Tuesday, August 21, 2007

#200 (or, by our count, #207)

E-mail from Cybrarian in the in-box: "Fox just announced official murder #200 on the news with great fanfare (half expected a light to flash and confetti to come out of the ceiling), but it went by too fast for me to hear who or where it was, though I did catch that it was at about 7 p.m. This evening." And that would be (oddly enough, not on Fox's website, this from WBAL:) "a 40-year-old woman with a record of prostitution who was found beaten last week in northeast Baltimore. She died several days later in a hospital."

Ok, I exaggerate, it wasn't great fanfare, but Jeff Barnes did seem awfully perky about it. -- Ed

8 comments:

John Galt said...

From WBAL on Big 200, Dixon is quoted:

"Can we afford new officers? I'm hoping in the long term we can, but right today I don't think we have the kind of budget to maintain it," she said.


If I didn't know better, I'd suspect she was getting a percentage of the burglaries & robberies and other crime around here. Her indifference is impressive.

ppatin said...

According to the Sun we'll hit 313 by the end of the year if murders continue at the current pace. I guess now it's "optimistic" to hope that we can keep it under 310 :(

Maurice Bradbury said...

Does anyone ever think maybe the murder rate is the same as it's ever been and there were just more "undetermineds" under O'Malley?

Maurice Bradbury said...

Jesus sheila! HER OWN AD just said she was "recruiting hundreds" of police officers!

She knows she's going to win, so she doesn't even care any more!

ppatin said...

Yeah, I pointed that out a few days ago. I think she also said that she was "retaining our best cops." I wonder who in the Ministry of Truth came up with that one?

ppatin said...

"Does anyone ever think maybe the murder rate is the same as it's ever been and there were just more "undetermineds" under O'Malley?"

How much influence would O'Malley have had over the OCME?

Maurice Bradbury said...

Who knows? Would O'M have been able to convice police leadership to tell beat cops to actually hide bodies or not take reports? or would no one have needed to tell anyone anything, because the system of rewards was such that it encouraged police to do their part to goose the numbers?
I haven't a clue, but the making of crime numbers is certainly not a transparent system with many independent checks on accuracy, and until it is you can suppose anything and not be proven or disproven, you know?

Anonymous said...

I knew Ramona Bradley when we were young. No matter what she did in the years that followed, she was still a human being and deserved to live.