Well, the media coverage made it at least seem as if it was an uneventful weekend, in terms of local crime. However,...
... we got three more homicides, which apparently were not as newsworthy as increased voter registration tallies statewide.
A 63 year-old woman was found dead in her home on the 200 block of North Culver St.
Saturday night Pepe Bennett,26, of the 2900 block of Montford Ave. was found shot dead on the 1600 block of Montford, in the Eastern District.
Around 7:30 a.m. on Sunday William Tillman, age 21, was found in the alley at the rear of the 3000 block, Spaulding Ave near Pimlico. He had died of gunshot wound(s).
In broad daylight
A 25 year-old man walking the 300 block of East North Ave. was accosted by a gunman and shot in the hip around 4:00 p.m.
A few blocks north along the 2900 block of Greenmount Ave., about three hours later, two female pedestrians heard gunshots and ran, finding that they had each been hit in the leg.
Now, mind you, we get better tv news coverage of people falling in Rock State Park and of robberies in Columbia than incidents dead smack in the middle of town. Where I was brought up, a shooting was considered kinda important. Welcome to O'Malleyville.
So, get yourself some stylish kevlar clothing, perambulate the neighborhood, and Get In On it. Or maybe Get Shot In It.
But stay out of cars, even your own. City resident Keith Spence was arrested in February for stealing a car, a used Eldorado. Who's car was stolen? Keith Spence's. Yes, he was arrested and tried for being in posession of his own car, according to the story in the Examiner.
BTW, German shepherd Rolf, the MTA k-9 officer, was found at Cold Spring Lane and Reisterstown Rd. He's good to go and back on the job.
34 comments:
Shooting stories get repetitive, no matter how you slice it. Sooner or later we all get murder fatigue. Newspapers can't cover murders 24/y because they'd lose their readership.
But isn't the solution to murder fatigue more along the lines of stopping them?
People in Baltimore should be fatigued: we have six times the murder rate of NYC.
If a newspaper's readers are more interested in Mel Gibson than in municipal mismanagement, should it run a front page on Lindsay Lohan? Maybe a Sun Extra edition on Tom Cruise's baby?
Journalists are supposed to stick with it. Real journalists, anyhow.
Readers are supposed to give a damn about murder and shooting.
there's no 2900 block of north montford. the last block is 1800. stupid sun.
John, please don't give directives on what topics should be important to all people.
Way to blog it up, galty! Don't forget to number the shootings in the city limits, please, in as close to chronological order as you can imagine, because Chuck's going to run some crazy statistical models, right, Chuck!?
Boohoo Cham,
If the paper(s) did cover ever murder, if every single murder got a picture on the front-right cover of the paper, right under the price, with a full profile of the life of the person, like the NYT did with the victims of the Twin Towers, that would be cool. And crime scene shots with blood and guts on the sidewalk. Do you think people would stop reading newspapers? i would think the circumstances of someone's horrible life and hideous demise makes better reading section fronts on, like, the pigeons that live at the Home Depot. The papers have become what lonely people take to restaurants.
Steve Geppi should publish a glossy magazine of really gory crime scene photos next to topless women and Pam Anderson's wedding thong like they have here ("Choco!")
In Baltimore there's some dying-on the-vine papers that try to do everything and succeed at doing nothing well. (Except the BBJ.) In five years from now, inky papers won't exist, it will be sources that cater to very specific interests, like mine! So go buy some Tribune stock-- NOT
"Journalists are supposed to stick with it. Real journalists, anyhow."
Maybe so, but if real journalists are being commanded by their real bosses to stop covering murderers, the murders will stop getting covered, either by that particular journalist or another.
"Readers are supposed to give a damn about murder and shooting."
They used to care a lot, and still do to some point today, but only up to a certain point. Seeing reports of basically nameless blacks being killed over the same drug-related drama that's been going on for years depresses and, more importantly, bores people.
I am *so* tired of people whining about why the Sun doesn't cover every single murder with an accompanying story. It's systematic desensitization: people have seen too much of it, there's nothing happening about it, so they don't care anymore. Very, very simple.
I suppose what I mean is that readers of newspapers should care about their neighbors. Now, I understand that Baltimore is an apathetic, crime-acclimated society. A bad society. A defective society.
