The eight-year-old with the loaded gun was charged with gun possession, which he'll serve under house arrest with his mom.
A man was shot to death last night in Seton Hill on the 600 block of W. Franklin Street (≤218).
A NE Baltimore woman claims she was abducted on Light Street Monday, taken to PGC, drugged and raped.
A man found in a burning apartment on the 1000 block of St. Paul Street Wednesday night was beaten before he was burned.
A suspect was shot in the NW after trying to run down an officer.
Vernon Evans' lawyer: greater care should be taken not to hire dog-poisioners as executioners. Because there are so many well-adjusted people who want the job.
Yesterday, in Rod vs. the Trout-Saving Gang, Shorty snitched on Casper and Pony.
The Court of Appeals ruled that Ehrlich can't cut off health benefits to immigrant children <- subscription req'd.
Hookers, sharpen your stilettos ... the American Bar Association Young Lawyers' Division will be conferring from Oct. 19-21 at the Marriott Waterfront.
Last Friday the family of Amanda Smith won a $675k wrongful-death suit against GBMC.
Robbing the pizza-delivery guy is popular pastime in the Northwest burbs.
James M. Thomas, 29, of Glen Burnie, left, was charged with sexually assaulting two young relatives nine years ago.
George A. Reigel of Reisterstown pled guilty in Federal court to possession of child pornography and two twentysomething Bowie women got twentysomething months in prison after stealing an old lady's identity.
Bad news, Galt: you're going to have to live in Baltimore for two more years. Maybe take up smoking?
Jeezmcrow!!: white women live 13½ years longer than black men!
Political BS Dept.
According to the Examiner, governor "blasted" the O'M for "unconstitutional" "mass arrests." (Oddly, the interview is not up on the WBAL web site, so there's no way to put the remarks in context). But assuming this was a recent interview ... how long have we had a high arrest rate-- one year? Two? He just now felt this worthy of comment?
"If you knew that Martin O'Malley wears a toupee, is attracted to little boys and tortures animals, would you still vote for him?" (TG for caller ID!)
I don't care which bozo wins this election, I just want it over so I don't have to hear this shite anymore!
20 comments:
FYI, The young lawyers would probably want "classy" DC hookers. Not Baltimore hookers who look like they just stepped out of a dumpster.
god i am SO tired of people (especially locals) talking trash on everything about baltimore! i'm sure we have plenty of classy hookers, you just don't see them because part of being classy is that they don't walk the streets or even really look like hookers.
Well, y'know, if Baltimoreans did anything particularly well, it would help. They used to many years ago.
Part of the answer here is that Baltimore is the trash receptacle of the Mid-Atlantic population. All the worst people who can't survive in a desirable place end up here.
Solution: This town has about 300,000 housing units. The number currently occupied is around 250,000. About 25% of our population has household income of less than $15,000, accounting for over 80,000 housing units. Most of the people trying to live on $15,000 or less per household are going to be sources of problems, whether intentionally or not.
How to get rid of the scumbags: Demolish (300-250+80)= 130,000 housing units, primarily in large contiguous clusters. Then let the competitive market determine who stays.
I can just hear the poverty advocates now - "...but we can house junkies in those 130,000 units...." Yeah, if I wanted to live with junkies, but I don't. If you want to magnanimously house them somewhere, may I recommend Siberia ???
Once the bottom-dwellers cease dragging down the average characteristics of Baltimoreans, you can think about this city distinguishing itself in some way other than #1 Most Ghetto.
BTW, today's Baltimore B considers the ramifications of the light sentencing of the pair who ambushes and shot a Baltimore City cop this Spring.
I resent that, galt.
Human beings are not "trash."
And I have "survived" in many other places (I'm interested to know where is 'desirable' in your book), but like many people I choose to live here... and wait, you're including yourself in that, you know!
Did I say everyone? Remember, Baltimore has several behavioral strata. My point is not that all Baltimoreans are human detritus. The point was that human detritus collects here.
