Monday, January 22, 2007

This past weekend I decided to finally update my non-fatal shootings map, so I slowly combed through the Baltimore Police Dept. Online Crime Map and counted all the "Agg. Assault - Gun" green triangle icons I could find. I thought the readers of this fine blog would like to see the list of this year's so far. It's a lot less than I expected and I have a feeling it is rather incomplete (where's that kid who got shot on Belnord and who was erroneously reported as dead by ABC?). Also, I don't understand why the person killed in the 300 block of West North Avenue gets to be the victim of both a murder AND an aggravated assault while the rest of this year's murder victims only get to be murder victims, but here it is, Jan. 1st through Jan. 13th:

Northwestern District:

1/1 - 5100 block Elmer Ave, 21215
1/7 - 2900 block Taney Rd, 21209
1/11 - 4100 block Fairview Ave, 21216
1/12 - 3800 block Beehler Ave, 21215
1/13 - 3400 block Paton Ave, 21215

Northern District:

1/5 - 1100 block E Belvedere Ave, 21239 (four victims)
1/5 - 3900 block Roland Ave, 21211 (three victims)
1/6 - 300 block W North Ave, 21217
1/8 - 400 block E 27th St, 21218

Northeastern District:

1/1 - 4900 block Aberdeen Ave, 21206
1/4 - 2600 block Pelham Ave, 21213
1/5 - 1700 block Carswell St, 21218
1/8 - 1800 block E 31st St, 21218
1/9 - 1700 block Abbotston St, 21218
1/11 - 4800 block Harford Rd, 21214

Western District:

1/2 - 1400 block Mountmor Ct, 21217
1/5 - 1900 block Clifton Ave, 21217 (five victims)
1/6 - 1000 block W Saratoga St, 21223
1/8 - 1600 block N Gilmor St, 21217

Central District:

1/4 - 1900 block Pennsylvania Ave, 21217
1/7 - 500 block W Saratoga St, 21201
1/7 - 400 block W Franklin St, 21201

Eastern District:

1/1 - 2400 block E Oliver St, 21213
1/2 - 1300 block N Bradford St, 21213
1/2 - 600 block N Wolfe St, 21205 (Johns Hopkins Hospital)
1/4 - 400 block E 21st St, 21218
1/8 - 1700 block Harford Ave, 21213
1/9 - 600 block N Wolfe St, 21205 (Johns Hopkins Hospital)
1/9 - 1200 block E North Ave, 21202
1/12 - 400 block E 22nd St, 21218

Southwestern District:

1/1 - 3400 block Clifton Ave, 21216 (two victims)
1/8 - 1800 block N Rosedale St, 21216
1/8 - 2700 block Walbrook Ave, 21216
1/9 - 4700 block Dartford Ave, 21229

Southern District:

1/10 - 3600 block S Hanover St, 21225
1/13 - 100 block S Schroeder St, 21223

Southeastern District:

None (!)

33 comments:

Maurice Bradbury said...

Yikes! One of those is three blocks from my house!
Where'd you find all of these, burg?

burgersub said...

i made them up!

burgersub said...

just kidding, i got them from the baltimore police dept.'s online crime map, as i wrote in the blog post and in my email to you!

you should probably drink some coffee.

burgersub said...

the thing is, i'm not entirely sure that the "aggravated assault w/ gun" icon definitely means that someone got a bullet put in their body. can just getting shot at but not actually getting hit count as an aggravated assault? what if you get pistol-whipped, does that count as an aggravated assault with a gun? the police website doesn't really explain it too well.

also, those two thing on wolfe street are the address of the hopkins emergency room, which i take to mean as these guys showed up at the hospital with gunshot wounds and the cops don't know where the shooting took place. i should have clarified that better.

InsiderOut said...

i think there was a shooting on Montford this month. Not sure if it was SE or Eastern

Maurice Bradbury said...

Sorry. I'm in deadline-land.

Anonymous said...

I live in the Sotheastern district (YAY!) but I work smack in the middle of the Eastern District (Gah!)

Unknown said...

Maybe they stole the stats from another city because I nhave heard more gunshots than that in Remington.... I only saw one near my residence.

Nut like burger said, they don't really clarify what qualifies as an aggravated assault with a gun... so all the people getting pistol whipped or being used as target practive probably were not included, they were probably downgraded

Unknown said...