Since the city will likely not be evacuated, I do call upon citizens to examine their premises and see whether they are insulating themselves from what public officials are allowing to happen here.
As a voter, you are responsible for what your elected officials permit to happen in the streets, even though you may have a very thick security door, because you have given them your sanction.
The reason I haven't been numbering murders is that I don't know with certainty that I have all of them.
Actually, funny you should mention it, I just had a discussion about Geppi taking an interest in an alternative media venue for covering 'all the news the Sun won't print'. The question which Anon raises is, does anyone really give a damn in this town, anyway?
I suspect the real truth is that people don't care, conditional upon the assumption that the nameless black has nothing to do with them. What is being justified is that Baltimore can have as much crime as neglect permits, just so long as it's Not In My Back Yard.
What that ensures is racial and income segregation unlike anything you'll ever find in any decent city. And, it doesn't work, unless you're planning border-crossing guards where the black and white neighborhoods meet.
Guys, understand, crime is the most public defect there is. Think of it like bubonic plague. If it's here, you're gonna get it. Or your wife. Or your kid. The only way to protect you, is to protect everyone else.
Now, if you have a particularly suspect population whose conduct makes the likelihood of infection spike, you quarantine them. But race ain't it.
Something I will add on this point, is that the functional black community needs to request enforcement and stop calling for the injection of publicly-funded nurturing. The proposition that those who commit violence upon black children are themselves victims is just baloney. They're offenders. Call it what it is.
I just saw an interview with Doc Cheatham along those lines. You have to come down on the ones doing the crime, Doc.
I understand if you don't find the incident fascinating. That would be kinda morbid.
The real news which should command your attention is the fact that your government routinely fails to adequately address the crime here. That should spur you to action. I thoroughly reject the notion that it's ok, so long as it stays on the other side of town. The crime in Baltimore is way, way beyond defensible. Your elected officials, having been given many years to step up, have repudiated their obligations. They should be tarred and feathered. And you should volunteer to do it.
"What that ensures is racial and income segregation unlike anything you'll ever find in any decent city. And, it doesn't work, unless you're planning border-crossing guards where the black and white neighborhoods meet."
...
"Now, if you have a particularly suspect population whose conduct makes the likelihood of infection spike, you quarantine them. But race ain't it."
I have often been wondering, as many others have I'd imagine, if race is an issue with crime in general, particularly in Baltimore.
This post, by nature, contains racist overtones. If you're unwilling to read it for purely hypothetical/discussion purposes, then stop now. I don't want a flame war started over this.
Given that crime is significantly higher in areas that are predominantly black, and given that the majority of people incarcerated in baltimore (and MD in general) are black, is it fair at this point to correlate black people with crime? I _know_ that correlation does not mean causation, but at some point the issue must be addressed. I also think that crediting the disproportionate numbers of blacks incarcerated to a racist justice system is a weak argument.
Poverty itself may be the cause of these numbers, but there have been other ethnic groups in the city that have endured poverty, ultimately triumphing over it and either flourishing in the city, or elsewhere.
Galt, I thought you might have some insight into this issue.
Again, I apologize if I am seeimg racist, but I am genuinely curious to ask this question in such a forum.
go drive around carrollton ridge for awhile and then come back and tell us that those white people are triumphing over poverty and flourishing.
Nope, I'm ok with the conversation.
Think of statistically correlated predispositions, such as Tay-Sachs disease and the Ashkenazi genomes or Sickle-cell and certain circles of afro-americans.
You could screen the entire population, but that would be wasteful.
You could screen the membership of synagogues or the NAACP, but that would probably fail to identify a lot of affected persons who are not institutionally connected.
What you want is a criterion which gives you the very smallest subpopulation which still contains substantially all of the distributional characteristics associated with the disease you are treating.
I'd suggest the population you are interested in is best referred to as antisocial, perhaps less-educated, and engaged with or well-connected to known criminals. There will be some in that set who are not a hazard. There will be some who are a hazard and don't fit the profile.
I'm betting that the closeness of fit to this demographic is a whole lot better than to the entire black superpopulation. The trick is that blackness is very obvious. Records of past misconduct (even rudeness or littering) are less so.