You've raised the crucial distinction: choice. Baltimore A is a neighborhood of choice. Aggressive competition for scarce homes, jobs, etc. results in a selection process that delivers a primarily viable, capable population.
Baltimore B is largely a neighborhood of desperation. The "wretched refuse" of urban America are unable to compete for space or engagement in desirable societies, so they bum around here. Our musicians are uninspired, artists are a joke, poets blow it and don't even know it. But while they would starve in Manhattan, they can eak out an existence here, based upon submediocrity. It wasn't always so. Baltimore, even lower-income Baltimore, had some... class.
Baltimore B is largely a city of bums. Many of them nasty, toothless, abcessed, oozing bums. And a buncha working folks whose expectations are so diminished by the bums around them that they don't even care anymore.
We (Baltimore City) have two and a half times the national percentage of poverty people and unlike their counterparts in the broader society, ours have no qualms about behaviorally imposing their deficiencies on their neighbors. Baltimore B has about five times the national figure.
If we can bus people around schools because of differing melanin to integrate the population, then we should certainly exclude from traditional pockets of misery those who comprise more than our fair share of behavioral disasters.
I choose to live in Baltimore as well. My husband and I moved from Annapolis, where we were surviving quite well. We just didn't like it - and we like Baltimore. And we don't live in Federal Hill or Canton. (Although I don't consider them "dirty words"). Our neighbors hang out drinking all night and throw trash in the street, and their dog barks constantly and the ally smells like dog pee and i feel like i'm in a never-ending battle to stave off the rats from their house. No one else on the street uses their own trash bins, they just pile it on the street whenever they feel like it. Two people were shot on my corner a few weeks ago while my mom was visiting and I had to pretend for her sake that it was firecrackers. And I could go on. But I feel like Baltimore offers enough pros (for us) to balance out the cons. It's not all bad.
On the Guv's opposition to the million arrests in Baltimore City each year, I'm sick and tired of NO'Malley hiding behind police officers, claiming Ehrlich's criticizing them. Even the police union objects, pointing out that it's O'Malley policy.
When spokesweasel Jablow replies that arrests are not false, that they're based on probable cause, so... how come 335,000 are thrown out each year ??
If they are procedurally good quality of life arrests, fine. Prosecute them fully to conviction. If the Mayor thinks 1 of 3 'perfectly good' arrests are not charged, then he should file a mandamus against the State's Attorney. Having been arrested on several occasions on these 'perfectly good' grounds, I'll be happy to testify that O'Malley's a stone cold LIAR.
This man is much more dangerous than any Republican. It's high time the FBI investigate his civil rights crimes.
Now, where's the Attorney General in this? That's his frickin' Father-in-Law !!!
I'm just hoping the gung-ho police downtown pull Jump Out Friday on the Civil Rights section of the American Bar Assoc. Young Lawyers Convention. I'll just sit back and watch the national fireworks.
Oh, but that's right, I forgot. They don't do that in Baltimore A, where the $305 million Convention Hotel is built. But then again, if Civil Rights lawyers were disproportionately black and male....
"I don't care which bozo wins this election, I just want it over so I don't have to hear this shite anymore!"
You and me both. I just want to take my daily jaunt through Baltimore's favorite past-times witout having to wade through anti-O'Malley screeds.
Well, you'll likely get your wish. Based upon what the polls are showing, in a few weeks they'll turn into anti-Dixon screeds.
It doesn't change the fact that the misconduct cannot continue.
"Baltimore B is largely a city of bums. Many of them nasty, toothless, abcessed, oozing bums. And a buncha working folks whose expectations are so diminished by the bums around them that they don't even care anymore."
"wretched refuse"
"human detritus"
"Baltimore is the trash receptacle"
You know better, Galt. That kind of talk is sensational, which, sure, for you means more hits to your blog, but it's a shitty way to get attention. It's not quite as endearing (O that Galt!) as you think.
Roll up your sleeves and get to work. Those are people. And that type of language has been used for centuries to dehumanize races, classes, and genders, to deleterious effects and for nefarious purposes. It's just not cool, man.
if you have no compassion for your fellow human beings, doesn't that make you one of the scumbags at heart? Why try to save anything, if you have no hope?