Nut should be but... sorry I've been misspelling all day

John Galt said...

Sorry, I've been in pissed-off land.

If you're getting agg assaults from the police website, please understand that that's so few of them.

The primary method of getting the stats down the last few years has been to refuse to take burglaries and to downgrade agg assaults, which are Part I offenses, to common assaults, which are Part II.

Gunshot injuries get recorded pretty accurately, unless the recipient was copping drugs and received minor wounds, in which case no report ends up filed. Now, what does fall between the cracks is gunshot injuries picked up at the hospital, with no cooperation from the victim. Police will not record the agg assault because they have a victim without an incident or location.

The other area where they can play with numbers is gunshots without injury. A gunshot with injury and a complainant is an Agg Assault 1 and attempted murder. If the bullet misses and the shooter is identifiable, the cop can call it an attempt, assault 2, or possession of a deadly weapon with intent to injure. It's really all in how he writes it up. They're all felonies, but I believe the jump from assault 1 to assault 2 will be classified as Part 1, which if off the radar screen. If the cop gets there and there's no shooter and no wound, he probably won't write it up and will offer that the vic can swear out a warrant the next day downtown(but they'll need a perp by name). If it's just gunshots but no visible shooter, they won't even stop. They'll just drive through.

Also, importantly, even when a crime is reported and accepted by the responding officer, it still may well not make it to the online mapping, just because they frequently lose chunks of the blotter.

I am so pissed with bullshit in this town when it involves losing or ruining people's lives. Our 'leaders' just don't get it.

burgersub said...

jain, PLEASE tell me you don't work at hopkins. i've gotten in more than one argument in my life about how if you work at hopkins, you are not allowed to tell people you "work in east baltimore" and expect to be taken seriously. my favorite analogy for this situation is if derek jeter went around telling everyone he "works in the south bronx."

(p.s. i work at hopkins too).

John Galt said...

Also, I've never seen a stabbing attempt recorded as Part 1 unless there's a pretty significant wound or an identifiable perp on the scene.

BTW, Hopkins is in E. Balto. like Gitmo is in Castro's Cuba. !Viva la Revolucion.!

Unknown said...

Hey D's.. i put a comment on yesterday's post, but now because of being harrassed by police, I get the grand prize of appearing in court tomorrow to tell the judge what happened.

burgersub said...

give 'em hell, liz

Unknown said...

I will, i figure it makes no sense not to speak up, that and the fact is they didn't even need my husband's testimony which is why his lawyer never called back for him to appear. I will let you all know what happens tomorrow.

John Galt said...

I just counted: it's still like 40 recorded shootings in two weeks! Baltimore should be closed.

About Southeast, keep in mind that Latinos almost never report because of real/perceived immigration issues. As for the upper-class white neighborhood, shooting there is bad for your position in a plea-bargain.

Almond Smash said...

"the thing is, i'm not entirely sure that the "aggravated assault w/ gun" icon definitely means that someone got a bullet put in their body. can just getting shot at but not actually getting hit count as an aggravated assault? what if you get pistol-whipped, does that count as an aggravated assault with a gun? the police website doesn't really explain it too well."

All those situations count as Agg. Assaults. Pistol whipping, Shooting At, etc.

Maurice Bradbury said...

Please do!

burgersub said...

are you sure a pistol whipping wouldn't count as aggravated assault with a blunt object? if a gun is used as a club, is it still legally a gun?

burgersub said...

well, for the next update there should be at least one shooting for the southeast, because some kid got shot in o'donnell heights the other day.

any of you guys ever been in o'donnell heights? it is seriously the single ugliest place i've ever seen in my life.

burgersub said...

huh, no wonder, i just found out that it was originally built as barracks for the soldiers stationed at fort holabird.

taotechuck said...

Chris, you had me all happy about the Southeast until you went and told me about the O.H. shooting. A kid I know lives over there... he's done pretty well at staying out of trouble, and he's got some good people looking after him, but I worry about him.

