Number four is a man found dead near Gwynns Falls Park who may have been the victim of a kidnapping.
Chillage cleaner shoots knife-wielding bandit!
Knife-wielding 7-year-old stabs 11-year-old!
Car service driver shot!
A local busybody is trying to clean up the block I fled two years ago on account of filth and hooliganism. You're a bigger woman than I, Joy Sushinsky!
"Are you concerned about juvenile crime in your community? Do you wish there was something you could do that might save a young person from a life of crime? Are you a busy lawyer short on time?" Then Teen Court needs you!
National:
"The number of people under supervision in the nation's criminal justice system rose to 7.2 million in 2006, the highest ever."
Federal porn trial compromised by judge's dirty web site!
... isn't jury duty unpleasant enough without having to watch six hours of people boning poodles and pooping on each other?
48 comments:
Elm must've really gone to shit quite quickly. I used to walk home from around there alone at 2 in the morning (admittedly probably never a good idea in B'more.) I wonder when it was the the annoying punk-kids turned into thugs & hoodlums.
The little punk kids, they grow up so fast!
I don't think Elm is nearly as bad as portrayed in the article. Sure there are punk-kids who definitely have "adopted a hip-hop vernacular and style". The other week I heard one white punk yell to another "Who's your n..ger?" It was hard not to crack a smile at how silly that sounded since there were being serious.
What really bugs me a bout the punk-kids is the litter.
My son turns 7 tomorrow. I hope he doesn't start stabbing 11 year old girls.
My blind neighbor on Elm claimed that he called the cops on the drug dealers and they set his house on fire while he was sleeping in it. But for the most part it was extremely annoying, loud teenage wannabe drug dealers and non-employed "adults" stealing everything in your yard that isn't bolted down, dropping trash everywhere, yelling at each other all night, cursing and getting into fights. And there are three (registered) sex offenders on the block.
What sucked most was that it was two houses full (and I do mean full, I counted 15-20 people regularly coming in and out of two houses) of unemployed, littering, bellicose drunks and meth addicts, but the rest of the block was full of very nice and hardworking people.
"What sucked most was that it was two houses full (and I do mean full, I counted 15-20 people regularly coming in and out of two houses) of unemployed, littering, bellicose drunks and meth addicts, but the rest of the block was full of very nice and hardworking people."
Meth addicts in Baltimore? Wow, this really is a diverse city.
When you have a block with mostly decent people there's still a good chance to save the place. We had a similar house on our block (a drunk woman & a bunch of Hispanic dudes who seemed to spend a lot of time selling weed & smacking their girlfriends around) but thank god they got evicted.
BTW, does anyone know the addresses of the houses on Elm that were raided by the cops and/or had their inhabitants evicted for drug dealing? The guy I knew who used to live there kept in touch with his former landlord, and told me a couple of years ago that his old house had been turned into a crackhouse before the tenants got kicked out.
if you want the neighebors to quite down, you must deal with them in a language that they understand....and no i dont mean talking
3508 was one. The other was like 4 houses up from the park, I think.
people always like to talk about hampdenites being "meth-addicts" just because they're white and, despite living in a big city, fit many peoples' definition of "hillbilly." i'm pretty sure they're all on heroin like everyone else around here, though.
anybody seen the guy that lives on falls road across the street from mcdonald's with the HUGE swastika tattoo on his chest?
Good point about methamphetamine. If Hampden junkies were using meth then some enterprising local would probably be cooking it, which means that sooner or later you'd have a meth lab either blow up or get busted by the cops.
Of course, it's possible that meth production has all shifted to Mexico, I seem to recall reading that smaller labs in the US were being replaced by industrial scale operations south of the border. Another fine example of the decline of American manufacturing due to overseas competition...
Meth costs more here than it does in other areas. Heroin is cheaper and more plentiful in Baltimore. Cheap meth can be found in Portland, Seattle and Texas. Meth addicts should go there.
The meth-heads that are congregating down at the harbor look out of place, they don't fit with the landscape.
I assume that the entrenched local drug distributors would also react very violently if someone began selling a competing product. Also, where in the Harbor have you seen meth heads?
when that house on roland blew up in the winter because some guy was trying to rig a propane tank to provide it with heat, everyone i knew yelled "meth lab!" before getting any facts whatsoever. i was like "yeah right." same thing when there was that "hazmat" situation a few months later, also on roland, that turned out to be some crazy militia-man type hoarding guns and bombs.
oh wait, the propane thing was on hickory.
it doesn't help when the local news likes to abbreviate methadone as "meth" in headlines and stuff.
yeah you're probably right (heroin instead of meth), I assumed it was meth because they looked like the "faces of Meth"
"BTW, does anyone know the addresses of the houses on Elm that were raided by the cops and/or had their inhabitants evicted for drug dealing?"
