Meet the new commissioner (for now), Frederick H. Bealefeld III, who will likely keep the job until at least after the election. Will he have a plan of his own, or be expected to work his way through Dixon's PowerPoint? (Or was it his PowerPoint all along?)Her Honor said nothing about the Brown pension scandal, the missing documents or the murder rate, but instead attributes the resignation she says that she asked for was because she "wasn't feeling the results" and "wasn't feeling that drive like I wanted to" and that the decision was difficult, but not because of Keiffer telling me to do this."
Yeah, well, I for one don't buy it... I don't think she had a clue!
She was just talking a month ago about what a bad idea a change of leadership would be!
Madison Smartt Bell has a piece about his Baltimore jury duty experience (MD vs. Crudup) in the Oxford American (a regional-interest magazine that slants itself as "the Southern New Yorker")
8 comments:
Whats the difference between Hamm and Bealefeld? One was in charge and one was directly in charge of running the daily operations since Feb.'07. Looks to me that both are responsible for poor enforcement action this year, along with a few others of Hamm's Staff. Isn't Bealefeld the guy who thought it was a good idea to have homicide detectives walking foot?
no matter who is in charge if somebody has beef with someone else and it escalates to shooting someone then it will happen. All this is bullsh*t about accountability. It doesnt matter if jesus was commisioner violence will still happen in baltimore. period, point , blank!
Well, not if you identify and long-term incarcerate the ones who behave that way. Separate the wheat from the chaff.
It also tends to inhibit their multiplying, I suspect.
Anon, the thing with most Baltimore murderers is that they don't go from shoplifting to homicide. The typical homicide suspect has a loooong rapsheet that typically includes a number of violent felonies. If we could put people away for crimes like armed robbery, agg assault and & attempted murder then we could put a real dent in the murder rate.
This why it's such a poor strategy to focus on the most violent offenders (only). It sets the bar far too low.
Fact: Baltimore is chock full of hoodlums. It won't get better until you make big dent in the population of them on the street, murderers or not.
You need a big, big chunk of them in prison or gone. Don't play around with Sheila Dixon's vision of 'transforming' (most of) them into productive citizens. They're mostly broken; can't be fixed. Take the writeoff and move on.
If you want to 'save' someone, look to the next generation, which primarily means excluding their unfit parents from a position of influence.
question: who raises the kids if you send the parents to prison?
We used to have something called orphanages. The kids may not grow up to have spectacular careers, but they can be raised to be productive and compliant.
The article in the Oxford American is very accurate about what jury duty is like in Baltimore.
When I served recently, I was amazed that I had been selected, but I guess the reasons why were:
A) I looked a little scruffy from having walked in hot weather to the court house and was dressed more casually than I would be for work.
B) The lady that asked what my occupation was got it wrong. When I went to get my 15 dollars, I noticed that they had me down as an "Engraver" rather than as an "Engineer".
Even so, the defense looked long and hard at me before saying "acceptable".
The article was right on about the bulk of the jury being middle aged black women. Mine was 8 women(7B/1W) and 4 men(1B/2W). My trial was far less serious but still involved an altercation with a police officer. I got to see first hand a perception of police as "the enemy". The case hinged on events that happened 2 years ago and every tiny discrepancy in the accounts of the witnesses was characterized by a _very_ vocal minority of the jury as a deliberate "lie" intended to frame a black man (even though the officer involved was a black woman).
In the end, people got weary of each other, and it was clear that the reasonable people weren't going convince the idiots that the guy was guilty. There was absolutely no indication on how long it was going to take to get a hung jury, so we all voted "not guilty". I was glad to be able to get on with my life to not be in the same room as some of the low-lifes in the jury, but later my own conscious beat me up with grief for about a week.
Later, I found out that the defendant had been in and out of the court system (both district and circuit) on narcotics distribution charges since he was 18. My case had been only one of the multiple active cases against him. It appears that the SA attempting to "throw the book" at him until something sticks.
Hopefully, the Zach Sowers case will have plenty of plain concrete evidence and won't hinge on the testimony of police officers.
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