Maybe we should start tatooing misdemeanors on people's foreheads.
Another interesting demographic quality is publicness of offense. Because of immigration issues, the low-income hispanic male population gets very drunk and potentially very violent on Friday nights. Guys stab one another a whole lot. But they know to keep it in the community, because if you stab an American dude, La Policia and La Inmigracio'n are gonna be all over you. It's because the sanction is quick and easy: deportation.
Our local hoods make their misconduct much more public because the sanctions are kinda ineffective, relative to the offense. Once upon a time, white crime upon blacks was nearly unpunished, while black crime on whites was front page, sting 'em up stuff. For that reason, black males were very careful to avoid white victims.
Statistical profiling is a valid tool, but it must not be abused so as to 'select' who is a more desirable class of victim. [As in, it's ok, he only robs black people.] It also must not be politically motivated. We do still believe in civil rights, which do not include the right to victimize people.
Most crime in Baltimore is done by blacks. Most crime in Baltimore is done to blacks. If you jailed all black criminals (as well as those would are waiting in the wings to fill the ranks), you have to ask whether the total crime rate would decrease as much as if you had instead jailed an equal number of persons drawn from the population of all criminals (of any race).
You want the characteristic(s) which result in the greatest decrease in incidents, provided those characteristics are not too difficult to detect.
BTW, I kinda discount the causative value of income in crime. I think it's convenient.
I know dirt-poor parents whose kids have the fear of God in them about ever getting arrested.
What is true is that the more you have (house, stocks, career), the more you stand to lose by committing a felony. Gaining wealth makes you more risk-averse. Losing income does not necessarily make you more crime-disposed: it makes you more luxury-deprived.
When I see hoodlums out here wearing their bling-bling, that's what their ill-gotten gains went for. That crime is a consumer choice, not an unavoidable necessity. Enhancing their income a bit won't reduce crime, unless you're proposing to hand them a quarter mill.
This is part of why I discourage policymakers from talking about "providing resources through the schools". The only resources which might means anything are ridiculously large.
Gotta do some things with a stick, and others with a carrot.
Actually, Cybes, the Abell Foundation has announced that it would like to purchase the Baltimore Sun from the Tribune Co..
Just what we need: our sole daily newspaper even more beholden to parochial interests in this City. Doesn't anyone get the concept of journalistic neutrality?
The Abell Foundation has its fingers in just about every major policy initiative of our ridiculous municipal government. And, keep in mind it pays no frickin' taxes. What a racket. Maybe I should Get In On It. Declare myself a nonprofit.
Yeah and that "Stop Snitching" campain is really helping the cause of the black people. That's why I, for one, could care less about black on black violence. They don't have enough respect for one another even to prosecute those who are indeed guilty of their crimes.
I suppose we'll hear next, Galt, that it's ok for you to speak so authoritatively because you yourself are black? Or that you base your theory on science (statistics)(because science has http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism
always been able to explain racial differences justly re:social problems!). Oh, my. It's like someone I knew who once said it was entirely justified to sweep an entire (black) neighborhood because "you know that most of those people are up to no good anyways or are repeat offenders and you'll probably" be sticking them with SOMEthing they're guilty of. Gawd.
Race is an issue (in the general sense of the word) with crime on a greater scale. As is poverty. As is availability of resources. As is education. As is the effect of incarceration (stripping of voters rights, ability to get jobs, and institutionalization). As is a whole slew of things that go into the mix.
An epidemiologist who stopped at race would be a bad epidemiologist, I would think. I would think they would want to understand more. I hope.
i think culture is stronger than race. I believe the crime rates in Africans moving to America is a lot lower than native born African-Americans. here's an article on the culture angle
Have I been unclear? I believe I just stated that I believe race to be far too coarse a filter.
In essence, what you are stating is that Crime is a function of many variables, let's say n variables. By Taylor's theorem we can construct a linearization about a point such that C = c1f(a) + c2f(b) + c3f(c) + c4f(d) + .... cnf(n) + R, where the variables a through n are the causative factors and the coefficients c1 to cn are the relative weights on the effect of those factors. R is a summed remainder term.
This gives you a basic linear representation of how much each factor contributes to crime.
