Think we've got it bad? Well, we do, but in PG County, murder is up 18 percent, carjackings are up 55 percent and robberies are up 34 percent from last year.
And more horrors from PG county: Yvette Cade, the woman whose soon-to-be ex-husband set her on fire, just weeks ago pled with judge Richard Palumbo not to dismiss a protective order she taken out against Hargrove filed in July, to no avail.
Oswald Victor Voigt, 48, pled not guilty this morning for first-degree murder in connection with the death of Robin Hoey, 36. A Baltimore Grand Jury indicted Voigt on September 9. Court documents allege on August 9 police officers found the body of Robin Hoey inside a safe. The Medical Examiner concluded that Hoey died as a result of asphyxiation and ruled it a homicide. Voigt confessed the murder to investigators.
In Dundalk, 23-year-old Sarah Glover got 15 years in prison for paying 18-year-old Kevin Martin to beat up Joseph Salisbury, an ex-bf who kicked her out for drug use. Martin got 30 years.
Marco Silver, 36, was shot in the head in a Towson apartment.
David Braxton, charged with witness intimidation, failed to appear for his scheduled arraignment today. Judge Lynn Stewart issued a warrant for his arrest. Braxton had previously posted $50,000 bail.
A 20-year-old was stabbed in the forehead then wandered into an elementary school in Randallstown.
A Glen Burnie man, Dexter Bert Tyson, 31, is facing life without parole in Federal prison on drug and weapons charges.
Jessamy and Glenn laid into the parole commission, saying their methods are "impossible to sort out" and "arcane and mysterious, beyond all understanding." Hey bitchin, there also appears to be no password needed get into the law digest, either! Thanks Raymond, way to keep the little rag relevant.
And it's arrest-o-rama in the blotter. Police say that they made a record number of arrests in July and August.
A 21-year-old "dad," Paul James Jr., has been arrested for making the bomb that the 17-month-old drank while in grandma's care.
Oh, you wacky addicts, stealing lightpoles. And speaking of HotSpots, where's the scrap metal yard that would buy a city lightpole, no questions asked? I agree with you, 'non-- HotSpots are stupid. First the gun buyback and now this, what's with the City resurrecting techniques that are proven failures? How about a little window-fixing action for a change?
Chuck makes a point: only in Baltimore could a 35-year-old woman be beaten to death in her home with shovels and only get a single, passing mention in the local media.
7 comments:
You have no idea how much it pains me to do this, but I have to defend The Baltimore Sun in regards to "majority unreported until Ditkoff found them."
While Ms. Ditkoff's column (and this site) are unparalleled, The Sun was remarkably diligent in giving at least nominal coverage to nearly every murder victim from early March until reporter Ryan Davis' mid-summer departure. (88-year-old smothering victim Robert Little was a surprising exception to this statement.)
Around the time of Davis' resignation, coverage once again became extremely spotty. They've gotten back on track, but there have been a few cases in the past three months that received no mention in The Sun. (The most glaring omission, in my opinion, was the beating death of Verna Brown, although I'm sadly surprised to see no mention yet of the woman found shot to death in a Northwest Baltimore alley a few days ago.)
I think it's ridiculous that one has to hunt through the toolbox thefts in the Police Blotter and the reports of Carroll County School Board meetings in the Metro Digest in order to find information about the murder victims in Baltimore, but for the most part, it is there if you're willing to undertake a gruesome Easter egg hunt.
And I am well aware of the irony of this comment, given that my entire site is full of disparaging comments towards The Sun. However, even I must give credit where it's due, and the majority of our city's homicides are, indeed, reported somewhere in the pages of The Sun.
Keep up the great work; I truly appreciate what you're doing.
Window-fixing action? Are we talking Broken-Window Theory? It's a real good subject to discuss here, because it is so very misunderstood in Baltimore. Let me know if that's what you meant, and then I'll get up on the soapbox about it. thanks
Yes, Broken Window theory. Soapbox away.
Warning: this is long!
Broken Windows is both an article written in the Atlantic Monthly in 1982 by behavioral sociologists James Q. Wilson and George Kelling and also a shorthand for defensible space arguments. But the two conversations are quite distinct, hence the unfortunate overlap of nomenclature.
Defensible Spaces argues that physical layout and the physical environment determine (criminal) conduct and its incidence. Basically, if your window is cracked, well, that's why a perfectly law-abiding person spraypaints grafitti on your wall. The blight 'made' him react that way. The proposed remedy is called CPTED, Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design and it's a sacred cow in Planning departments in Academia.
