Wednesday the 10th at 5 p.m., Barack Obama will be at PG Community College with Elijah Cummings and Maryland Attorney General Doug Gansler. Guests: $25, Students: $15.
This Thursday the 11th at 7:30 p.m. in the auditorium the Friends School Diversity Council is hosting a free chat with David M. Kennedy, Director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control and a professor of anthropology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. His talk will be entitled "Race, Culture and Crime: Facing Facts and Finding Common Ground.”
A good & long interview with Bealefeld aired on MPT tonight ... but the only other chance to see it will be Saturday at 5 a.m. He kind of explained the gun registry: we're doing it because NYC is doing it, being extra-hard on gun offenders is going to be our thing, and the people on the list will basically be one gun charge away from being federally Rodified, so building a tidy case against them will be high priority. That's how I heard it anyway.
12 comments:
The experience in (relatively) crime-ridden Edgewood in Harford reinforces the folk wisdom that violent crime is communicated by the Section 8 program.
We have a name for the homicide on Eutaw.
Can't make it to the hip-hop event, have to stay home and finish "The Ambassadors" for my book club, but if I take a study break around 2 AM, I'll jump behind the wheel of my 1991 Volvo 240 wagon, crank up Ice Cube's "The Predator" and burn rubber down Greenmount from York all the way to the Mickey D's on 25th.
Yeah, I like Bealefeld. But being tough on guns? Heard it before...
Bikebreath
Singapore is tough on gun crimes...
Well yeah, blahblah about the guns, but the difference now seems to be that the federal government is willing to take gun offenders off of the state's hands. I wonder what what point they get EXILE'd though... is it every felon with a gun, or just a few really bad ones?
I'm going to go to the David Kennedy thing, he sounds like a smart guy...
This policy change is a cosmetic measure for PR effect.
The real issue is: what does parole/probation supervision really mean in this city. I submit that it has been about early-releasing persistent offenders onto the street with nothing more than paperwork check-in and the donation of a urine sample. Big frickin' deal. These guys need too be kept in jail unless someone (patrol officer, P.O., whoever) is going to babysit them on a hands-on basis.
The justice system should not be waiting until their recidivism amounts to a shooting, either as shooter or as shootee.
"I wonder what what point they get EXILE'd though... is it every felon with a gun, or just a few really bad ones?"
In theory EXILE is supposed to mean that every felon with a gun should be facing five years of Federal time. The resources for that just aren't there in Baltimore though, so they pick the criminals who they think are the most dangerous and let the US Attorney's office go after them. Here's a summary of what they did in 2006.
"As she is preparing for a case scheduled for trial soon, Paugh says excitedly, "I got a FLIP letter in this one." She is referring to a "federal letter of intent to prosecute," which she'll show to the defendant. He might be more likely to take a guilty plea in Baltimore Circuit Court to avoid federal prosecution and the serious prison time and intense probation that accompany it.
Last year, federal prosecutors sent 36 such letters in city cases, prompting 27 defendants to plead guilty in Circuit Court to handgun charges with the five-year-no-parole sentence.
But with just six federal judges to hear cases from Baltimore and much of the rest of the state, it is impractical to think that federal prosecutors could take more than a small percentage of the cases.
Still, Maryland U.S. Attorney Rod J. Rosenstein says he will do what he can. Project Exile cases - city gun cases that are indicted federally - are spread among eight violent crime prosecutors, and "I'm personally handling two Exile cases," Rosenstein says."
Project Exile has worked really well in reducing violent crime in Virginia -- it's not an either/or, and there's not a lot of discussion about it. Commit a crime, have a gun on you, go far away for a long time. PERIOD.
This is why we need Rod R. running things here in baltimore - more power to do his job and a less sympathetic Judiciary to bog down his work.
Think we could convince our Federal representatives and senators to get more courthouses and judges here?
Maybe, but it's not really the US Attorney's job to be pursuing street thugs. That's what the state court system is for. What we should do is change state laws so that they're just as tough as Federal ones.
But the reason we need federal intervention is that our glorious state seeks to allow the City of Baltimore to misadminister those statewide laws in a manner which would never be acceptable in other, more mainstream counties.
It's essentially an Equal Protection (ie. 14th Amendment) argument. Think Little Rock circa 1957.
For real.......
Thank you so very much for posting about last night's meeting. I appreciate you doing that very much.
The turn out was great......the audience was very diverse.
I feel something special in the air my fellow Baltimoreans.
I hope you all have a great day!
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