The mother of the three kids who were murdered in 2004 was the first to testify in the retrial of the murder case.
Greg Doda pleaded guilty to criminally negligent homicide for the snowboarding accident that killed Heather Donahue.
In the "why is this only mentioned on the WBAL News Radio web site" department: A Harford county man may lose his leg after his car (and 5-year-old son) were carjacked by an 18-year-old soldier from APG.
Rodney Bethea is competent to stand trial for holding a police employee hostage.
Defense attorneys are spending "more time attacking our officers than defending their clients".
They're watching you drink chardonnay on the mean streets of Federal Hill.
Drinking and smoking dope with teenagers in Carroll County is a no-no.
Potty pyros are loose in Carroll County.
14 comments:
My neighbor just stopped in to see me; I'd been wondering why I hadn't seen her about: her son was shot last week and she's been in the ICU all week.
I'm really getting fed up with this rotten city. Now, I know that there's some self-selection among young males who get shot. Usually, they were traveling in dubious company at the moment. I don't necessarily defend them. I just think anyone in the felony business should be locked away. For a while. So that the rest of us can be safe. And for that, you'd need a lot of cops. Said another way, you do need a lot of cops.
That's really sad to hear - I hope that your neighbor will be okay.
I think its pretty obvious that they don't care about making the city that much safer. Some of the same neighborhoods have historically been violent, yet haven't received the attention they need to fight crime effectively. And it isn't like these are isolated neighborhoods - if they have issues, surrounding neighborhoods will as well.
Is it any wonder that a lot of the long term planning has been so connected to new housing downtown? They've given up on fixing the places where there's already houses built but with too much crime.
Maybe a new mayor will change things - but i'm doubtful.
Who, Sheila Dixon?
Disaster. Even worse than NO'Malley.
The interesting thing is that my neighbor's son was shot in SE Baltimore, but she lives about 200 feet east of the house in Guilford which was taken hostage.
The flaw is to imagine that purposeful crime is somehow magically attached to substandard housing and that it won't pursue the important people to where they live in purported tranquility.
Purposeful crime, however concentrated in poor areas it may originate, will always seek a high return.
It is the random crime, in particular the senseless, violent crime, which will tend to be contained in the ghetto.
To adopt a policy accepting that behavior provided it remains geographically concentrated in the 'hood is, to my way of thinking, accessory to the crime itself, and the City leaders who go along with it should be removed by state government, which has already designated such behavior unlawful and passed to the municipium the authority to dispense policing.
The problem, I suppose, with the Home Rule movement in American government, is that it addressed only the powers of local government and failed to specify its responsibilities.
As an historical matter, please recall that the Balto. City police department is an instrument of the State, not the City. The appointment to Commissioner was made by the Governor, not the Mayor. This is why the court ruled as it did in the case of fired Commissioner Kevin Clark. It's time the State of Maryland took over the Balto. City Police Department. Long overdue, in fact.
Well, you saw what happened when the State decided to get more involved with the City for Education - the general assembly had a fit. I'm surprised that there weren't more efforts to take that moratorium to court - there has to be a federal/state conflict just waiting to go before SCOTUS.
Yes, and the Democrats from other counties sided with the entrenched Democratic Balto. City delegation against a Republican governor.
Never mind that they also sided against the children of the city of Baltimore.
Goes a long way toward dispelling them myth that 'the government of, by, and for the people shall not perish from this earth.' It has, in Maryland. We have government of, by, and for the bureaucrats.
Makes the Republican party look pretty attractive by comparison, doesn't it?
Anyone in education will tell you that a turnaround for historically poor schools is impossible to do within a year(and foolish to even conjecture about), so why in the world did they impose the moratorium? Its because the issue of education did not come down to progress, but politics - as has been the case since Bobby E. came into the Governor's mansion.
Is it at all coincidental that after getting rid of the Big Bad Business supporting PSC (which, if I recall correctly, was appointed by ehrlich but approved by the general assembly, along with the People's Counsel), that the only person reccomended to keep his job was Harold Williams - the sole democratic appointee?
If 2006 has taught me anything, its this: There is no right political party, only the right people. Just as you can argue that the republicans are screwing things up federally, the baltimore debacle proves that democrats are pretty lousy at running things as well.
That being said, I'm probably voting Republican or Libertarian come November. If Mayor MCcheese ends up winning, I worry for the city as well as the state.
PS - I mentioned the nickname 'Mayor Mccheese' when I went to the BC State's Attorney's office a while ago. Some of them agree: Best nickname ever.
"Believe" it or not, I think El Queso has done a lot of good for this city. 311, for instance, and the new 'nuisance property' thing will, I hope, help me get rid of my crackheads next door in a way not previously possible.
Plus, you have to admit, he's really hot.
I could never vote Republican. That is the party that sucks up to big business (aka insurance companies and polluting power companies) and right-wing "Christians," and no one gay judge is going to make me forget that. I'm obviously not psyched about O'Malley's record on fighting crime, but there are other important values at stake as well.
