Wednesday, November 15, 2006

November 15th

So, The Sun's murder count was (sort of) right, there was another murder that was never reported until today, even though it happened a week and a half ago. The catch is that it wasn't until more recently that anybody realized that the victim was wanted for a shooting in Columbia. Nobody cares if another person dies in Baltimore, but everyone cares about Howard County!

Other than that one, according to Murder Ink the Sun got all the other ones. Anna Ditkoff points out that her records indicate that there have been 240 official murders this year, but the police (and The Sun) say 238. For a minute I thought she was counting the two people killed by police that are listed this week, but I just checked my own spreadsheet and she's right. Hmm.

UPDATE: Wait, I take it back, she's wrong. Two of the murders in my spreadsheet that I was counting were people getting shivved at the City Detention Center, meaning they were wards of the state at the time of death, so it's not within the city police's jurisdiction. And, I just noticed that she had the right number last week, so she DID count the two people shot by cops (one incident it wasn't even a city cop, it was an MTA cop). Doesn't she know, after 2+ years of doing Murder Ink, that isn't how it works? Why isn't she including the other four people that have been killed by police in the city this year?

In today's blotter, a weird burglary in Roland Park and a shooting in CHM, among other things. Yesterday's blotter has the identity of Saturday's murder in Mount Holly (you say Walbrook, the Baltimore Dept. of Planning says "to-mah-to"), shootings in Poppleton and Milton-Montford and a lot of robberies and stuff.

Salisbury had its sixth murder of the year last night. They had one last year.

That's all for now. I'm definitely going to do at least one more update today, I just thought I should throw something up here real quick since I didn't post anything yesterday.

3 comments:

John Galt said...

Um, if deaths while in custody don't count towards the City's total, what of the fact that like 250 persons enter custody each day? That's a nontrivial understatement of deaths.

burgersub said...

what are you talking about? all i did was state a fact, which was that the baltimore city police department does not count murders committed while in state custody on their official tally of city murders. that's irrefutable.

John Galt said...

I was just pointing out that the greater the percentage of arrested, the more incidents will be off the City's books.