It will burn you out.
In my old mixed-income neighborhood on the upper west side, 67% of households have median income over $50,000. 90% have income over $15,000, which is about the median household income in better waverly. The mean household income on the UWS is about $140,000.
How about waverly? Better Waverly has 67% of its households earning over $10,000, 90% have income over about $5,000. Per capita income is about $8,000. Better Waverly was a leader among neighborhoods in the volume of homicides last year.
Gentrification doesn't mean Trump Towers. It means that overwhelmingly, occupants are capable of responsibly attending to their own needs. They have enough financial substance that being convicted of felonies would really mess up their lives. This is not the case in Better Waverly. Many, but not all, of its residents are just plain ol' ghetto. They have no future, and consequently they have no inhibitions. They are loose cannons. If you have a sufficient yet modest number of encounters with random subsamples of this neighborhood, you will be victimized. This place breeds crime and defends its practitioners. Decent people typically do not survive here for long. Sooner or later, they head for a nice enclave, or the suburbs, because they're fed up with ghetto conduct. They just want a life... the pursuit of happiness.
That, not a fleet of Beamers, is the objective of gentrification. One way to achieve it is to change who is there. The other way is to change the supervisory environment by hiring large numbers of sworn officers. Tiny Better Waverly needs about 75 officers, distributed over days and shifts. It gets less than one tenth that. The behavioral filter that comes with intensive policing permits behaviorally acceptable families to live with the rest of us, notwithstanding their lower incomes.
With no behavioral exclusion and little income exclusion, you get the 'hood. Hello, Baltimore.
Drop kicked that shit right through the goal posts.
So far it seems as though gentrification is the answer. . .let somebody else deal with em.
Seriously galt, not a personal attack, but I'm not sure I've heard one solution from you other than lock them up, move 'em out. It just, for such a smart person, boggles the mind as to how you think it could be that simple? You and I agree that drug treatment is not a panacaea, even for the drug addicted population. There are plenty of criminals out there who aren't on the stuff.
For sake of argument, are you being humanitarian in advocating increased policing because it will ultimately lead to less people in jail and prison? As though a show of force would keep people in check? Sort of like they will then know that they can't commit a crime and so behave or go somewhere else? (not a rhetorical question). On some bizarre level one has to agree with that, a city/state without policing is lawless.
But you're coming across as very fed up and exasperated (probably rightly so) so much to the point that the counterargument has become your argument. Sort of the "I dont give an f what you do with them as long as their not bothering me". The thing is, no matter what you do with criminals they impinge on you, whether it's through tax dollars, warehousing (a la Keith Ray)(and they do get out unless you want to start the ridiculously utopian argument of locking all of them up forever, I was being facetious in my earlier comment), or paying for some sort of service which is trying to make them better people with minimal to moderate success.
Rehabilitation, compared to "get them out of my way", seems like the only logical choice. At least if you are going to direct all of your energy toward advocating one solitary solution (get them out of my life to where they belong) you could direct all of your energy towards better programs inside if you want to put them there. But mostly it just seems as though you are relying on too much black or white in a wonderfully complex problem.
Prisons, as they function now on the whole, do not rehabilitate. You can pay for it now or you can pay for it later when they get out. But you can't just keep harping on sending them there without advocating for the system to work better. Do some freakin advocacy or something. You've got way too much energy to be wasting on only a fraction of the answer. And criminals, believe it or not, are unique in what, if anything, will work to rehabilitate, so don't think I'm copping to drug treatment alone, mental health treatment alone, incarceration alone, as an answer. No no. Much more complex. Thank you.
Thanks, I'll take my beating now.
No beating, we're cazh.
It's just, you see, that I've worked with these people for many, many years now. I've seen generations of 'em come, and go. When you get preggers at 15 and shot by 25, a generation passes quickly here.
They mostly don't rehabilitate. What they do, is to get physically 'too old for this sh!t', and tone down the criminality starting in middle age, for the ones who survive that long. Precious few that I've known have turned over a new leaf before they were too old to climb over razorwire when chased by cops.
The only successful programs I know are those which cherrypick... they have a 90% success rate because they held no attraction for anyone who wasn't in the game wholly accidentally. And yes, the people who know they weren't supposed to be gangstas will always have a high success rate. They weren't even supposed to be there.
We need to accept that Baltimore is just far, far more dyed-in-the-wool criminal than most parts of the world. Then you either allow it (goodbye...Get Out of It), or you're at war just as if in Sadr City, Iraq. It's the same thing.
Galt, (wegggcza) "they mostly don't rehabilitate". It's a tough thing to have to come to, personally, because it feels like a copout, but harm reduction is also a form of success. If you can reduce (because I don't know anyone who can eliminate) the amount of crimes committed by a single criminal isn't it worth it to provide whatever treatment caused that effect? We already agree there's no panacaea, Galt. Hopefully we already agree that you cant get rid of them forever. Incarceration is a form of harm reduction in and of itself. It's not a panacaea and in many instances the current practice is contributing to the problem with gang members becoming co's, drugs running rampant throughout, overcrowding so that there are long waiting lists to get into the GED, RSAT, and COPS programs (which don't include real life experiences in their treatment), lack of adequate physical and mental healthcare needed to keep tax payers from paying more to incarcerate these individuals, . . .only to spit them back out with no right to vote, no ability to become gainfully employed, and no way to relate to a world 10 years different than the one they left. You want to lock somebody INTO the game, make it the only thing they know and tell them it'll never be any different. I'm not an apologist, I'm a pragmatist. We're doing this to ourselves in many ways by not looking for better solutions, particularly on the side of the factors that create criminals to begin with, outside of biological reasons. Open the f-ing problem up.
Is a reduction in chronicity a success? It certainly don't hurt, but if someone holds up two liquor stores instead of three, he's still gotta be in jail, right? I mean, if not, I need to go hold someone up, because it's ok.
so, if you'd like to dedicate yourself to the underlying cause of their incivilities, I'm there for you. We'll have them brought to stay at your house and then you let us know when you've fixed them, hear?
I'm not an antipunishment advocate by any stretch, to be sure. I am a punishment without meaningful consequences opponent. I am an opponent also of wasting my time not trying to work on any way of making a difference. So sure, send em over. I can't guarantee results but I can sure spend my time trying. Remember, you said you'd be there for me. . .
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