Warning: real, real long post. Blunt, too.
I don't believe in artificial criteria such as race, gender, or creed. Class, however, has a great deal to do with behavior. That said, I happen to know many well-bred low-income families. Just not enough of them.
Behavior is uniquely personal and transcends all those other criteria. Behavior is an excellent basis for excluding scumbags from decent society.
Who is the arbiter? Well, it's kinda split up between courts, legislatures, prosecutors, defenders, and police. Elders and clergy and mothers and fathers have a preemptive role as well, although you won't see it much in this town.
Suffice it to say, if these apparent scumbags from Baltimore were to be airlifted to a more mainstream jurisdiction, say Kent County, they'd be picked up and charged with some very proper (and prosecuble) offense in no time. Same result. Are they people? No. They're offenders, and they are intended to be kept where they cannot impact society.
Do I have compassion for them? Only to the extent that their offensive behavior was inadvertant. As for the ones who are antisocial and pathologically conduct themselves in that fashion, no I have no compassion for them whatsoever. Scumbags, to the gutter born.
The amazing thing is just how readily people who are poor of pocket but rich of character manage to lift themselves up out of the trash bin. They don't stay there, they advance, given time.
What this implies is that those who languish probably deserve it. A feature which can inhibit their mobility is stigma. Young people who do stupid things have limited opportunity going forward. That's why you don't allow young people to make their own decisions about serious choices until they're fully-formed. That's why so many of these lousy Baltimore parents doom their children to be a pox on society. It's not genetic. But it does exhibit intergenerational persistence.
You want compassion? Don't allow cretins to beget cretins. That's the most compassionate thing you can do for the next generation. Now, if you want to shoulder the burden of personally remediating their every misstep so they do not impact me, then bless you. But I doubt you have the requisite willingness. I've never known anyone to have that sort of durability of commitment, even if they do have the instantaneous inclination.
Customarily, when the left-of-center propose to heap a social burden on our backs, they intend in practice and in time to slough it off onto mine.
And this is part of why the best and the brightest leave Baltimore to the lessers. Like a trash bin already culled for its serendipitous treasures, the wet, sticky ooze tends to sink to the bottom and remain there.
Baltimore will never uniformly be anything attractive to the Outstanding. Its strategy has been to carve out an enclave of distinction and push the burden of its human decay onto the least mobile.
That's wrong. It's criminal. And it's the death of cities. The vital core will not expand to subsume the miserable periphery. The protection of the vital core will tend to fiscally immiserate the whole. It just doesn't work.
The wretched refuse must be integrated regionally. They must largely be run out on a rail, to be dealt with by the institutions of a more mainstream society in a manner which first ensures its survival, rather than theirs.
Rodya,
Why should I roll up my sleeves because some parasite wants to jimmy my window and steal my Rolex? If you want to roll yours, go fer it. Teach him job skills. Teach him astrophysics, for all I care. But when after that's all done he takes a pry bar to my window again, you bear the burden of making me whole. I am entitled to be left the hell alone. I you don't wish to shoulder that burden, day after day, then society has an obligation to remove him from circulation. That's the reason, the ONLY legitimate reason, to create the concept of government in the first place: its essential purpose.
As for having no hope, you may be correct. Baltimore has sucked all of the optimism out of me, after over a decade of doing its heavy lifting for it.
This city, as a municipal entity, is actually one of the worst parasites of all.
They want citizens to patrol the streets instead of hiring enough decent (yes, that qualifier is necessary) cops. Those cops then abuse everyone's civil rights like something our of the Deep South in 1958. They expect parents to paint the frickin' walls of the public schools, even though they have a very generous payroll. And then they have the nerve to claim that the State and Nation don't hand them enough aid, even though the local taxes are already exorbitant.
The City's charter should be pulled due to emergency conditions and a truly minimal law & order-based government should be put in its place.
