An inmate at the Maryland House of Corrections in Jessup was fatally stabbed with a homemade knife yesterday.
I missed linking to Murder Ink last week, so here's a summary of last week and this week: Said Sawab's March 22 death has been removed from the murder count pending an FBI decision on the case. 80-year-old Clyde Lewis killed 66-year-old Thomas Batty (#133) in the lobby of the apartment home where both men lived. Sheldon Anderson (#137) was shot in the face on Edmondson Ave. Kareem Foster (#134) was shot repeatedly in Cherry Hill on July 2. Irvin Conley (#135) was stabbed while trying to break up a fight in the Northeast. Elroy Long (#136) was shot to death in his car on Long Island Ave.; witnesses said before he was shot, he appeared to be reaching for a loaded gun that was found in his car.
Kidnapper David Piccione was arrested in Harford County last night, and his 25-year-old victim was unharmed.
New questions about a drop in violent crime arrests.
More info on the three men who were shot (but not killed) in the Southwest on Monday.
The FBI has decided that Rey Rivera's last note was a stream-of-consciousness poem and not a suicide note. His family maintains that he was a victim of foul play.
Dontae Nichols got 30 years for shooting Montrell Williams with a shotgun at a party.
Marquis Moore got five years for kidnapping and attempting to choke to death his ex-girlfriend.
Stealing scooters at gunpoint and watching his brother shoot a girl in the face during a game of Russian Roulette are just part of the fun of being Mike Foster.
He may be a bad swimmer, but he's a mighty fine escape artist.
Baltimore County is getting $110,000 to help monitor sex offenders.
No more detox in the box.
Vegetarianism in Carroll County has never looked so good.
One hundred cats and the body of an 84-year-old woman were found in a condemned home in Dover. The woman's two daughters have been arrested.
16 comments:
Guys, in light of some spirited debate in this forum, I have been examining my premises regarding my intolerance for Baltimore crime. Why, I thought might it get to me more than some of you other urban pioneers. Hmmm. The answer, as it happens, is acclimation.
I have compared recent crime outcomes in Baltimore City, its state as a whole (MD), my ex-urban home town, and its state as a whole. What I found was interesting. I clearly expected that urban crime would be higher than suburban. What I found was, that while the composition of crimes across categories was fairly identical between Maryland and New York State, the statewide per capita numbers in Maryland were about 50-70% higher for agg assault and for property crimes, and burglaries were about 75% higher. That is, purposeful crime is more common here than in New York.
Statewide per capita results in New York were about 25% higher than in its suburbs, a great deal of the reported crime in which was simple larceny.
Property crime per capita in Baltimore is about double that of Maryland, while per capita violent offenses are several times that at the state level. The composition of reported offenses across categories in Maryland is largely larceny, while in Baltimore City robbery is far more prominent.
Comparing the exurbs of New York with Baltimore City, the percentage of crimes consisting of larcenies in New York suburbs is quite high, while in Baltimore City, about 150% more robberies take place than in NY suburbs, as a percentage of the total crimes in those places. The inference is that the reporting rate in New York is probably much higher than in Maryland, so lower-order offenses are more likely to be picked up.
Net, net, crime per capita in Baltimore is about four to six times that in New York suburbs, which consists primarily of lower-level property theft, a response to a much lower threshhold for reporting crime overall.
What it all means is this:
the crime that gets reported in Baltimore is just the tip of the iceberg: lower-level offenses are just swept under the rug because we've got so many frickin' people being killed and shot.
Maryland offenders in general and Baltimore in particular, have less regard for your property rights and the right to be free of physical molestation. Baltimore offenders know no bounds.
Anyone not raised with a pack of wolves should be offended at the kind of conduct prevalent in Baltimore: it is excessive not just by suburban standards, but by ALL standards. It's just unacceptable and inexcusable.
While leaving Maryland is not necessarily life-enhancing, clearly leaving Baltimore City is indicated provided it is expected to maintain its current trajectory. As the housing market deflates, this will occur and priced-out residents will flock to the suburbs. The only way to stem that tide would be to really, truly commit to massive increases in policing and increased quality competition among Baltimore City public schools. The teachers' union won't like that last part.
I like that you included schools. No doubt the level of violent crime is high (to put it mildly) here. Factor in to your analysis that you've been attacked, a couple of times you say, for maybe no apparent reason.
I'd like to offer that your living in total fear a la lock your windows, doors, car doors, etc. has a bit of normalcy given your experiences (generally when people are attacked, what's more, unprovoked and for reasons that can't be made sense of, a bit of PTSD is a normal reaction, but I thought we all understood that).
And the flavor lingers of some mix of having been employed or being employed by part of the system.