Since you cannot really expect to fine-tune all of the lesser causations, you'd probably focus on the most influential few. In this case, I'd speculate, that would be behavioral history, local police resources, strictness of court sentencing, substance abuse status, and education/socialization status. With those in mind, income probably won't have a large effect, because much of its influence is already captured in education and conduct history.
This is all covered in any introduction to Regression Analysis. The trick with that field is understanding how your inferences can skew your results. You need to be able to self-criticize and self-analyze.
This work has been conducted by fairly well-regarded econometricians, better than me in practice at any rate, and the causative influence of cops on crime is considerable. Once you've controlled for behavioral history, education, locality, and drug use, race isn't very helpful.
Basically, you end up comparing black $100M income PhD's with white $100M income PhD's and black unemployed junkies with white unemployed junkies. Race doesn't contribute much insight when comparing apples with apples, oranges with oranges. That's what careful regression accomplishes for you.
Culture is important, provided it subsumes socialization, interpersonal dependence, etc. It will be revealing if it captures low culture, rather than high culture. In all likelihood, distinctions in high culture will really be proxies for income, education, etc.
A good measue of antisocial culture might be "How many times a month do you urinate in public?" A bad one would be "What percentage of your family is circumcized?" or "How frequently do you cook with olive oil?" Those are culturally transmitted traditions which are probably not behavior-linked.
But consider Gypsies/Roma. That tradition encourages theft, regarding it as guile and shrewdness. Gypsy culture (music, dance, language)is probably nontrivially determinative of conduct because it's a pretty decent proxy for the behavioral outcome.
Point is, you really have to be careful with your data, because they interact. That's the measure of a really, really top econometrician. Fortunately, I studied under one such.
In tomorrow's Examiner will appear an article oh how fed up Columbia residents are with crime which is up around 5% over last year.
I understand that Howard County has a Part I crime rate around 645. Baltimore City has a Part I rate around 7,000. My neighborhood has several times that rate.
If the good citizens of Columbia had any idea what life's like around here...
Also, personally more important, was a
Reuters articletoday about the wave of increased violence throughout the US since federal funding of state and local police forces and social programs was diverted to homeland security type activities.
Hi from amsterdam!
Talk about your functional cities... you can walk or bike everywhere, the murder rate is about zero, everything is clean, soft drugs and soft porn are a-ok.
I think racism is built into the very idea that murders are classified by race as Black, White or "Other."
Baloney. Galt. Baloney.
Some of us are not impressed with your manic half-assed attempt at trying to characterize crime as a simple analytic phenomena. Don't push mathematical language unless you intend to make a point with it _and_ know how to use it.
You could have made the point that race is not good factor using plain english. Instead you pulled a bogus Taylor expansion out of nowhere and tried to impress us with it. Well, I am not impressed.
Don't be.
Fact: crime is not an imponderable mystery.
I'm not willing to tolerate assertions that it is a strictly qualitative phenomenon and therefore cannot be 'treated'. It can.
The most important treatment, given a legislative and judicial regime, is police manpower. Secondary, but complementary, treatments may well address substance abuse and education/socialization, but policing is the first, foremost limiting factor.
And that's what the City needs to do at this time.
Oh, don't change my spin, man... I didn't say it was "imponderable" nor strictly "qualitative". I just don't buy that human behavior (crime, etc) is some analytic function.
If human behavior were like that, we would have everything figured out by now and be living in an optimal utopia.
And, I don't tolerate loose hand-waving with math.
"Don't change my spin, man" -- I like that.
I think there's one thing we can all agree on-- we need to have enough police and a court system that is managed and organized somehow by someone. Right now they literally cannot prosecute a drunk for peeing in an alley.
Anything other than fixing the basics is just another dooomed-to-be-obsolete waste, like blue cameras and kobans (remember them?).
The city has to be willing to do what it takes-- but the Mayor hasn't shown up for the Crimal Justice Council meetings in more than a year. There is simply no one in government with the power to change anything saying that there's a problem.
Why show up to a CJC meeting?
"Crime? What crime?
We ain't got no stinkin' crime."
Martin J(oke). NO'Malley
Galt,
As a current resident of Howard Co, I can say that getting upset over a 5% jump is a good thing. It's allways easier to get a handle on an issue when it's small, rather than letting it grow out of control.
