"I couldn't stay silent." the Sun's Matthew Dolan tells the tale of Edna McAbier, who may never be able to return to her beloved Harwood neighborhood, even though the Bloods who bombed her house are in jail. Sigh. Says a neighbor, "she brought it on herself."
WBAL covers the federal court appeal of Vernon L. Evans, Jr.
WJZ: a hearing re. reopening the Robert Clay case may be held this month.
Carl Evans was convicted of murdering his stepdaughter Breaunna Floyd, 13.
Wow, I remember this story (or one like it) from a few years ago: the Orthodox Jewish community is rallying to support Cynthia Ohana; her abusive control-freak of an ex-husband Ephraim won't grant her a divorce.OMG!! Bill himself is coming to Maryland October 17 to help O'Malley raise money!
Correction: the body of Roxanne Amick, 40, was found wrapped in a blanket (it sounds like on the side of Belair Road), her van was found at the mall.
19 comments:
From the Harwood article:
Others saw her activism as needlessly reckless.
"I guess she was block captain in the neighborhood and it went to her head," said Nathaniel Wilson, a retired city employee who has lived on McAbier's block for more than 30 years. "I think sometimes she thought she was the police."
I really don't want to call this man a coward, but it is exactly the attitude of this block captain will creates strong neighborhoods.
And as for Mr. Wilson's comments he must never heard of phrases like "self policing", "citizen's arrest", and reporting criminals.
Imagine...if every person said, "I'm not going to get involved because I might get hurt." That's cowardly. Baltimore needs heros like this block captain "who thought she was the police."
Well, I'll tell you as someone who worked with Edna on these problems that this city tells you with one side of its mouth that it wants you to do all that good civic stuff, and then out the other side of Mr. O'Malley's mouth they set you up to be killed.
Because Edna called for more policing, which clearly meant more manpower, and Regis was taking Harwood on as a project even if it didn't fit the standards for a political 'best choice', he was targetted by ex-Commish Clark and in particular by a certain Lt. Col. McMahon (sp. McMann ??), who countermanded all the coverage which Harwood was given under Phelan immediately upon Regis's being placed on leave (because he caught the Commish. smacking his girlfriend around.).
It became hazardous overnight. And not only Edna but others of us personally e-mailed Martin O'Malley, telling him and the Commish. that it would directly result in people being killed. Apparently, Mr. O'Malley was willing (for someone else) to take that risk.
As one of the last of a crop of grassroots neighborhood walkers who sought to do the safety work in Northern Baltimore that this lousy City Administration keeps shirking, I now understand that we are totally unbacked by this government and that the streets are owned by the criminals with the assent of the administration.
I still walk. I no longer feel hopeful that one day my neighbors will be able to as well. I will probably be killed before long and most of my neighbors will say something like Wilson's kind words.
But let us understand, the massive crime here is not accidental. It did not 'happen'. It was chosen by your government. The method of substantially retaking the streets is analytically simple, although admittedly resource-intensive. I have outlined the necessary elements to most of the councilpeople. They know.
When your councilpeople tell you 'we've done all we can do', it's not true. Never allow them to get away with that sh!t. Make them say it. 'I've chosen for your neighborhood to be unsafe.' 'I'd rather give the money to the Jewish Museum.' Make them say it.
They get to make those choices. You get to throw flaming dog doo at them for it at campaign rallies.
As for Martin 'zero tolerance' NO'Malley, how can anyone consider advancing him to the Governorship given his utterly disgraceful stewardship of this, the still second-worst city in America ?
Baltimore: BELIEVE ???
Baltimore,.. be left...
to rot...
in hell.
Do you know that to this day the Police Department sends out a guy by the name of kevin cleary to sign suckers up to be the eyes and ears of the administration? But he never mentions that if you fall for it, they'll leave you high and dry when things get hot.
When the going gets tough, NO'Malley gets going.
They have a really bad history. Tell them to screw off.
It's not that Baltimore doesn't need brave souls like Edna. It's that it hasn't done anything to deserve them, nor will it, I think, in this lifetime.
What shocks me is the policeman telling her to move. It's like, "oh by the way, the government has ceded this area to the Bloods."
For the guy who's into mapping, THAT would be an interesting map to do: which areas of Baltimore are still governed by the city and which have been surrendered to gangs.
ps. I'm so annoyed my Martin and Bill is blurry but I don't have time to fix it!
I told Galt to move, but he seems determined to become a waverly martyr.
Michael Jackson said "They Don't Care about us". Kanye West said George Bush doesn't care about black people. All I wanna say is
"O'Malley---and his spineless, rubber stamp city council--- Don't Care about US"
...and US ain't just black people
I just re-ran the murder rate using the final numbers from FBI. Our 2005 murder rate exceeded Detroit's by about 7%.
That's really, really bad.
For the guy who's into mapping, THAT would be an interesting map to do: which areas of Baltimore are still governed by the city and which have been surrendered to gangs.
what's the difference between this idea and the murder map?