Your concern about violent crime and criminals is well-warranted, Galt.
However, your solutions to me seem extremely simplistic. Locking more people up, even if for longer time, will not help because the whole criminal justice system is ineffective. As my previous post argues, the prison system validates a logic of violent social interaction as the basis for heirarchies of power. This is especially true with regards to sexual assault in prison.
Your suggestion for the schools, shrouded in the ideological codes of capitalism is interesting. But the problem is less about "choice" than about quality of education and accountability. If you speak to teachers in Baltimore City, you are likely to find massive frustration with the burocracy, waste, and unaccountability of an unelected school board (which the state and the city jointly administer and equally deny responsibility for).
However, you should talk to the students that are organizing for a better education. Tutors for the Algebra Project who are training fellow students using the successful pedogogic models advanced by Civil Rights icon Bob Moses also have a very compelling analysis of the miseducation of Baltimore's (especially its black) youth. Their answers have to do more with changing current power structures, increasing accountability, and fully funding the system rather than offering half price vouchers for private schools.
I would also offer that the education system is absurdly designed to offer vocation training based on a Fordist economic model (think large American factories using the assembly line) that has been in decline since the sixties and is now as bankrupt as the abandoned factories that populate East and West Baltimore alongside its now abandoned houses. With so much work to do to rehab, construct, teach, cure and organize in our communities, its absurd that there is no good paying work. There is work to be done, but there is a lack of will to organize, train and pay people to do it.
p.s. i am in a hurry, please excuse any grammatical errors or sentence fragments.
But Simon, absent a Fordist need for an 'undifferentiated labor pool', any work organizing, teaching unreceptive children, and razing (not rehabbing)the east and west sides is going to be below the minimum wage. That's just how low the value is. Public employees who have a marginal product of capital in the $3.00/hr. range will push for big union salaries... that's why our schools cost so much and deliver so little that people have walked with their feet even though they continue to have to pay with their taxes. That's how bad the schools are. Private construction will follow market labor rates for rehab, but in my experience the skilled contractors do not employ problematic urban youth. Those programs train people to be highly unproductive as carpenters, and a lot of them go on to be 'scam' ghetto handymen.
That's the only way you get paid much more than what your work is worth, and the marginal product of labor with most Baltimore young males is really, really low. The pleasant surprise is when one exceeds your expectations and really excels. It's just rare.
One thing I'm betting we can agree on... is that almost any programs operated by this inept, self-interested, croneyistic municipal government are probably going to be ill-conceived. Those that aren't will have all the value in them stolen by some minority contractor associated with someone's sister. This government needs to be dissolved. I advocate municipal receivership.
Simon,
This is probably your best post yet. What frustrates me about your other posts is they often just criticize the criminal justice system and the idea of punishing those who break the laws. The basis of your criticism seems to be that the punishment will not cure the cause of crime. Your post today talks more about how to cure the crime and it talks about the schools.
I think what we need to realize is that the goal of criminal justice system is not to cure the cause of crime. It is to respond to criminal acts. Our society should address the cause of crime (fix the schools, provide more drug trmt and job training), but it should also punish those that break the law. Those two goals are not mutually exclusive. In fact, both are absolutely necessary. We should all work to acheive both goals with discounting one or the other.
Thoughtfully,
insiderout
Good, Insider. And, yes, Simon, thoughful consideration on a hot topic. BTW, if you know how to make incarceration less damaging, go for it. The one thing I cannot accept is that we won't arrest them because they're going to worsen. They MUST be arrested (if they in fact did what we proscribe against).
Rodya, I don't think of myself as a PTSD candidate, only because that generally applies to someone who's now out of the warzone.
I'm still here. I see the stuff every day. I sit in a bar and the guys are discussing who offed whom, quite casually. On the way to the supermarket, the guys on the median strip exchange info about who's getting out this month and who just got jacked by 5-0. And these are not mob bosses.. just daily conversation. In another place they'd be asking about the weather or 'Did you read Doonesbury' this morning?' Here, crime is what we do. It's quite institutional. The nicer hoods actually get quite confused when you make it clear that you're going to 'rat them out.' They don't understand why someone fairly nice would interfere with their enterprise.
I'd be PTSD if I moved to New York, got a studio on Horatio Street, and waxed poetic about the nastiness back in ol' Baltimore.
But I'm still here. And it still happens every night. I suppose I'll eventually shut up. That's how you'll know they finally shot me good. #138 or whatever, lying in the street bed.
Now, if we really wanted to go after the root cause of the problem, I suppose you'd declare Baltimore a behavioral hazard to the development of young people and remove children from their mothers at birth, sending them to integrate with the real world as they come up from a very young age. Once kids have become Baltimorized by about age 10, they're overwhelmingly gonna come up no good.