I don't know if O.H. was more depressing two years ago or now. You see block after block of bricked up projects, and the only people around are the straggling dealers and a few leftover families. In its own unique way, it's one of the harshest neighborhoods I've seen in this city, and that's saying a lot.

burgersub said...

there was this one weird episode of homicide that was really meta and had a lot of weird clips (both clips of things that had actually occurred in past episodes and totally new stuff) thrown together in a non-narrative way, and one was pembleton or somebody asking some white kid in a kangol hat if he was ok with going to hell and the kid stands up and yells "I'M FROM O'DONNELL HEIGHTS! I'M ALREADY THERE!" or something. at the time i didn't know what o'donnell heights was and thought that scene was stupid but years later i drove through it and it made a bit more sense.

burgersub said...

well i can't seem to find the articles now (there was one on fox and one on either wbal or wjz, i forget which), but i do know that the shooting occurred on mosander way. i'm pretty sure the articles i saw said that the kid was not facing life-threatening injuries though.

John Galt said...

Burger, what's your shooting count for '06 ??


Also, reviewing your camera map I found you've omitted the non-bluelight cameras on the poles on Greenmount from 30th to 34th and on the intersect with 33rd.

Question: has anyone noticed that cameras appear in high density where the black community adjoins the white? That is, where the gradient is steepest, almost like a no trespassing sign.

Also, understand that assault 1, assault 2, possession of a deadly weapon with intent, and attempted murder are Maryland statutorily defined charges. Agg Assault and common assault are FBI UCR index classifications, so the former are shoehorned into the latter. Kinda arbitrarily. That's part of how the O'M massaged the data when he came into office. Yeah, right, Baltimore's just SOOOOOOOOOOO much better, Your Honor.

burgersub said...

yeah i realize i don't have those greenmount cameras on there, i've been meaning to add them, but they got left out originally because they look to me like they are part of the old first wave of "downtown partnership" style cameras, erected long before the blue-light dealies that predominate now. i also don't have any of the hundred or so cameras that are at practically every intersection in the downtown/inner harbor/mt vernon areas for the same reason. i am also missing long lines of cameras on westwood and walbrook aves, mchenry, ramsay and wilhelm streets, and pimlico road. i know they're there because i've developed a dangerous habit of looking down side streets while driving instead of watching the road ahead of me, but i haven't gotten around to actually driving down those particular streets and cataloging all the cameras. also there are still a couple parts of the city i have never been to, such as poplar grove street and cherry hill.

also, the greenmount corridor's cameras are the only ones that support your thesis on cameras used as a dividing line between white and black communities. the original five major corridors that the permanent small non-POD cameras were put in are greenmount, monument, park heights, west north ave, and west pratt street. the pratt street ones are the ones that most fit your description after greenmount, but they are smack in the middle of carrollton ridge, which is comprised fairly equally of whites and blacks, with a large number of both races who are poor and prone to crime. the cameras on park heights above northern parkway are a weird anomaly that i can't fully explain. a reader of this blog emailed me during the week that i was running things and told me about them, and he said it was because all the orthodox jews were walking around all the time on shabbas since they aren't allowed to drive cars on that day and they were getting robbed a lot, but that doesn't explain why there are several spots where there are two cameras within like ten yards of each other, which would seem to cause a huge overlap in area covered and therefore be a huge waste of resources.

as for the shootings total, i got everything down in a couple of spreadsheets, but i still need to organize it. hopefully i can get back to you on that before the week is over.

John Galt said...

So, Monument bounds JohnsHopkinsville East and Park Heights (approximately) separates a very white place from a very black one.

John Galt said...

'Course, I could be wrong. It's happened before. I supported the O'M for Mayor. (not that Lawrence Bell would have been a real prize.)

What is it about B'more and bad politicians? Are we the affirmative action posterchild for the competency-challenged ??

burgersub said...

i don't know what johns hopkinsville east is and monument doesn't bound anything, orleans is what i would consider the northernmost frontier of the gentrification currently taking place above patterson park.

the image you linked for park heights isn't working for me so i don't know what that's meant to illustrate either.

basically the long lines of permanent cameras were set up along heavily commercial districts within high crime areas.

John Galt said...

Burger, just a gif file, located at:

http://www.baltimorecity.gov/government/planning/census/images/2000white.gif

you'll see how the camera lines mesh.

John Galt said...

how about trying

http://www.baltimorecity.gov/government/

planning/census/images/2000white.gif



without the big space.

burgersub said...

ok i see the map now, but i'm sticking by all my earlier statements on the matter.

John Galt said...

That's fair.