OK, I agree. What I intended was more like "If they're upset about a 5% increase over a very low level in HowCo, WE should be banging the doors down at City Hall, chasing the rascals out, because our crime is totally off the hook."
Responsive to "I don't like hand-waving" Anonymous, rather than my teaching a rigorous class in Econometrics from my perch on this blog, let me instead state the result:
"We find an implied elasticity of crime with respect to the size of the police force of -0.26 for property crime (t-statistic of -1.72) and -0.99 for violent crime (t-statistic of -3.2)."
along with the citation:
working paper
a paper from the Economics Dept. at College Park.
What it, and other similar studies, mean is that within limits, if you want to cut the crime, a good strategy is to hire more cops.
That said, there may be particular subpopulations of (potential) criminals for whom another treatment is more effective. They should be handled specially.
My kids are the big reason I'm out here in HoCo and not in Baltimore. I can't even give them what I grew up with in the city in the 70's and 80's.
What I had was a pretty low standard to meet. I saw my first small riot at the age of 5, first mugged at 7. But 2 of the neighborhood kids made the news. A pre-school playmate was Keiffer Mitchell. The other escaped from baltimore city jail while serving time for murder.
With the current state of affairs in the city I try not going there as much as possible.
Insider, there's two interesting points here. Cosby's comments, in 2004 to the NAACP and since, have been defined by many groups as more classist than cultural.
Your discussion about crime rates compared between African Americans and Africans in America raises similar questions, oddly enough. The fact that, in my understanding (and as cybrarian is apt to point out), the US is generally thought to be more violent in overall than other nations (I don't know if that's just developed nations) makes the fact that African Americans are, well, citizens of the US, and therefore included in this culture. . .
There is a highly educated group of people who are seeking to redefine the issues a la postmodernism that you probably won't find interesting intellectually, however, it supports your point? Maybe? The extremists in this group may even go so far as to say that African Americans who subscribe to the US culture on the whole are, in a way, mentally ill since it goes so much against the "true" nature of Africans as defined by a people, across the Diaspora, who originated from Africa.
The theory is an interesting one, no doubt, however, I haven't found that a lot of African Americans agree with it. I've heard it's classist (from white people) but there is some interesting work being done with it. I don't think you'd probably be interested in Afrocentric Theory (or maybe you're already versed in it) but it might be another voice you could add to your repertoire of angles on the issues.
The theory, by the way, was bourne in the 60's and 70's as postmodernism and discourse analysis was in it's heyday, used by Israel, Africa, US, etc., to redefine and restructure Power, at least that was the goal.
In my experience Africans (both West and East) are embarassed by the conduct of their Afro-American brethren. African men have their flaws, for sure, but they are very concerned to give off a respectable impression, particularly in their role as head of the family.
Inner-city Afro-american males, on the other hand, are far more concerned with immediate gratification than accumulating a favorable reputation. The two cultures are largely incompatible.
Violence in an African culture may be prevalent, yet there is a crucial distinction between violence occasioned by (culturally-specific) just cause and thoughtless violence for myopic self-interest. In African societies, the occurence of these two differ sharply in terms of class context. Senseless violence is therefore associated with the very dregs of society. Hence, Africans view American hoody boys with considerable contempt. Many young afro-americans, on the other hand, quite revere the Gangsta.
I'm tired and don't have time to respond much at this time of night but I'd like to Galt, in that I'm a bit confused with that comment.
I will say that the Afrocentric Theory does deal with "Many young afro-americans, on the other hand, quite revere the Gangsta."
I am rather well cultrally versed and once did have a Jamaican maid who refused to work for 'black Americans.'
Here everybody just hates the Muslims. The 'Jewifs' are also not tray populaire.
...and in England they're trying to ban the 'hoodie.' And Americans and American society is generally considered pretty mental, what with the guns and all. Columbine is still well-known everywhere. Then you have to tell people that kids get shot in and around schools in Baltimore all the time and the event is rarely given more than a sentence in the local paper.
Yeah they (Europeans, the Chinese, anyway) think we're rude gun nuts pretty much. But they like our pop music and gangsta style.
Post a Comment