The work of Wilson & Kelling, on the other hand, observes the correlation of (primarily nonviolent) criminal behavior with visual signs of nonenforcement of laws against property crime. Basically, the experiments revealed that when those hanging around a neighborhood see examples of unanswered property crime, like vandalism and littering, they INFER that similar (or greater) crime committed by them will be similarly ignored, whether by the police or by a proximate owner or irate neighbor. Some areas are immaculate because the police won't take no crap, "We don't tolerate crime here." Other areas have a high likelihood of crime enforcement because neighbors look out for one another in the owner/occupant's absence, "We don't tolerate crime here." Consequently, fixing a cracked window results in a lasting signal of a strict enforcement regime.
On the other hand in a somewhat dissociative environment where police really don't get worked up about anything which isn't potentially lethal and where neighbors don't really give a hoot about one another, then the cracked window is a CORRECT signal of the generally permissive environment. The potential vandal CORRECTLY infers that he probably won't be enforced upon and that neighbors won't lift a finger, so he is emboldened in his conduct and likely ratchets up his level of misconduct. Since crime is not responded to, the owner of the cracked window can reasonably well INFER that it will only be re-broken in short order if he fixes it, so he doesn't.
There are four cases:
signal: tolerant reality: tolerant
signal: tolerant reality: intolerant
signal: intolerant reality: tolerant
signal: intolerant reality: intolerant
The first case is a stable, self-realizing equilibrium. If you are in a very safe area, you fix your window and everyone understands that they'd better not commit crimes there. This ensures the windows stay fixed.
The second case is a fake-out of the criminal. Police will land on you quickly, even though you thought they wouldn't since the windows here are cracked. This is not stable, since with a low crime rate, the owner will fix the window, it will remain fixed, and the signal will be true, which is case 1.
The third case is a 'paper tiger'. It's like a neighborhood with 1000 hoodlums and one cop with signs which read "Don't do it. We are watching." It's all hot air and its not a stable arrangement, because if a hoodlum tests law enforcement by committing a low-level crime, he will find that, contrary to what the sign says, there is no response, so he steps it up. Again, no response. The signal is a fake. Inference: vandalize away, no one will stop you. Result: hoodlums break windows, owners learn that fixed windows are quickly rebroken and stop fixing them, so this unstable arrangement devolves to the (stable) fourth case.
This in NOT about housing policy. It's about what ecoinomists call informative signals, versus 'cheap talk' signals, which promise to fake you out, and hence should be ignored. Informative signals truthfully tell what will be the consequence of your actions, in this case vandalism.
The problem with applying Broken Window theory is this: if you have crime and you do not supply enforcement, but only fix windows/paint over grafitti/remediate litter, then you are trying to send a false signal. The hoodlums will clearly experiment with their behavior and will discover that deviating from the behavior they were warned to adhere to has NO CONSEQUENCE, regardless of the impression the neighborhood wanted to convey by tidying. They learn that it's "O.K." to break the window. Since they get away with it, the owners/neighbors learn that fixing windows/cleaning grafitti is futile; they stop doing it and the signal becomes 'true', which is to say that the truthful equilibrium is self-realizing.
Hence, if you're not going to supply the requisite level of enforcement, whether formal(police) or informal (neighbors chasing hoodlums away from the scene of a vandalism), then fixing the windows/painting the walls/cleaning dumped garbage will not have an effect upon your crime.
Unfortunately, so many who read abstracts of the Broken Window theory understand it to mean that crime goes down when you perform maintenance. Wrong inference. Not a housing theory, but rather a policing theory.
Just wanted to ask you to post the following excerpt from the article on PG County crime, as we have the same basic problem, but Hamm refuses to deal with it:
http://www.gazette.net/stories/101305/princou230126_31905.shtml
Staff strain
With a force of 1,290, the county has 1.53 officers per 1,000 county residents, 130 officers short of the county’s authorized force. The national average for metropolitan counties is 2.6.67 per 1,000 officers, according to the FBI.
Last summer, the Fraternal Order of Police, the police union, publicly criticized High’s CSA strategy, saying the program cannot be effective without a fully staffed police force.
“If your department is so understaffed that officers spend their entire shift racing from call to call, there’s really no way for them to break away from those calls and engage in community policing activities,“ said Michael D. White, associate director of the Criminal Justice and Evaluation Center and professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.
The following link to wbal indicates just how thoroughly intimidated Baltimore witnesses are. Note how many cases are being lost: 3 of 4.
http://www.thewbalchannel.com/news/5097013/detail.html
And how. I had a guy arrested for breaking & entering at my house; he was on the street the next day and pulled a bottle on me. I go to trial in a few days, knowing full well that I'll be having run-ins for years with this guy, who's continuously in and out of jail as a violent offender. The police know it too, they say they haven't enough manpower to respond other than, say, 45 minutes after the incident. Very reassuring.
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