Also in the Blotter (linked above), Gary Shipman (#139) has been ID'd as the man who was stabbed to death on Sheridan Ave last Wednesday.
In the wake of Kevin Harold Rowlette's murder, some people in Edgewood are trying to come together and strengthen the community's bonds. Accused killer Kyvelle Jamaas Martin is still on the loose.
In the first use of a new law that allows tape recorded statements to be played without the witness present, Tyrone Beane's sister testified against him.
The Lamar Owens rape trial is being deliberated after the prosecutor grossly misquoted testimony in his closing comments.
Victims of sexual assault in military academies claim they are punished for reporting the attacks.
A woman who lives on a sailboat at Shipwright Harbour Marina in Anne Arundel was sexually attacked by a stranger while she was sleeping early yesterday morning.
A 21-year-old woman claims that she was sexually assaulted by an off-duty uniformed officer whom she knows.
Issac Smith was sentenced to over 12 years in the slammer for his role in bombing Edna McAbier's Baltimore house.
A Severn man bought a house with a stolen Social Security number.
3 comments:
It certainly would figure that reporting getting raped gets you in trouble. There is enough stigma about reporting rape as is, but institutional punishments are insane if you ask me.
i heard the shooting at the mall was more like a shoot-out. There was a large police response. It's sad the Sun can't (or won't) get more information on it.
warning: Windbag Alert.
Lengthy comments follow.
So, to recap my earlier conversation with Anonymous, regarding police department misconduct, he/she Just.Doesnt.Believe.TheyDoIt.
,yet from so many, many different sources, they clearly do.
And regarding reforming the sufficiency of the departmental manpower:
"In other words, you want to more than double police expenditures and police staff even though they have trouble maintaining their current staffing levels? Not gonna happen, ever."
So, it seems what we've established is that there are two Baltimores. An inner-city black one in which police are sometimes a greater hazard than criminals and no one can have a reasonable expectation of law & order, and a white, upper-middleclass one in which police are overdeployed relative to the neighborhood's share of resident criminality and people freak out if the neighbors have cut their grass too high, so high is their expectation of enforcment.
There also from the quote is confirmation that people like Anon
are unwilling to bear the (admittedly large) fiscal burden of providing law & order in the amount needed to satisfy their level of expectations equally over all neighborhoods.
So, what we get, {credit due here to Simon for inducing me however unintentionally to reread Plessey v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board} is a society which is separate but decidedly unequal in terms of public safety. Effectively, by refusing police enforcement on the North side which is provided on the South side, the laws have been rewritten so that breaking into a house on one street is lawful (or otherwise tolerated) and yet is unlawful on another street because enforcement exists. This, applying in both cases the same laws of the State of Maryland.
Did someone repeal the fourteenth amendment while I wasn't looking?
Now, to complicate the issue, in my neighborhood, about two of every three males are not unmeployed, but rather are outside the work force, meaning they are not even looking for employment. Since they are constantly purchasing fast food and malt liquor, they have income. Three guesses where it came from.
So, when a cop gets ready to bust someone here for doing something or another in the street, he's statistically doing the right thing. Except when he's not. The way cops are coping with insufficient manpower is to play the odds, arrest black males on the sidewalk in suspect neighborhoods, and steer clear of people with a higher likelihood of innocence (and political influence).
It's a reasonable approach in an emergency, a flood, hurricane, or such. Civil rights are abridged, but again, it's temporary, an emergency. But over an extended period, it doesn't suffice. You cannot run a city in disaster mode for forty years. At some point a government needs to abide by basic tenets of law, regardless of the abridgement of ambitions of municipal tin gods.
If you cannot afford equal protection and Convention Center Hotels, then the hotels have to go. Sorry.
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