That's a great response. I enjoyed reading. Also, I think the idea that the kids born and raised here will be overwhelmingly no good by age 10 is another perceptual distortion and generalization; my how you like to stoke the fires.
As always, thanks for stirrin' it up.
Oh, BTW, I've run the number on Baltimore County in the same way. They're basically identical to Maryland statewide numbers, except that motor vehicle theft and robbery are about a third lower per capita. The composition across categories is pretty identical. What that means, I think, is that Baltimore City is quite idiosyncratic. That is, the conduct of and in the City generates the extreme reported crime.
Makes a compelling argument for reviving the punishment of exile from the jurisdiction.
Poor old Si gets the kick just b/c I decided to, “criticize the criminal justice system and the idea of punishing those who break the laws.” And in fact I was wrong, but not for that. The 3 pillars of jail’s purpose are purportedly 1) to rehab the offender, 2) offer retributive justice (i.e. lose privileges and be isolated) and/or 3) to deter future crime by others. It was a point meant to be taken with reference to Mr. Ray’s standard setting behavior. If Insiderout thought that meant, “The basis of your criticism seems to be that the punishment will not cure the cause of crime.” Then it is true. B/c its ugly self has made a stellar appearance.
More difficult is the question of what do some numbers as against other numbers mean ? – is the UWS comparable to Balto? When there are identifiable black and white neighborhoods that don’t perform well can they be lumped into the larger metro population for comparison? How do we know 150% greater than X means something? Balto has the distinguishing characteristic that areas of town are death traps, not unlike other big cities in the US. They are such to people often known to eachother if not distantly related. It is a case where generations face the incentives for crime and the lack of any counter incentives (NOT b/c the threat of prison scares them, makes them respect the law and/or fear retribution) but where the culture in the area is desperate and there is a lack of any other perceptible standard. Upward movement from that isn’t impossible, I admit, but really rare and admirable.
When I first came to Balto I was amazed to read in the Sun how local police and teachers joined to take elementary children to visit the prison on Greenmount – prior to the building of the Supermax, but the regular Iron bar, barbed wire and brick House. The reason was inculcate in them a natural dread of the House and to “send a message.” I can’t imagine what was going through the hollow chambers of those adults’ heads. Were they Baltimorized?
X
I have observed that dread of the Big House is initially high as of the first exposure, which is enough to deter for a population such as the UWS which never intends to ever end up there again.
The problem is that the magnitude of the dread falls off sharply after the second experience with the jail. By the fourth detention experience, they're old hands at it and, knowing what to expect, it holds no dread, but merely inconvenience.
In a society where the experience is widespread, being in jail is almost a pedigree, even if quite inconvenient.
hmm...
* stabbed _twice_
* regular confrontational conversations with dealers
* overhears gang-bangers in bars
* thinks being shot is a real possibility
Just what are you getting yourself into, Galt?
You'd have to force me at gun point into a bar where patrons are talk about the 'offing' people. Which bar are you talking about?
I'm starting to think that you lack common-sense and street smarts (are you one of those wacky objectivist libertarians?)
All this makes me think of Bernard Goetz, the infamous guy who shot three would-be muggers in NYC. He had been living with a chip on his shoulder for some time after having been mugged. One day he decides to arm himself. He enters a subway car and delibrately sits himself down next to thug that was slouching across two seats (for the those of you with asperger's, that is body language for "don't sit next to me"). That incident started the whole mugging and shooting event that followed.
I'm thinking that maybe Galt, like Goetz, is pushing his luck with his public interactions.
Well, in my neighborhood, you really don't have the option of a bar without hoodlums.
While my conversations with known dealers are regular, I'm not sure I'd call them confrontational. In this neighborhood, the less-violent dealers are sorta the makeshift community leaders of the unengaged young male population. (now that's something, ain't it?)
If you don't speak with them, then you really wouldn't speak with anyone under 25 at all. There are the creme de la crap. We just don't have a lot of hardworking family guys or college students here, and they're mostly itchin' to make some $ so they can get the flock outta here.
Now, what is true is that I'm not about to lock myself in the bomb shelter with 10 years of k-rations on account of the widespread misconduct rampant in this area. And pretty much everyone here knows that I'm in regular contact with 5-0 and I'm gonna keep on snitchin'. It's called civic duty.
Most of the young males understand that I have my job and they have theirs. Many of them would certainly appreciate it if I were as ineffectual as the City. I'm not. I'm fairly diligent.