If you know the name of the landlord, you can look him up on MD Casesearch to see if he was a defendant in a drug nuisance case (these cases are labeled as "INJC" in the search records).
I think the landlord in question booted the tenants out as soon as he found out what they'd done. Not like I care that much anyways, I was just curious.
Not your daddy's reefer.
(unfortunately this is a very poorly written article)
"Sushinsky has grown attached to her century-old house, which she began restoring after buying it for $203,000 from an elderly couple who had lived there for three decades."
The first rule of gentrification is to move out the poor people and minorities before you try and gentrify.
Just because you pay a lot for your house in a neighborhood that the Realtor said was "up and coming" doesn't mean that the current residents agree.
It's a lesson that a lot of "young professionals" with rehabbed rowhomes in "Upper Fells Point" and Pigtown are learning.
Mr. Reticent:
Upper Fells Point is actually pretty nice, as long as you're not right next to Broadway & the cesspool of human filth known as the Perkins Homes. Butcher's Hill on the other hand...
By the way, did anyone see the latest posting on zachsowers.com? Holy shit, Margaret Burns is apparently the dumbest person on the face of the plant.
"“The truth of the matter is, Zach’s injury was on one side of this face, and he looked like a sleeping baby when he arrived” at the hospital, Burns told Exhibit A."
WTF??? A sleeping baby? How the hell did this woman get a job as a spokesperson for the prosecutor's office! Why not just go take a shit on Zach's grave.
reticent, i thought that gentrification implied that the area had not yet been improved, but that some people had taken the initial step of moving in, hoping to improve it? just a thought.
Memo to Margaret Burns: Stop digging!
ppatin,
Do you live in Jim Kraft's district? If so, you should e-mail him about the Exhibit A article. He detests Jessamy with a passion and will gladly call her out in front of the local media outlets.
Mr Meph: Yes I do live in Kraft's district, and I'd totally forgotten about the Kraft/Jessamy spat. Thanks for reminding me, that guy could probably run wild with this.
I wonder though, is it possible that Margaret Burns's words were badly twisted or taken way out of context?
Well, I guess I was doing a poor job of being annoyed that the Sun is devoting so much column width with a story that gives the textbook definition of gentrification "a boost in property values and the arrival of an eclectic mix of stores [and] to drive lower-income residents into smaller concentrations of cheap rental housing or out of the area altogether". What bothers me the most is the way in which the article equates crime, violence, and delinquency with race - however thinly coded.
"In Hampden, a traditionally working-class neighborhood that had a reputation of being hostile to blacks, the white youths on Elm Avenue have adopted a hip-hop vernacular and style [i.e. BLACK ACTING]."
While my heart breaks that this 28-year old princess with her marble countertops and exposed brick can't afford to live in a gated community where the kids don't adopt "a hip-hop vernacular and style" but instead study for the SATs - you shouldn't move to the beach and complain about the sand.
If she wanted better, then maybe she should have worked harder to make more money and move to a better neighborhood.
While I'm all for cleaning up the streets, etc. - I find it kind of disgusting that the only time people care about these neighborhoods is when they need a place to park their Saab without the ragtop being sliced open. The fact that the Sun sees her cause as so important as opposed to every other activist in every other crappy neighborhood in this town is beyond me. She's hardly the first - and all she really cares about, I suspect, is the value of her home.
I think we're missing the bigger point here, people.
Baltimore has been a toilet for decades. Most of these people has been ill-behaved underclass for multiple generations.
As much as I detest these hominids, simply shooing them away from Elm Avenue for the benefit of the newly arrived is an inequitable solution: whoever resides where you dump them doesn't deserve them either.
As long as Baltimore's liberal Democrats want to advocate for easy sentencing and the depletion of police manpower, they should also have to live with their fair share of the bipedal detritus.
I, for one, want everyone on Elm Ave. to have good reason to seek more officers and more prisons so long as I continue to see such reasons all around my neighborhood.
Do not shoo the hoodlums my way; I don't want them either. Place them in jail where they truly belong. Place them ALL in jail. On Elm, on Charles, on Harford, on Broadway.
But by all means cease singling out favored neighborhoods; it's the same as crapping on all the others.
