Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Vigil in the Village

The Charles Villagers for Peaceful Living says there will be a candlelight prayer vigil in remembrance of Stephen Pitcairn on Wednesday August 25th at 11:30pm. 26th Street and St Paul.

4 comments:

John Galt said...

Take a look at this story:

the city wishes to require that landlords accept Section 8 tenants,

then, when they are living there, it observes that the police have been unable to deal with the mountain of incidents,

so, it proposes to padlock the joint and relocate those without current felonious activity somewhere else, but to exclude the problem people, who will go live somewhere else in Baltimore, perhaps your block.

And then proudly pronounce "Mission accomplished."

Whoa. Slow down.

Neither your Commissioner of Housing nor your police have done anything about the people who commit the crimes.

As a rule, you will find that the problem people may be a handfull, but the homes they frequent in these complexes are many. That is, most of the residents have hoodlums in and out of their homes in the ordinary course of events. Some of them even stash the drugs and weapons of the problem males within their units.

They are generally not innocents.

Most of the problem offenders have never been on any lease: they stay with their girlfriend, sister, or momma, who will be getting relocated, courtesy of Graziano. They will then call their hoodlum relatives, who will move in the following day.

Section 8 will always generate this sort of behavior as long a s tenants have own discretion in who they admit. In theory, there are rules against criminal hazards and drugs, but no one in Baltimore proposes to actually enforce, mostly because the section 8 recipients are heavy registered for voting purposes.

Bottom line: you're throwing out the baby and keeping the bathwater.

With hundreds of incidents a year, doesn't it sound like there are a lot of good opportunities to incarcerate problem people there? Think of it as mining the motherload of criminality in this city. Isn't that what we want police (and judges) to do, lock these guys up and keep them out of our lives?

Oh, I forgot, we have in mind to run a criminal justice system in which known criminals are never incapacitated.
, other than superficially.

So, THAT's why Baltimore's such a friggin' hellhole.

ppatin said...

Yay, Galt is back!

Unknown said...

Good post. But here's the money quote from the article: "Graziano said ... Apartment owners must act when renters commit crimes." Whoa!! Where the hell did that come from? Are owners supposed to hire their own police force? Make a determination on their own as to who has committed a crime and then take punitive action? Force witnesses to 'snitch'? Be mommy and/or daddy to the kids? Don't get me started.

Maurice Bradbury said...

Ah, it's so nice to have everybody back together again. I hope you'll come out to our Meetup Sept 1!