I would argue that the primary effect of CitiStat has been to make agencies far more responsive to 'how to eliminate service requests' than to 'how to eliminate the thing the requester was complaining of'. I've had really old complaints 'resolved' by having a DPW inspector decide it wasn't a problem, and then having another inspector start the process all over again because it very obviously was, in fact, and had been continuously.
As for nuisance property law, this is kind of a nonstarter. Crackheads are crackheads and if they're forced to vacate a house at 101 e. main st., do you think they're going to stop using just because they're now residing at 104 e. main st.?
This is a classic case of objectifying a problem into an inanimate object, like a house.
I actually run into a lot of Baltimore people who will say "That house deals crack." or "That house is a burglar."
What they mean is that the resident is a dealer or thief. So, you arrest the person for his conduct. That's what's illegal. Get tough on people, not things, and require your public officials to bear responsibility for serving justice upon those people.
In Baltimore, folks seems to not want to confront their neighbors, so they embed whatever behavior they dislike in an object, and then villify it as the nuisance.
If someone's parked outside your house at 1:00 a.m. with the radio on at 10,000 decibels, it's not a problem car which should be towed away. It's a problem person, who should be ticketed or, if need be, arrested. That may well require that you come out of the house and be identified as the complainant.
Oh, as for Mayor McCheese being hot, I just don't swing that way.
But if I did, I'd hope I'd be attracted to someone who doesn't get quite so petulant when interviewed about his shortcomings. He just scrunches up his sour ol' puss and dismisses his failures as being Bush's fault, or Ehrlich's fault. I'm surprised he hasn't tried to lay off his administration's improper payments to Dixon's sister/U-Tech on British PM Tony Blair or maybe on the exchange rate of the Deutschemark. And, he's kinda pasty-faced, don'tchya think?
The guitarist thing plays well, but I think people are worried about more weighty things, such as the bursting of the real estate bubble, in the absence of which Baltimore ain't got squat.
As someone with a small child who's lived next door to a crack house, I would be very very happy for them to just move around the corner. What's so unfair is we have a block of good, hardworking people, then one, single house owned by a landlady (Lynn DeWitt) who will simply not take care of the property and has let drug addicts/ dealers move in. And people who've lived on the block for 30+ years have been driven out by the 24/7 noise, loitering, garbage and constant influx of crackheads. Any tool at all that helps homeonwers fight slumlords is a great thing, what people did before 311 and nuisance property laws is beyond me.
And what do you think neighbors did 30+ years ago?
They called the police. About the house? No.
About the noise. The police would issue a citation to the person making the noise.
About the loitering. Warn the loiterer and then arrest the loiterer.
About the garbage. Issue a citation to the current occupant.
About the crackheads. Arrest them for posession.
The issue for the landlady would be the height of the grass, the fact that the downspout drips on your begonias, etc. Inanimate objects are her issue.
Behavior is the domain of animate entities. In most cases, people. In my neighborhood, bipeds is a more accurate description.
If the problem is a state of being, such as an overgrown tree, it's the landlady. If it's personal conduct, that's for a police officer to correct.
This is all part of why I've said the misbegotten population of Baltimore needs many, many more cops. Easily one-third and likely two-thirds of them in my vicinity are not suitable to be at liberty and at large on their own recognizance.
If you want to make the landlady responsible for the conduct of her tenants, then you also would need to endow her with dominion and jurisdiction over them, body and soul. That was called Feudalism, and we don't have enabling legislation for it any longer.
Unless you'd care to address her as Lady Lynn, I'd continue to advocate hiring many more officers. In fact, now that we have a broader curfew ordinance for the underage, we need even more to serve as truant officers, rather than the current UB volunteers.
Whenever you pass a law, you really must provide those resources reasonably necessary to enforce it uniformly and thoroughly. Baltimore passes law after law and surprise, nothing changes because no one enforces it, other than arbitrarily.
If you want a change in the conduct of your problematic bipeds, a sworn officer is going to be necessary to compel them, for neither you nor Lady Lynn are so equipped legally. That's why parents with young children face a quandary where you live.
"The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in our selves." In this case, your crackheads' selves.
I hate to say it, Galt, but you're right.
But -- if she kept the property up and did the landlady things she's supposed to, and collected rent as most land-people do, the crackheads wouldn't be able to afford to live there.
Common belief. But city entitlement programs, such as section 8 vouchers, make all areas accessible to the income-restricted. Thank you, Mr. NO'Malley.
The reason the most well-heeled neighborhoods don't have crackhead tenants under these programs is that they a) complain about conduct until the city yanks the vouchers and b) some of them have original covenants forbidding rental use.
Whenever communities try to income-exclude poorly behaved people, some liberal insists on publicly-funded access, whether by section 8 or by zoning premiums for low-income rentals. Personally, I don't like enclaves, but in a city that fails to protect anyone from crime, they can be a really good second-best solution. Well intended city programs serve to take this, too, away from the poor suckers trying to have a decent life in this rotten city.
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