The only alternative would be that I should fly out of here to be with 'my own people'. Call me a flowerchild if you will, but it is in the public interest to encourage people of different socioeconomic backgrounds to coexist. The flight of the black middleclass is killing the still-shrinking City of Baltimore. If the 'hood if gonna be off-limits to everyone but hoodlums, then it's just another name for a prison, and you ought to just build one. Folks need to understand that you cannot simultaneously ask people to integrate and also maximally 'use street smarts', because street smarts in Baltimore tell you to segregate. In housing, in schools, in business. It's why Baltimore is being torn in half: a mostly-white, slightly-mixed upper middleclass urban village and a black inner city ghetto.
If you want people like me to either hide or flee, then the inner city should just be condemned and torn down to green fields. You have no business operating a jurisdiction which is known to be a crime-dominated ecosystem. It'd be like breeding mosquitoes in a malarial swamp. That's no community, it's just a 99% hazard.
As for what to do with the hoody residents, I'm increasingly agreeing with the judge in the ACLU housing case vs. Baltimore City that Baltimore should selectively export it's problem population to other counties to equalize the burden.
Interestingly, Mr. NO'Malley has gone on record that he feels otherwise and intends to retain them as constituents. The reasoning, in actuality, is that their population mass entitles his government to a big ol' pot of federal assistance money, and he doesn't want to lose that gravy, even if the City taxpayer gets stuck paying more out in the end because these are problem-intensive people.
I've been twice stabbed in this community because I'm actively engaged in it. I walk its streets, shop the shops, and actually speak with people other than clergy. That's normal. In a decent place, if you didn't do those things, we'd call you a hermit. In this place, it also exposes you to hazard, because the police administration have not adequately responded to the level of criminality here.
Neither of the stabbings was confrontational. In fact, I was completely surprised on both occasions. On both occasions, I was just coming back from a local shop with my purchase. That's not particularly risky behavior. We want people to do that. If that act exposes you to exceptional hazard, then the policing's not right where you are.
Thanks insider,
but if that was my best post yet, its cause you have never bothered to visit my blog (though i have been on hiatus for a week or so
http://laluchita.blogspot.com
Re: Galt
If you answer is pay sub-poverty wages, raze everyone's home, kidnap people's children so they can live with "civilized people," kill whoever you can in a massive flood and lock the rest up; then you are just a cynical asshole, doomed to repeat centuries of cruelty and brutality that brought us here today.
The more you right, the less I think you are who you claim to be.
People who really want to prevent the root causes of crime should work to empower those working for solutions such as:
Baltimore Algebra Project
United Workers Association
Critical Resistance
Baltimore Free Store
and a whole rack of others who Don't talk about it, but are about it.
Si, The holier than thou is dull - everyone has a civic duty and if it's done somewhere where it's not normally known then all the better. Talking to people, fine; shop in the hood, fine; snitchin in the hood...no. Not alone anyhow. There is a critical mass achieved when enough good guys stay in town vs. when enough bad guys overtake town. When the tipping point is reached it's not just a social/dusfunctional problem or even a police problem - b/c it isn't supposed to require 'legions' of cops to defend a place called Better Waverly (hah!)- It means people should move out and begin living (without stabbing). Untenable is just that. Other than providing a juicy statistical basis for getting out of it (not in on it) what is the tipping point?
X
Simon,
I don't 'favor' low wages, I accept economic laws of behavior. If I'm paying you $10 for producing $2 of output, then I need to stop, or better yet, get in on the receiving end of that deal. The result is what we call the equimarginality principal.
I only advocate razing homes which are destined to breed extreme, over-the-top incivility.
I only advocate removing children who are going to be raised to be subhuman.
I didn't quite get the postdiluvian reference, unless we're talking about New Orleans. And, yes, the concentration of really bad people remaining in the ninth ward and resettled into Houston ghettos are a big problem and have vastly increased the crime there. They should be locked up for willful (as opposed to disaster-desperate) misconduct.
A few gratuitous thoughts:
I kinda support Balto. Algebra. I do think kids are wronged by rotten schools. I do not support the call for big hikes in expenditures. Efficient education is a better avenue. I don't think it's about a conspiracy... it's about rotten union-dominated municipal government.
The other three entities are utopian whiners. They wish to abolish basic behavioral laws which have been in place for thousands of years by using kum-ba-ya advocacy. Whatever. Get a job, y'all. A real one.
I actually did some organizing work with the Living Wage/SLAC people years ago. The sales pitch was great, but when they expressed absolute disinterest in making their followers more valuable employees in the market, I kinda dropped them like a bad cold.
Simon, your association with Critical Resistance unfortunately diminishes you as much in my eyes as my reactionary libertarian stuff has done me in yours.
Right back atchya.
Post a Comment