Libertarian huh? I mean, ultimately that's what's behind the "I don't bother them until they start to bother me" attitude right? That's pretty simple, I know. It just never ceases to amaze me how all of this (ALL of it) in the end is about you. "I am entitled to be left the hell alone." You are entitled, yes.
The behavior piece is actually quite interesting. "Behavior is uniquely personal and transcends all those other criteria [race, gender, class].". . .not exactly true, or shall I say "reliable" unless you are using it as the primary variable, which many people HAVE used to explain social ills, much to the detriment of an entire people.
Don't get me wrong, we should all be held responsible for our actions. I just think the language of wretched refuse, trash receptacle, etc, etc, is dehumanizing, not useful, and reprehensible.
Understand that people of any quality level can be rendered harmless with the application of sufficient criminal justice resources.
This jurisdiction has refused to do so, not temporarily, but persistently for many, many years.
What deters relatively rational criminals is the expectation of sanction. The expected sanction is a function of the likelihood of being caught (conditional upon having done it), the likelihood of being charged by a commissioner, the likelihood (or extent, in the case of pleas, compromised charges, etc) of being tried, and the degree of sanction awarded by the court.
The law of compound probability says that it is in fact the product of those probabilities(giving appropriate effect to conditionality), which is mathematically convenient. Halving prosecutorial inclination to seek a penalty is the same as halving effort to apprehend. You need at least twice as many half-credible police officers as you need credible ones. In Baltimore, all of these contributing measures are strictly less than in other Maryland jurisdictions.
The end result is that in Baltimore, the likely result of committing a crime is minimal to the perpetrator. The more defective the policing, the less likely the prosecutor is to follow up and the less is the sanction that a judge will be comfortable with, since he hasn't faith in his witness. {Now, police effort, prosecutorial zeal, and judicial inclination are not locationally uniform. A robbery in Guilford is treated differently from one in East Baltimore.}
Nonetheless, a robbery in Baltimore will entail an expected sanction far, far less than one in Towson, ergo Baltimore residents (or otherwise people considering criminal activity here) are strongly encouraged to engage in that conduct.
This is the policy of your local government. The legislative proscription against robbery is statewide, not local. But when municipal government is permitted to 'choose' to operate radically differently from other jurisdictions, it also is permitted to water down the law. Equal protection under the law, guaranteed by the Constitution, is thereby nullified.
Regardless of what is lawful, crime in Baltimore B is permitted. You should not be surprised that anger at a failed and contra-constitutional government would spill over after many years of persistent abuse to the most readily identifiable supersets of the offender population. It is not reasonable to expect people to just take this nonsense.
Maybe when enough people are fed up, they'll burn down City Hall. More likely, they'll just burn down Baltimore B. It's pretty clear that this government will not change of its own volition. Sheila Dixon is no reformer. Hell, she's already under investigation as City Council President. The external source of imposed change would be the Governor, but it seems likely that that post will be filled by someone with a strong interest in ignoring the misdeeds of past and present Mayors of Baltimore.
If you want wronged people to be cautious about collateral damage, fine. But, please do not ask them to just take it.
Criminality is supposed to be extricated from society by operation of government, but here it is encouraged and institutionalized.
Hocojoe is partly right.
Galt, you have _NEVER_ said a nice word about Baltimore in the volumes you have written here. You don't think anything will change anytime soon. Yet you _stay_ in a troubled area of town even after having been arrested "a few times", stabbed twice and buglarized.
The last time I brought up the idea of you just leaving, you vaguely claimed that you were staying so that other nice people would not be left to hang. I don't buy it.
I think your personality is such that you must have constant conflict in order to "feel right". What you may not realize is that you are wasting a lot of effort on refining your hatred about things you can't do anything about. Why not just move to a different area (even in the city)? There, you can devote your effort on solvable problems and make some progress. You seem to be smart guy, why do you waste your efforts?
