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Offline mystery-ak

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Baltimore Residents Fearful Amid Rash Of Homicides
« on: May 28, 2015, 03:39:08 pm »
http://baltimore.cbslocal.com/2015/05/28/baltimore-residents-fearful-amid-rash-of-homicides/

Baltimore Residents Fearful Amid Rash Of Homicides
May 28, 2015 8:53 AM

BALTIMORE (AP) — Antoinette Perrine has barricaded her front door since her brother was killed three weeks ago on a basketball court near her home in the Harlem Park neighborhood of West Baltimore.

She already has iron bars outside her windows and added metal slabs on the inside to deflect the gunfire.

“I’m afraid to go outside,” said Perrine, 47. “It’s so bad, people are afraid to let their kids outside. People wake up with shots through their windows. Police used to sit on every corner, on the top of the block. These days? They’re nowhere.”

Perrine’s brother is one of 36 people killed in Baltimore so far this month, already the highest homicide count for May since 1999. But while homicides are spiking, arrests have plunged more than 50 percent compared to last year.

The drop in arrests followed the death of Freddie Gray from injuries he suffered in police custody. Gray’s death sparked protests against the police and some rioting, and led to the indictment of six officers.

Now West Baltimore residents worry they’ve been abandoned by the officers they once accused of harassing them. In recent weeks, some neighborhoods have become like the Wild West without a lawman around, residents said.

“Before it was over-policing. Now there’s no police,” said Donnail “Dreads” Lee, 34, who lives in the Gilmor Homes, the public housing complex where Gray, 25, was arrested.

“I haven’t seen the police since the riots,” Lee said. “People feel as though they can do things and get away with it. I see people walking with guns almost every single day, because they know the police aren’t pulling them up like they used to.”

Police Commissioner Anthony Batts said last week his officers “are not holding back” from policing tough neighborhoods, but they are encountering dangerous hostility in the Western District.

“Our officers tell me that when officers pull up, they have 30 to 50 people surrounding them at any time,” Batts said.

At a City Council meeting Wednesday, Batts said officers have expressed concern they could be arrested for making mistakes.

“What is happening, there is a lot of levels of confusion in the police organization. There are people who have pain, there are people who are hurt, there are people who are frustrated, there are people who are angry,” Batts said. “There are people, and they’ve said this to me, `If I get out of my car and make a stop for a reasonable suspicion that leads to probable cause but I make a mistake on it, will I be arrested?’ They pull up to a scene and another officer has done something that they don’t know, it may be illegal, will they be arrested for it? Those are things they are asking.”

Protesters said Gray’s death is emblematic of a pattern of police violence and brutality against impoverished African-Americans in Baltimore. In October, Batts and Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake invited the U.S. Justice Department to participate in a collaborative review of the police department’s policies. The fallout from Gray’s death prompted the mayor to ask U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch for a full-fledged probe into whether the department employs discriminatory policing, excessive force and unconstitutional searches and arrests.

Baltimore was seeing a slight rise in homicides this year even before Gray’s death April 19. But the 36 homicides so far in May is a major spike, after 22 in April, 15 in March, 13 in February and 23 in January.

Ten of May’s homicides happened in the Western District, which has had as many homicides in the first five months of this year as it did all of last year.

Non-fatal shootings are spiking as well. So far in May there have been 91 — 58 of them in the Western District.

And the arrest rate has plummeted.

The statistics showed that even before Gray’s death, police were making between 25 and 28 percent fewer arrests each month than they made in the same month last year. But in May arrests declined far more sharply.

So far this month, arrests are down roughly 56 percent. Police booked just 1,045 people in the first 19 days of May, an average of 55 a day. In the same time period last year, police arrested 2,396 people, an average of 126 a day.

In fact, police did not make any arrests in the triple digits between April 22 and May 19, except on two occasions. On April 27, when protests gave way to rioting, police arrested 246 people. On May 2, the last day of a city-wide curfew, police booked 140 people.

At a news conference Wednesday, Rawlings-Blake said there were “a lot of reasons why we’re having a surge in violence.”

“Other cities that have experienced police officers accused or indicted of crimes, there’s a lot of distrust and a community breakdown,” Rawlings-Blake said. “The result is routinely increased violence.”

Rawlings-Blake said her office is “examining” the relationship between the homicide spike and the dwindling arrest rate.

“It’s clear that the relationship between the commissioner and the rank-and-file is strained,” she said. “He’s working very hard to repair that relationship.”

