Saturday, August 5, 2006

August 5

A man on a mopehead was shot to death by police in Cherry Hill.

Christopher Parr was indicted on nine counts in the rape of a 62-year-old woman in Brooklyn.

Four shootings and two armed robberies in the Blotter.

The NAACP and ACLU are suing the city about its quality-of-life arrests, and the case has been transferred to federal court.

Officer Che Christopher Jackson pleaded guilty to stealing the rims and tires from an impounded Caddy. He resigned from the force as part of his plea.

A LoJack transmitter led police to over 15 stolen cars and boats.

8 comments:

InsiderOut said...

FYI - This week's edition of The Baltimore Guide police blotter mentions the shots fired by the tennis courts in Patterson Park last week that was mentioned on this site(it says there was an officer on patrol in the park who heard the shots and the police responded quickly, but no witnesses would talk). Unfortunately, I couldn't find the blotter in the online edition http://www.ebguide.com/

Anonymous said...

link to WJZ report video on crime stats discrepancy

Anonymous said...

moped

taotechuck said...

When WJZ stops calling it a mopehead, then I'll stop calling it a mopehead.

Anonymous said...

OK, time to come clean about criminals. They're a pain in the ass.

Poor, dear, sweet Ernest Oliver, who was shot while fleeing law enforcement, had quite a criminal history in Maryland.

His family contends that it's not right for him to die because he was dealing. Certainly, nothing in the law provides for summary execution, however, let's consider the resource requirements when crimninals routinely resist arrest.

If a suspect is not infrequently going to pull a weapon on a cop in pursuit and the cop is not going to apply preemptive measures (like using his own service weapon), then the department would have to make overwhelming force available for each smalltime hoodlum that gets arrested. Since there are 75,000 chargeable arrests in this town each year, that's a lotta cops.

When you bust some guy for dealing, you have no idea what else he may have in his possession. If he has an unlicensed weapon or which has been used in a murder, you gotta know he doesn't want to go away for it. Therefore, you have no way of knowing who's gonna be a shooter.

Because in Baltimore, the violent offenders are pretty mixed in with 'routine' offenders, the stakes are raised across the board. In order to safeguard a hoodlum like Oliver from events as they occurred that night, you'd need to equip every routine police operation with overwhelming manpower, kevlar vests, etc.

In another jurisdiction, where criminal conduct is the exception, that might make sense.

Here, criminality is the rule. When you serve a warrant for FTA on a moving violation, you never know that someone in the household isn't a wanted murderer hiding out. The fact that most households and families in this town are tainted by varying degrees of criminality severely compounds the multiplicity of potentially violent exposures.

In other environments, a good family will shun a violent offender and, in fact, most nonviolent offenders, filiality notwithstanding. What that means for officers in those places is that most of the lower-level interactions they have daily pose no real potential for violence.

Consider, however, the case of the car stop on Montpelier Street in Better Waverly about a month ago. The driver tried to outrace the officers and when he had crashed his vehicle, came out bearing a shotgun. This is what officers have to deal with when making a 'routine' arrest.

Perhaps, if we wish to safeguard small-time hoodlums like Oliver, the best way to do it is to keep them in the lockup with full-term sentencing. I don't know who told him, or Dwight Pettit for that matter, that dealing was going to be a safe vocation on the streets of Baltimore.

Anonymous said...

See the following on the repeat offender population engaged in part I crime. Get 'em off the street and into a cell, where they cannot hurt anyone.

Majority of convicted violent felons have prior record

Anonymous said...

Looking at crime blotters over time, I see reports of robbery-- armed or unarmed. I've been trying come up with a plan of what to do if I get accosted by a robber.

Basically, it comes down to a few choices when approached by a robber(s) demanding money:

1) Run-- my first instinct.
2) Give up wallet/goods, drop it, run.
3) Refuse.
4) Follow all instructions.

Of course, which option one choses depends on who is doing the robbing and what, if any, weapons they have. It also depends on the victim's physical (running) capability.

I've read about situations where the victim gives up the goods and still gets shot, I've also read about victims successfully refusing to cooperate (ladies working night-shift at Santoni's, god bless them).

So, the question is, what are the best street-smart tactics that one can use against a robber in the most common situations?

Maurice Bradbury said...

mopehead! That is so priceless!
So I'm back from France... 3 weeks early. I may go back after I take care of some business here.