Tuesday, September 19, 2006

Your wish...



Here's what crime looks like in Baltimore.

You see in the center where a grey (low-criminality) area is surrounded from the East and the South by a J-shaped band of green/yellow? That's called Charles Village. See the dark green plume up the east side of Greenmount, through its surrounding neighborhoods? That's called home. About where the J turns and heads Northward is called Better Waverly. The red spot just below is Barclay/Harwood.

The crime would be so easy to wipe out, given a couple hundred cops, because everything around it is pretty okay. This is why the Greenmount corridor is sometimes called the spinal cord of crime in Northern Baltimore.

All it would take would be a Mayor with some cojones.

15 comments:

Maurice Bradbury said...

Wow, that's really interesting. it looks like a rorschach test. Oddly symmetrical. You can see how for police the East and West sides must be like Fallujah-- everybody's a potential insurgent.

John Galt said...

And any time they set up a police hot team to go to either or both of the East side disaster and West side disaster, notice how it would tend to drive the lil' buggers right up the middle? To.... me.

Maurice Bradbury said...

What's also amazing is the size of the Northern. The headquarters in on West Coldsprint past 83, so those poor bastards on the right are really screwed. Oh, wait, that's you!

Maurice Bradbury said...

west coldspring that is

John Galt said...

Now. offenders in the population tend to be about 90% male and 75% afro-american. If there are 33,000 cases floating out there in town, and therefore 29,700 are male, of whom 81,900 are black male,

Now Baltimore's population according to Census numbers is 608,481 (???? , of whom 65%, or 395,512 are black. Of those, about 46% are male, or 181,935. The total male population aged 19-50 is about 155,000, so 65% of that would be around 100,000 black males aged 18-50 in Balimore. so, about one half of the black male population is of appropriate age for nonjuvenile crime, of whom a third actually are under supervision for same.

What does this mean for the man on the street in a 'green' neighborhood? It means every third adult, nonelderly black male you see is a source of real problems, unless you know a lot of personal characteristics of an individual which help you sort within the category. It kinda means "Get the hell outta here."

If you're in a meeting of the Black Student Union at Johns Hopkins University, you're probably ok. If, however, you're at a cut-rate liquor store in West Baltimore with a bunch of guys in the line, watchit.

Before you ask, we could do the same thing for eskimos, but the conclusion would be kinda iffier.

In case you were wondering, our Baltimore City cases are the bulk of the statewide Maryland cases.

John Galt said...

Yep, that's us, Alone in a wilderness.

Anonymous said...

Any attribution for the graph? Or do details like that not concern anyone?

John Galt said...

Yeah, my grandson drew it in Sunday school with Crayolas. He watches too much CSI:.

FYI, I'm informed that there were more gunshots last night outside the Blockbuster in Better Waverly, which is kinda closed now. Street stuff, according to the scuttlebutt.

Maurice Bradbury said...

Baltimore population is now 641,097, says the FBI, for what it's worth.

John Galt said...

I believe that number comes from Mr. O'Malley's people, along with the incidence data. He has an ongoing dispute with the census bureau over numbers, because his administration gets cash for heads.

The number cited, 608M confuses me, but that's what the census said for 2000. I generally use a figure of 635,000. The diff is about 5%.

Anonymous said...

Looks like a citistat map?

Kinda ironic for a city hater who has been known to slam citistat uses citistat as a source, isn't it?

John Galt said...

It's most definitely not Citistat. Citistat is a crock of sh!t. Citistat data are injected by those ridiculous 311 operators and are 'resolved' in the discretion of the employee responsible for the service, who generally self-reports that he did a thrilling job. Many people abort a 311 call and hang up because the operators are such morons.

I believe that Northwood's density is conditioned upon the apartment complexes, moreso than the lil' slatbox houses in Original Northwood.

Anonymous said...

Where did the map come from then? I'm also curious to see what a higher resolution version of it would look like.

John Galt said...

It comes from a multi-jurisdictional task force which compiled the data supplied directly by DOC/P&P.

I'll post a zoom-in for Northern.

Maurice Bradbury said...

(that's Department Of Corrections Division of Parole and Probation?)