Emergency response specialist Michael Greenberger cautions against blaming the police for the violence. The founder and director of the University of Maryland Center for Health and Homeland Security, he said it’s more likely a response to Gray’s death and the rioting.

“We went through a period of such intense anger that the murder rate got out of control. I think it’s been really hard for the police to keep on top of that,” he said.

Lee disagrees. He says rival gang members are taking advantage of the police reticence to settle scores.

“There was a shooting down the street, and the man was standing in the middle of the street with a gun, just shooting,” Lee added. “Usually, you can’t walk up and down the street drinking or smoking weed. Now, people are everywhere smoking weed, and police just ride by, look at you, and keep going. There used to be police on every corner. I don’t think they’ll be back this summer.”

Batts acknowledged that “the service we’re giving is off-target with the community as a whole” and he promised to pay special attention to the Western District.

Veronica Edmonds, a 26-year-old mother of seven in the Gilmor Homes, said she wishes the police would return and focus on violent crime rather than minor drug offenses.

“If they focused more on criminals and left the petty stuff alone, the community would have more respect for police officers,” she said.
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Offline sinkspur

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Re: Baltimore Residents Fearful Amid Rash Of Homicides
« Reply #1 on: May 28, 2015, 06:06:14 pm »
Voila, Baltimore thugs!

You want fewer cops, you got fewer cops. Live with the outcome.
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Offline DCPatriot

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Re: Baltimore Residents Fearful Amid Rash Of Homicides
« Reply #2 on: May 29, 2015, 11:32:31 am »
The Left’s Reign of Terror Continues in Baltimore
Matthew Vadum



As Maryland’s largest city grieves for a mother and her 7-year-old son found shot to death, it is becoming clear that criminals emboldened by left-wingers are terrorizing the people of Baltimore like never before.

The city’s radical, left-wing, thug-loving mayor, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake (D), has emasculated the local police she despises and abandoned her constituents by giving criminals a green light to do as they please. Police officers have been ordered not to do their jobs which is just as well because many of them are quite justifiably terrified of doing their jobs in the current environment. Mobs of as many as 50 people now routinely assemble when police arrive at crime scenes. Are they serving as community watchdogs or are they there to intimidate cops? Maybe both.

At this rate it won’t be long before Baltimore dethrones Detroit as the premier municipal showcase for left-wing urban policy failures. Ominously, this is America’s Mad Max-like future if it continues on the suicidal course set by President Obama, a man whose proudest accomplishment has been to serve as a rabble-rousing Marxist community organizer.

While the still-warm corpses of the city’s newest murder victims were being processed by authorities yesterday, panelists at the George Soros-funded Center for American Progress in the nation’s capital laid the blame for the rising tide of violence in Baltimore on everyone except the perpetrators.

No people of color are responsible for their actions, panelists said or implied. It’s society’s fault. It’s capitalism’s fault. It’s the fault of “white privilege.” There are too many laws. There are too many cops. Corporations are too powerful and they are definitely not people. Campaign finance reform would level the playing field. Things would be better if tax rates were raised. Every left-wing shibboleth and cliche was dusted off and put to use at the agenda-setting think tank founded by John Podesta.

Also discussed was the profoundly racist Black Lives Matter movement that is built on demonstrable lies –for example, that Michael Brown of Ferguson, Mo., was an innocent gentle giant murdered by a black-hating white cop– and gross exaggerations about the state of race relations in America (or at least they were hyperbolic before Barack Obama moved into the White House).

The pro-felon brainstorming session was titled, “Toward a More Perfect Union: Bringing Criminal Justice Reform to Our Communities.”

more at:  http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/matthew-vadum/the-lefts-reign-of-terror-continues-in-baltimore/

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Offline evadR

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Re: Baltimore Residents Fearful Amid Rash Of Homicides
« Reply #3 on: May 29, 2015, 12:57:26 pm »
"politicians and government are the problem in Baltimore, not the citizens. Nothing will change in Baltimore until the political leaders, who worship this big government ideology, are swept from office, and replaced by those who believe that the future of Baltimore is in the hands of the liberty of its citizens, not the permission of its government."
Dan Bongino
November 6, 2012, a day in infamy...the death of a republic as we know it.

Offline olde north church

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Re: Baltimore Residents Fearful Amid Rash Of Homicides
« Reply #4 on: May 29, 2015, 01:10:16 pm »
Then again, it wasn't a binary situation.
« Last Edit: May 29, 2015, 01:10:37 pm by olde north church »
Why?  Well, because I'm a bastard, that's why.