As for Baltimore B "burning down", in a sense that has already happened metaphorically. The old cities of the northeast, including Baltimore, have all experienced a tremendous decline in the 70's, 80's and 90's (eg philadelphia, boston, DC, pittsburgh, cleveland). They effectively bottomed out and now there is economic pressure to rebuild simply because property and infrastructure is relatively cheap and locations are good. These places are all seeing improvments. Of course, the improvment does not happen uniformly, it takes hold at various anchor points and spreads outward like crystals precipitating in a solution.
Caution: this one's long again.
Please do not frame what happened in East Coast cities in the passive voice, 'they declined.' No, they were destroyed. Criminals destroyed our cities.
And your government stood by and allowed it in the same way Baltimore does now. Back then, the national guard were deployed to ensure that angry mobs of (primarily young, male) afro-americans didn't get to, for instance, the Charles Street corridor, because that was white. But they were allowed to burn and pillage Greenmount up to about 24th Street. Why did they stop there? Because citizens, not government, brought firearms to bear on them.
Our lousy Mayor recently participated in a mayoral conference calling for tighter gun control. Fine. Take up the guns and THEN become fully responsible for applying force necessary to prevent the crime. Fully rseponsible.
Again, what this stinkin' excuse for a government has in mind is not a charge to protect (as in equally), but the option of choosing who will be afforded the protections of law and against whom it will conspire to take their lives and property.
Your government, my friends, is evil. Not a word to be bandied about casually. It is evil.
To my way of thinking, it has been granted sufficient latitude over many years to clean up its act that no citizen may now be faulted for opposing it. By any means necessary. This government is an oppressor. It is arbitrary. It is racist. It is everything that our broader governing structures state they were created in opposition against.
Citizens have not only the organic right, but also the duty to oppose oppressive government. By any means necessary.
As for the rebuilding of this city, you're forgetting something.
The woman whose family lived on 23rd & Greenmount. She's been raped. Her sons shot. Her home burned and somewhat rebuilt. She bought it in 1966 for $25,000= $125,000 in today's dollars. The market value because of the permitted crime is perhaps $25,000.
Before your city has any business trying again, it should be required to pay her reparations for its cumulative negligence over the last 40 years. And it should also be required to pay similar reparations to all those who fled in the face of incredible violence, assented to by this government.
Now, having once made whole all those who were pogromed out of here, if your government wants to try again, fine. Just warn the yuppies you're trying to market to that they will have to pay off the bonds for reparations to the 400,000 displaced Baltimoreans and that those bond payments will be added to their taxes. $40billion.
Since your murder rate should be around 50 per year if you policed sufficiently and is in fact about 275, that's 225 wrongful deaths per year for, say, 30 years, or about another 6,750 million.
So let's just call it an even $50 billion in total to account for miscellaneous suffering.
Oh, you didn't have in mind to pay them? Just sorta waltz in and take their land, huh? And then institute policing again to protect the rights of white people, once they arrive. And call it revitalization.
There's another name. Theft. When the Swiss bankers kept the gold deposits of the jews who were decimated in the holocaust, it took a while, but it was finally called what it was: theft. After the war, after Austria took the property of the murdered and the refugees and declared it abandoned to the government, that too was theft.
You ask me to just take the abuse and the unlawful conduct of your government, or flee.
Where are my reparations? It comes back to the same isue: your government being held accountable for its acts and omissions.
No, there is no solution of the form 'make the complainants disappear'. One way or the other, your lousy stinking government has to pay for its misdeeds.
The most fiscally responsible way is to start providing good policing. Good, adequate, ethical, and oh yeah, constitutionally-supported policing.
Oh, and if you don't have enough cops? Not a problem. Deploy them first on Greenmount, and then only to the extent you have surplus does the Charles Street corridor get any. None for Guilford/Homeland/Roland Park unless Waverly, Barclay, and Harwood are first secured.
Then we'll see how well those white constituencies look on your suggestion that they just leave.
This conversation is not about the aggrandizement of Baltimore. It's about justice long overdue and even now still not on the horizon.
As for an institutionally unjust Baltimore, this jurisdiction should be condemned as unfit until a proper replacement government is put in place to afford its citizens the protections available under Maryland law.
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