For those that are interested the methheads have set up shop along Gay Street adjacent to the Best Buy Building. There is some bushes and flower beds that they are sitting in. They look like standard meth addicts: White, lots of tats and piercings, and have that meth shit-eating grin like they have the world by the balls.
They're panhandling over by the World Trade Center and being far more aggressive about it than those mild mannered older black men strung out on heroin enjoying the benches along the promenade. Watch out for an especially nasty smelling meth-addict that is panhandling on the WTC walk-through. He has a story about living in a tent and he needs to buy soda and candles. Just to let you know, I spend lots of time in tents and you don't need candles. And nobody needs soda, you can drink water if you are thirsty. Me and stinky had an animated discussion about this after he thought I might be a good panhandling mark. He desperately desperately needs a bath. You figure he would take off his winter parka and jump into the harbor every once in a while. Disgusting.
wait, you're not confusing crust punks for meth addicts are you? lol @ the identifying sign of meth addiction being tattoos and piercings.
also, mr. reticent, what a bizarre mixture of left wing and ring wing thinking you've got there. anti-gentrification and anti-yuppie sense of entitlement, but also saying "if you want to live in a better neighborhood maybe you should earn more money."
I should have taken a picture of them all dirty and sleeping in the bushes. This is a pretty nasty group.
Mr. Reticent: Let me start this off by saying that you're an obnoxious piece of shit.
"If she wanted better, then maybe she should have worked harder to make more money and move to a better neighborhood. "
So you're saying that only the wealthy are entitled to law & order? What the hell is wrong with you? This city needs MORE people like her who stand up to thugs. What's she supposed to do, say "oh well, I guess my neighborhood doesn't such as much as Oliver or Sandtown-Winchester, so I should just suck it up and live with the criminals who ply their trade on my block." No, fuck that. The reason that ANY parts of this city are still inhabitable is because of residents who are enough to fight back against criminals and hoodlums. I hope that you become a crime victim someday so that I can snear at you the way you're doing with that unfortunate woman.
The Sun has another story about the shooting in Charles Village.
"The fourth robbery occurred about 1:45 p.m. when a man walked into the store. He said nothing but held a knife in his right hand and pulled $46 from the cash register with his left hand, according to the police report.
Goodman reached under the register, grabbed a revolver and shot the robber once, the report says.
"OK, you got me, now put the gun down," police said the robber told Goodman. Police said the robber went behind the counter and wrestled with Goodman. The owner shot the man a second time.
"OK, don't shoot me again, I'll leave," the robber said, according to the report. But police said the man kept coming at Goodman, who fired a third time."
LOL, what a dumbass! Must've been high to keep coming at the guy like that. It's a pity the store owner didn't have a shotgun. You never need to shoot someone more than once if you use one of those :)
how do you know it's meth, cham?
We need to write a field guide to Bmore addicts so you can tell!
galt, the problem with "Place them ALL in jail" is that then the govmint, aka us, has pay for their stay at the Monument St. Hilton. I hate foul language and the throwing of chicken bones on the street, but not $30k a year much.
There needs to be like three blocks in Hampden, perhaps somewhere between Roosevelt park and 83, where everyone caught throwing garbage on the street has to go live in quarantine.
There is such a place.
They call it Remington.
anybody seen the guy that lives on falls road across the street from mcdonald's with the HUGE swastika tattoo on his chest?
yeah, solid black ink, it takes up just about his entire left pectoral
I live on Falls, see him all the time. he likes to show it off, obviously
real classy
ppatin-
I was being sarcastic. The thing is, the article is written about kids - delinquents and *gasp* the KIND of delinquents who, according to the article are, "white youths on Elm Avenue [who] have adopted a hip-hop vernacular and style". Not murders, not rapists - just kids who hang out in the park and drink, cuss, and yell at adults. This is hardly an act of any criminal conspiracy. But I guess for "a traditionally working-class neighborhood that had a reputation of being hostile to blacks" it must seem like the end of the world when the kids start showing non-white cultural influence. If it were to continue, then god forbid other teens in America start acting, in the words of this brave woman, "like they're in a video". It must be horrifying for her to return to her heroically rehabbed home in that [once] working class neighborhood and come up against some thugs who don't have the breeding to act as refined and white as she is. So yes, once again, if she wanted fucking yacht regattas and polo matches, she should have gone to Yale, founded the next Google, and bought a home where the only "black acting teens" are the ones on "Cops".
What she should do is shut her goddamn mouth, realize that we all have "neighborhood problems" and allow the police to help the neighborhood activists in this city who are trying to help prevent toddlers from being shot on their front lawns.