Joe, the problem here is two fold:
the ratio of decent people to criminals/criminal abettors is just too low.
and
the number of cops, although it may seem commensurate with other cities, is totally out of proportion to our massive criminality.
We need at least twice the number of cops we have now, and along the way we need to dismiss, retire, or fire a bunch of rotten, Baltimore cops who are either corrupt or ineffective at doing this job.
Required gross hires are easily 2,000, probably 2,600.
All this nonsense about municipal 'nothing can be done' is bullsh!t. Start firing people. Things will magically get done in a hurry.
Start by sequestering all funds not absolutely necessary to the public safety. (anything other than police, DPW critical maintainence, DPW water/sewer operations,and emergency housing demos). It's usually called austerity. It has a remarkable habit of knocking some nuts out of the tree.
What's the current count w/ these two more on Lanvale?
194-204.
BTW, last year ended with 269-293: 24 homicides were ruled justified or deaths while in state custody.
24? Geez, you know, the entire city of Boston had a total of only 73 murders. We had one third of that in justifiable Oopses?
Like I said, Baltimore ought to be condemned, just like the 9th Ward of New Orleans. It's not habitable, but for entirely behavioral reasons.
So, we've already passed the total annual murders for the District of Columbia and will presently be passing Dallas in similar fashion.
We presently have for ytd 2006 almost precisely twice the total annual murders of similarly-sized city, Columbus, OH.
"...Start by sequestering all funds not absolutely necessary to the public safety. (anything other than police, DPW critical maintainence, DPW water/sewer operations,and emergency housing demos)..."
Fine, so a massive increase in police... what about the other factors such as prosecution, the courts, and sentencing? Do you really think that increasing the numbers of police will be a long term solution if the other players aren't on the same page?
To make matters worse we already spend quite a bit on public safety in the budget. How would you allocate the budget?
Here is the budget for 2006, page 26 has the expenditures bar-graph by function. Instead of being vague about how much more we need to spend on police, why not be explicit?
"... It's usually called austerity. It has a remarkable habit of knocking some nuts out of the tree..."
One thing that pisses me off about Baltimore is when the little things are left to slide year after year. Its why the exquisite pavillion in Clifton park looks like it has been bombed. I would not want to continue down that path. I like my 311 tickets solved, thank you very much.
Well, as it happens, the courts and corrections are functions of the State of Maryland. None of those costs should compete with policing, but I certainly agree that they are complementary. Now, the State's Attorney's office, for reasons I've never really understood, seems to get its funding from the city.
Interestingly, you might even find that increasing the number of cops reduces many of the babysitting functions associated with prosecuting cases here.
Now, as to policing, I'd want to see a net increase of about 2,000 full-time sworn officers, before accounting for the number of cops who need to be dismissed. This probably needs to be done done over the course of a few years, for as I understand it, the academy can only handle about 50 at a time.
Now, that's not gonna happen at today's salary scale. We pay around $37,000 to start. Houston pays $50,000. Baltimore County pays like $40,000 plus inducements., which means we'd need to go up to at least $45,000. The differential is then about $90,000,ooo per annum before fringes.
One of the things that means is that the $16MM which the department of finance 'found' in some desk drawer was never lost; it was policing unprovided. And there's much more due.
Hey, what if we made the council reserve funds for the excess deaths caused by the lousy policing and other criminal justice here? We should have around 50 murders, which means we have say 210 excess. At $1,000,000 per death, that would be a $210,000,000 wrongful death reserve each year. Starts to make hiring some good cops a real good investment.
We should probably have the State revoke the Mayor & City Council's sovereign immunity, where incompetence is involved.
Anyone,
Why do you think the mayor has been silent on the death of Robert Clay? Do you think it really involves some type of police cover up? Or, just the usual incompetence?And, isn't it scary that the police and coroner could have been wrong? With all the deaths in the city, this certainly does not help instill confidence that even homicides are being properly classified and counted.
I'm actually rather close to this situation. Bob Clay was an associate of mine, and while there may have been times in the past when I thought he might be on the verge of self-destruction, most of his bigger issues had been resolved by the time of his passing.
I believe the police department homicide unit was somewhat incompetent to start, and that when discrepancies were brought to light they denied them in typical Baltimore, pigheaded fashion.
Now it looks really bad, perhaps worse than it should, because there's no love lost between O'Malley and Bob, GRHS. What makes it look fishy is that fact that justice is so elusive in this town and especially so under this Mayor, that conspiracy theories has far more fertile ground than they should. If you'd ask O'Malley the time of day at police HQ, he'd probably answer "No comment."
Did they cover up a murder? I dunno. Would they cover up a murder ?? Oh, yeah. Definitely.
Both the Police and the ME's office are so secretive you have to assume something unsavory is going on. If it's evil-bad or stupid-bad is anyone's guess.
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