Wednesday, January 26, 2005

Stop snitching

A few weeks ago, the house of a 59 year old outspoken anti-drug activist (whose name they haven't released) was firebombed. They've now charged four suspects: according to WBAL, "Jackie Brewington, 18, and Antonino Newsome, 18, Richard Royal, 20, all of Baltimore. A fourth suspect, Andre Wilkins, 31, is from Randallstown." This is two years after the horrible firebombing that killed the entire Dawson family, kids and all.

According to the AP, "The new incident comes about six weeks after a DVD titled "Stop Snitching" hit Baltimore streets, warning people they could "get a hole in their head" for telling police about illegal drug activity." "Stop Snitching" was produced by Rodney Bethea, owner of One Love Underground in Baltimore, and a guy named Skinny Suge, who appears to sell a lot of mix tapes online, usually with names like "Street Wars 6".

Evidently, the DVD was aimed at one particular Baltimore drug kingpin who rolled over. Still looking for details.

I think it's clear that some major upheaval is going on out there, what with the 27 murders this year so far and the new police commissioner saying the drug trade is being squeezed so hard, it's causing violence. I dunno what his logic is there. They haven't come out and said it's an all-out war, but come on.

1 comment:

Maurice Bradbury said...

Yeah I guess the theory goes that the police are cracking down on the dealers more, so the organizations are killing more potential witnesses? I don't know if that's really what's happening, a lot of the murders actually don't seem to be drug related. But then you get so little information about them it's hard to say. But yeah, something's up, if there are basically twice as many murders (27) at this point this year than there were last year (14).