So excuse me if I'm not sympathetic to the plight of those who had the roof of their convertible slashed, their plastic angel "blowed up", or their flowerpot broken in a terrifying act of kids being fucking kids.
Vandalism, slashed tires & drug dealing does NOT equal kids being kids, it equals thuggish pieces of shit behaving like pieces of shit. I don't know where the hell you get this idea that "working class" means that people in that neighborhood don't obey the law. And what the hell does "come up against some thugs who don't have the breeding to act as refined and white as she is." So now not smoking pot in public or STABBING PEOPLE (read the sun article, there was at least one stabbing in that area) means you're being snooty & elitist? WTF! She's not asking people to do anything other than obey the law.
Oh, by the way, did anyone read about this year's city budget? A TEN PERCENT increase in spending! No wonder they couldn't afford to cut the sky-high property tax! Where is all that money going? Handouts to bums I assume, certainly not the underfunded police department or state's attorney's offich.
Reticent, when you were a "fucking kid", did you slash car roofs, detonate explosives in neighbors' furnishings, and destroy their belongings?
And if you advocate "fucking kids" doing so, what makes you think anyone would be willing to put one dime into the exposed exterior of their home?
The people who live in most of this country have little tolerance for that sort of misconduct, which is a bit different from an impish prank. Perhaps we ought to encourage the Hampden yo's to perfect their technique at YOUR home for the next few years.
Speaking for myself, I'll be happy to direct your way the Crip set that controls the streets after dark here. Please let me know which block to specify.
mjb:
Perhaps you would like to come with me tomorrow and I can teach you a great deal about what is going on in the hood.
If you would like to tell Margaret Burns to go f--- herself (or if you're too polite, just tell her to resign), you can e-mail her at mburns@stattorney.org.
the hood of best buy?
i'm still willing to bet the people you're talking about are just crusties.
and ppatin, it's great that you read that whole article wherein the guy repeatedly says he's glad the robber is alive and that he wasn't trying to kill him, and the conclusion you draw is "vigilantism fuck yeah! too bad he didn't kill him!" at least you're consistent.
I bet they aren't. Meet me at 9AM on Saturday at the gate of the B&O Railroad museum. Wear comfortable shoes.
It's easy to make snarky comments from the comfort of your rumpus room. It's a different ball of wax when you are up close and personal.
i don't care how much tougher than me you are because you live in pigtown, you were specifically talking about panhandlers in front of best buy.
Thanks, Cham, as much as I enjoy the smell of fresh homeless people in the morning ...
Reticent proves two of my big hypotheses about the world: 1. for every person who says or does anything, no matter how selfless or well-intentioned, there's always going to be someone with some rude thing to say about it.
And 2., in Baltimore, you can't say anything about anything without someone injecting race into it when it isn't there.
The "elderly" couple who moved out of Joy's house (who would be horrified to hear themselves described as elderly) put their house up for sale soon after one of the teens came up behind her while she was walking 10 feet to her house, grabbed her throat, rubbed his boner on her and threatened to rape her and kill her and her husband if they called the cops again about noise & vandalism.
It's a bit more than, oh, someone won't buy my house if there's white kids calling each other the n-word out front.
I think the Hampden story is a good illustration of how residents can enact change, albeit incremental and at a glacial pace with Herculean effort. The Sun does plenty of stories, at least one a month, about crappier neighborhoods and various citizens' efforts to improve them.
My problem with Joy's effort is that it is portrayed as some sort of pro-communty altruism.
She's only activist as long as the impacted hoodlums are on her block. Is she starting a citywide effort to exile squatter junkies regardless of proximity? Not that I know of.
She's trying to improve HER place. Kinda like when you paint your kitchen lime green because it suits you. It's for you. Just you. Not a public service.
And that's O.K.
But public safety is about a broader (and kinda nebulous) set of beneficiares.
I object very much to the privatization of public safety. If this City wants the broad, randomly-selected public to be subject to nuisance crime, then it should be happening to all those fine well-to-do people in the condos at the Ritz-Carlton too.
What is it that makes the rest of us so much more deserving of crime than the condo-dwellers and Joy?
For so long as the City underprovides police, we're all just crabs in a barrell.
In the meantime, I won't hold my breath waiting for Joy to volunteer to patrol my neighborhod.
actually I confused Joy's house with another one.. she was two doors down from me. The couple that left on account of boner boy were in a different house.
Reading the article again I get a different come-away point: there's things the government can do and things it can't. It can arrest someone who's committing a crime, but it can't make the indigenous population civilize its culture.
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