Saturday, October 12, 2013

The streak

After an incredible 10 days with no murders, Reginald Hart, 58, was killed in the 5500 block of Gwynn Oak yesterday.* He's the 178th murder victim of the year.

A 17-year-old was shot in the neck on Arunah Avenue yesterday.






Thursday, October 10, 2013

There's some shirts

Jose Morales was found guilty of soliciting Robert Long's murder by a federal jury, a murder Demetrius Smith* was doing time for. ... But what happened to Stanley Needleman?

MTA Police are looking for three fashion-foward guys who committed armed robbery of a passenger on the number 40 bus.

Police Tweeted a shooting in the 2400 block of East Monument Street.

Anthony Towels/Towles has been charged with involuntary manslaughter in the death of his 16-month-old granddaughter Sabryia, even though her death was ruled accidental-- he left her in his car last summer and she died.

Anthony Batts was on the Marc Steiner show yesterday evening, you can listen to the podcast if you're into that kind of thing.

Christopher Troy Goode aka Public Enemy #1 has been captured.

Dude's mellow was harshed in Glen Burnie when a bowl, weed and pot brownies were seized.
(What is the Baltimore News Journal? Who's behind it? Anyone know?)

Media blabber: local neurosurgeon Ben "Bestiality" Carson has debuted as a Fox News commentator.
Laugh so you don't cry dept: A company called Dynis LLC is poised to get a city contract for new "Smart Meters," even though their bid is $101 million more than a competitor's. Why, you ask? Is it the vast techincal superiority of their meters? Or is it perhaps because the CEO of Dynis was Stephanie Rawlings-Blake's top contributor in 2011? Strokes beard.

Housing inspectors have reportedly made a game of who can issue the most citations, with the "sharks" at the top and the "crabs" at the bottom.

Wednesday, October 9, 2013

Confidence level = zero

Down in Greenbelt the Jose Morales case has gone to the jury.* Last week prosecutors tied him to three murders and an attempted murder-for-hire -- Robert Long's, plus three men who were in the federal penitentiary, Clyde "Junior" Lucas, who was with Long when he died, Mark Bartlett, a thief, addict and drug dealer who was the "star witness" who originally helped put Demetrius Smith in jail for Long's murder, and Terry Sadler, who is alive and also the mother of one of Morales' children. (I guess Stanley Needleman never testified?)

Four people arrested and three indicted on charges related to bribing postal workers at the Waverly and Pikesville post offices. Richard Wright, 37, and Kimberly Parnell, 43, are the respective post office managers, making Shane Anderson, 37, and Ladena Sketers-Anderson, 46, are the presumptive alleged bribers. Fenton says the managers are accused of taking kickbacks for no-show jobs from landscaping and janitorial companies.* Wright allegedly texted, "'Yo bra u need to text or call me because I need to get my loot!' ... referring to a $2,000 cut from $3,750 paid for contract work."

Kenneth Bernard Corporal was arrested for stabbing bouncers at the Comedy Factory.*

The Baltimore Police Department posted to Facebook,
"The Baltimore Police Department will make no changes to its policy regarding the information it currently disseminates on Twitter. We will continue to use Twitter to inform the community on all non fatal shootings, all homicides, crime prevention tips, public safety issues, noteworthy arrests and community events. Our goal has always been to provide the most accurate information possible. The community deserves nothing less. In order to meet that goal as crimes happen we will endeavor to add more context to events when they occur."
I gotta say, too little too late-- at this point I've completely lost confidence in Batts to lead. Homicides are up, transparency is down, dude seems completely clueless as to the law when it comes to Terry stops,* you had Gugliemi saying "we're pretty satisfied where the city is headed, violence-wise" after one of the most violent weekends in history, then the new guy saying they're not going to tweet "criminal on criminal crime." The spokesmen's words are their own, but apparently the Batts administration culture promotes that dismissive attitude: with Gugliemi's remarks, Batts never denounced them, he just "temporarily reassigned" Gugliemi to another post and remarked that the "messaging" and been "terrible."*
     And as a cynical Baltimorean, know how easy and tempting it is to slide into the "let the criminals kill each other off and have God sort 'em out" attitude. But there are problems with this line of thinking. First being collateral damage: kids and "actual citizens" literally getting caught in the crossfire. Second, people lose confidence that the police can protect them, and start taking care of threatening individuals themselves, already a huge problem in this city, the average homicide victim has 8.5 arrests.* When there's been a shooting on the block yet nothing is said, it reinforces this perception and conveys the message that shootings are so routine they aren't even noteworthy any more and the police don't care, reinforcing the cycle of violence. 
     Then there's the ethics of the "criminals aren't citizens" attitude. Just because you've bought some pot in the park doesn't mean you deserve the death penalty, or even a bullet in the knee. And finally, because America. Do we believe in the rule of law, or do we believe in the rule of the jungle?
     So yeah, no confidence. Time for this guy to go.

