The Ink has last week's eight murders. Shocking that the deaths of Janaya Wallace and Clifford Williams haven't gotten more ink and airtime.
Kendall Jones, 19, was arrested in the fatal shooting of 53-year-old Ashley Harper, killed in front of his house Saturday night in Baltimore's Poppleton community
All about homicide and shooting numbers. Are there really 20% fewer shootings, but the remaining shootings are somehow 20% more likely to be fatal? or do these strange numbers signify something else-- like police taking 20% fewer reports?
Is there anything to corroborate these numbers, like emergency-room statistics?
And robberies are way up in the Northern, so where is it robberies are going down?
12 comments:
As a Northern resident, I know there's something just not right up here. We're having way too many burglaries, drug activity in normally quiet areas, and little effective response from the district. And our access to stats continues to be inconsistent. As of today, the online database only carries through November 28, so we have no info on what's been going on for the last 4 weeks. Kinda hard to give tips, keep a look out, and inform COP members when there's no info being shared!
Only in Baltimore: "Police urge partyers to celebrate holiday without firing guns."
Merry New Year!
I believe that the BCPD shooting numbers are largely derived from hospital ER reporting under MD law.
The target population is not known for its degree of collaboration with the BCPD.
Do I believe the reduction in nonfatal shootings? Yes, actually, I do. It'd be something of a good trick for Bealefeld to juke that stat. Burglaries, yes, oh yes. They definitely juke that one, largely by inducing victims to allow reports to not be made.
I was recently broken into and the responding officer made it clear just how very long and laborious a process it would be to assemble the report and wait, perhaps days, for the Crime Lab (which still has only a couple of print readers). He also emphasized that I would be disturbing a crime scene if I a) asked for a report and b) cleaned up the mess before crime lab arrived, which would be a chargeable offense.
I told him "Fine, we'll just wait. All day and all night long if need be, but there WILL be a report filed, officer."
He was pissed and I could tell that it was because he knew the burglary/robbery count on his post was soaring that week.
Anyhow, back to shooting stats:
The stats are down because of our version of Boston's CeaseFire program.
The Mayor had the District Commanders convey a clear message to violence-prone offenders that although Baltimore is pretty wimpy on crime, he WOULD turn gun offenders over to the Feds if found with weapons in their possession. And he did.
Largely because of the threat of doing Fed time without probation, the hoodies have largely shied away from packing on their persons. They now seem to prefer to stash communal weapons in strategic locations in their territories for use by their members. That way, if you get jacked in a jumpout, your heater probably isn't on you. And you cannot sentence trees and bushes for possession.
As a result of not packing, when these knuckleheads get into stupid conflicts over "whatchyou lookin' at?" or "he be dissin' my boyz by wearing that bandana on our turf", they are far less likely to turn into the gunfight at the O.K. Corral.
So the numbers are down.
Is that a good thing? Not really.
Think of it this way: you just made Baltimore a much safer place for an individual to be in the business of crime. Hence, we see more guys going into that business, which results in a more disaggregate organized crime structure with far smaller gangs each attached to smaller, more local territories. Penny ante street thugs, rather than citywide criminal masterminds. And that makes the profit margin lower, so the heroin is cheaper, which makes this a much more attractive market in which to buy, so suburban customers are more inclined to buy here from farther and farther distances.
Like I said, NOT an improvement.
For whom is it good? For politicians and perhaps for the mothers of criminals, who are a highly registered voting constituency in local politics.
Not good news for mainstream people.
But look on the bright side: a Ceasefire-type environment is based upon collective responsibility, which is not sustainable by the BCPD in the long run. (In game theory, we call it cheap talk.)
So, once BCPD lets up, the guns will reappear and the shootings will go back up, because the level of criminality here is undiminished
Happy new year!
Now, if we want to talk about actual long-term drops in violent crime, well, that would largely be a matter of policing per criminal ( or, alternatively, criminal workload per officer).
On that subject, the data are fairly clear:
30 Cities' Policing and Violence
You have to prime the pump with a lot of cops to start driving the hoodlums out of your city and you may, in fact, have to keep them in place to ensure that other cities/states do not export their criminals to you, as is largely the case from Virginia and points South into Baltimore City.
Virginia has no parole, so when you use up you second chances, drug diversion, bad childhood excuses, PBJ, and Strikes One and Two, you don't want to be convicted in Virginia courts as you will get the entire sentence, NO GOOD TIME.
So, they come here with a clean slate (in MD records, at least) to finish out their criminal lives, because our courts and SA won't get serious for another ten years after moving here.
It simple: how many cowboys; how many indians.
Let's not forget that NYC has about five times the policing per criminal that Baltimore provides.
John:
I agree with your more cops premise-given the bureaucracy of pursuing and prosecuting crime, we have far too few bodies.
But what about the number of individuals and hours required to really work the war on drugs we have committed to? I like The Wire, but who is pretending that kind of macro-scale investigation and prosecution actually happens here? Those people are not producing weekly and monthly crime control results. Do we need them, or not?
Also, if you look at crime as a high-discount rate phenomena where individuals just don't care about the future and break the law to get ahead now, what kind of investment in addition to police do you need to get the 12-20 demographic something better than crime?
Cowboys? Indians? Are you implying one set was law enforcement the other criminal?
In Baltimore we have 3 groups of people dancing around each other: 1)Citizens who pay taxes and don't commit violent crimes , 2) police officers and 3) violent criminals. I'm not sure if one or more groups represent good and other groups represent bad. It's all a big game where nobody appears to be winning except the lawyers and prison workers.
To make any type of dent in the rate of violent crime our city needs to totally rethink the game. If we take the police and the judicial system out of the process entirely and come up with another way to deter people from choosing a life of crime, to deter people from accepting a criminal culture, to think of new ways of approaching the drug trade we might come up with something. I'm not sure I can come up with some answers, but I would love to see our community be given the opportunity to meet for a couple of days and come up with some out-of-the-box ideas. The police department keeps on shoving down our throats their vision of how to go about fighting violent crime and it isn't working and it has never worked.
I have seen the City Department of Public Works and Baltimore County hold conferences inviting all citizens that are interested in coming up with ideas on how to improve local water quality. Isn't it time the city residents be given the opportunity to come up with new ideas to approach crime, or is it going to be more of the same crap from our leadership in 2010?
Galt:
BCPD = Baltimore County PD.
I hope that crime continues to decline in the city,but I think that we have to to stop putting more criminals back out on the streets
Cham:
Another frickin' committee in Baltimore?
Gimme a break.
Galt:
The watersheds conferences are pretty cool. Everyone that attends does so voluntarily.
What Baltimore needs is not more popular involvement in decisionmaking. In fact, what is needed is for professionals, in this case law enforcement professionals, to be appointed from outside Baltimore City to do all of the things that need doing here, quite independent of what the locals want. Remember, Baltimore City elected Sheila Dixon AFTER her misbehavior in office was known. Baltimore people cannot be trusted with self-government.
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