Tuesday, October 8, 2013

Drug dealers are citizens too

What. If being callous and utterly tone-deaf gets you fired from a BPD communications job, sounds like Jack Papp is about to join Anthony Guglieimi in the bread line-- dude emailed a reporter that the department "is not going to tweet out every time a drug dealer shoots another criminal in the leg* for nonpayment, i.e. criminal-on-criminal crime that we know... we will still tweet out instances where nonfatal shootings involve citizens, public safety issues, etc." So I guess this guy* and the other people shot over the weekend were confirmed criminals, duly noted, and that if you have an arrest on your record you lose your Baltimore citizenship ... you're walking around in your own personal airport transit zone or something.
   Papp now claims that due to outcry the policy has been reversed, but the BPD has still not Tweeted a shooting in eight days.

In Glen Burnie a school bus driver was charged with robbing banks.

A male body this morning in the water by Fells Point, cause of death unknown

Monday, October 7, 2013

Really out to get you

Spooky comment on the blog this morning--
Today's date of this posting is (October 7, 2013)... As I was driving down Interstate 95-S just past the 295 Baltimore/Washington Pkwy. at 12:45 a.m. this past mid April when I suddenly saw a large drone (about the size of a helicopter)hovering just off of the northbound side of 95-N with red lights flashing on and off underneath it, when all of a sudden, bright white lights touched down in front of my car, then on top of my car and then circled onto the northbound side on top of another car. That was probably the spookiest thing I've ever seen. I feel like we are now living in a twilight zone dictatorship called Obamba-land and no longer the good ole U.S.A. land of the free! We are living in scary times!!!
Yes they are, but spying is a bipartisan effort! And speaking of the federales, the New York Times has uncovered that the government shutdown has been planned for months, and guess which evil duo is behind it? That would be the Koch Brothers, founders of the Tea Party, who are no doubt pleased as punch that the government shutdown means less nosy gubmint poking into their activities, activities such as illegal sales to Iran, fracking and drilling for oil in national parks (which continue in spite of the "shutdown"). The shutdown is win-win for them, and we can expect it to go on for a long time.

The FBI couldn't figure out how to seize the Bitcoins of the founder of the Silk Road, so they seized users' funds instead. Fun fact: Silk Road operated on a TOR network, TOR being an acronym for "The Onion Router," so-called because of its encryption layers. The network was a creation of the U.S. government, which wanted to offer anonymity to users in repressive regimes. The FBI likely took down Ross "Dread Pirate Roberts" Ulbricht by using a backdoor in Firefox to insert malware that identified specific networking devices.

And court records were unsealed that reveal why Ladar Levison shut down Lavabit, the e-mail service provider to Edward Snowden and about 400,000 other people: the Feds demanded that Levison turn over SSL keys that would give them access to every single user's metadata and fined him $5,000 a day when he refused.

Don't think extralegal government activities are something you should worry about? Read this plz, and mull over the fact that Maryland State Police spied on Peace protestors-- not just here or there, but monitored their activities for more than a year.

Rather worse for the wear

Somebody's got mommy issues: "Public Enemy No. 1" Christopher Troy Goode is now wanted for questioning for the shooting of a woman that took place Saturday night.* Goode has a shiny forehead, a red goatee with the number 13 on it and should be considered armed and dangerous.

Power Plant Live = hot mess. Two bouncers were stabbed there at a Aries Spears show last night, and Spears has some n-words for the incident.


Business model: charge people $9.99 to see if their mug shot is on a site, if it is, charge them $40-$90 to take it down.*

History corner: 164 years ago today, Edgar Allan Poe died at Church Home and Hospital between East Fayette and East Baltimore Streets where he was taken after being found at 44 E. Lombard Street "rather worse for the wear" on October 3rd. Still to this day no one knows exactly what killed him; theories range from rabies to liver failure.

Sunday, October 6, 2013

Depends on what is is

Busted! Batts justified the use of ye olde stop-and-frisk by citing the example of some BGF guy he patted down in the CHUM. Turns out that according to legal experts the pat-down was not legal, and as it turned out no guns were found;* rather stretches the credibility of his claim that the department only conducts lawful Terry stops when the commissioner is unaware of what a lawful stop is.

Two shootings yesterday, in the southern district and on E. 24th Street, respectively.

A shooting in Parkville in the 7100 block of Darlington Drive, a shooting in the 1400 block of Ingleside

Whodathunk it? States with stricter gun laws found to have fewer shooting deaths.