There’s a good story in today’s Baltimore Sun by Annie Linskey about me, my book, and current crime reduction efforts in Baltimore.
When I talked to this reporter, I could see that she’s a thinking woman who cares about her story. Plus she’s got a solid track record of good pieces. Well done.
I tried to take the high road. I did!
But my friend just sent me this and I can’t resist. Thanks, buddy!
Here’s what my friend wrote:
Not that you needed me to but I took it upon myself to defend you by sending Ed a nasty gram.
Ed,
I listened to the show today and was very disappointed. You spent 3 breaks with Mike Wingler, an old washed up alcoholic who can barely put a sentence together. You listen to his lies and BS and treat him like a hero? WTF!!! Moskos comes on and you treat him like a piece of shit. I graduated the academy with Moskos and worked with him in the Eastern District. When working in the Eastern you don’t have to be on the streets for more than a day to realize what’s going on. He was a very good cop for the time he served. I worked in the Department from 1999 until 2003 and for those 4 years I never received any sense of direction much less a “strategy” from the brass. My job was to drive a beat up patrol car, chase 911 calls, clear corners, and take home an insulting salary. The streets were the same on my last day as they were on my first as they still are today. So if you want to pat yourself on the back for a job well done, go ahead. Good job Ed!!! Perhaps you should stop being so bull headed, take a step back, listen to criticism, and learn from it. If you would have done this earlier in life maybe you would still be a cop and not a DJ.
Why beat around the bush? Here’s what I think about Ed Norris as commissioner.
Like I already wrote: I think he was a good commissioner. Not as good a commissioner as hethinks he is, but then who is? I think he was better than the guy that came before and the guy that after him.
When Norris came in, the goal was to reduce homicides to 175. Ultimately he failed. Then he quit. Then he got convicted.
Norris likes saying how he led the nation in crime decline every year. Errr, kind of, sort of, but, no. Not really. But it says so in Wikipeadia! Yeah, right next to “citation needed.” First of all, there’s no official stat on crime decline, so it depends how you measure it. Let’s take murder. I like murder because it’s fun and easy (to count, that is).
Year — Baltimore Murders2000 — 262
2001 — 259
2002 — 253
Norris took over in March, 2000. That was the first year in a decade that Baltimore murders dropped below 300. It was a big deal. I even got a medal (we all did). Norris deserves credit. He did things that should have been done a lot early: put cops where the crime is, clear up cold-cases, talk about crime prevention, help get cops a raise, and try and get guns off the streets. He had the right ideas. He still does.
Since 2002, after Norris, murders are back up. In 2007 there were 282 murders. Like I said, Norris was doing something right. I’d guess he prevented about 30 murders a year as commissioner. That’s more than Iprevented last year.
But a big decline? Well, not really. The murder rate (that’s murders per 100,000 population–don’t forget, Baltimore was losing population this whole time) didn’t go down at all between 2000 and 2002! And when Norris couldn’t get the murder rate down any more, he quit. Well, there’s a longer story, perhaps for another time.
Biggest decline in the nation? No way. Let’s take New York City as just one example.
Year — NYC Murders2000 — 667
2001 — 649
2002 — 587
New York’s murder rate dropped more than 10% when Baltimore, under Norris, was stagnating. And this is aftermurders in New York had already gone down by two-thirds (the so called “low-hanging fruit”).
The problem wasn’t Norris’s vision. And by and large the rank-and-file, myself included, supported him. His problem was implementing his policies.
Ultimately my jobwas judged by arrest number and not crime prevented. I would have loved to have been brought into the district-level problem-solving meeting and asked how I thought we could do a better job? I have ideas. But that’s not how it works. In police departments, ideas come only from the top.
I’m telling you, his “plan,” despite what he wants to believe, didn’t change my day-to-day patrol job one bit. Is that his fault? Yes and no. I don’t blame him personally. But as the man in charge, well, it is his problem.
The weak link is middle management–the 4 layers in the chain-of-command between the commissioner and the patrol officer. Middle management believes, in this case for very good reason, that they’ll outlast this outsider boss. Just kiss ass, say yes, play nice, stay out of trouble, and hope for promotion. Meanwhile cops like me, at the bottom, go about and do their job same as it ever was.
I wantedto write my book on the great crime drop in Baltimore. Too bad it didn’t happen.
Since they say that writing about music is like dancing about architecture, I’ve got some audio tracks so you can hear the Baltimore Club sound and the work of K-Swift, who died a few days ago.
First and foremost, Baltimore Club Music is a beat.
If it ain’t got this beat, it’s not club music (the droning note is a classic sample from Public Enemy No. 1). After the beat is there, it’s up to the DJ. And often the DJ plays dirty, with lyrics not fit for kids (though I’ve selected relatively clean samples here).
But here’s what made K-Swift so damn good, so much better than the others. K-Swift was great at mixing what became known as mashing, taking, say a television theme song and putting it to a club beat.
That’s the theme from “I Married Joan” (not what most people think of when they think of Baltimore). I love that track. A great beat, sample from left field, and always a sense of humor.
This party spirit goes back to early days of hip-hop. I don’t know about you, but I like throwing my hands in the air and waving them like I just don’t care. It’s certainly more fun than glowering and nodding your head to brutal lyrics about a life you don’t agree with.
K-Swift was great with the samples, they’re not all as silly as this, but I like her silly. A track called Pork Chops and Onion Gravy coins the term “Bougo,” that means bougie and ghetto at the same time. And the beat, that’s club music!
Here’s a little sample that starts with Southpark and goes into horns. There’s a lot of horn in Baltimore Club music. I like horns.
Put it all together and you get this. Here is one of her complete short radio mixes I loved so much. It’s not top quality, recording-wise. But it gives you an idea of the driving beat and spirit that really did make K-Swift the Club Queen.
You should really play some of her music while reading this post
I’m very sad to read about the death of my favorite Baltimore DJ, K-Swift. The poor girl was only 28 and died in a swimming pool accident. And when she started mixing a decade ago, she really was a girl in a man’s world.
There are three stories in today’s paper. One, Two, and Three. And here’s an older story from Spin about K-Shift and the Baltimore Club scene.
For those who don’t know, my music tastes are eclectic (but no heavy metal or guitar-driven rock, please) but various forms of club music have always been important to me.
I got into hip-hop in 1985, when my brother forced me learn the lyrics to Krush Groovin’ (I still know them). Then in high school I got into house music from listening to Chicago’s WBMX, WGCI, and the Hot Mix 5. From about 1987-1989, I was a DJ on Northwestern University’s WNUR’s Streetbeat. I went by the name of “Peter the Piper.” Sounds kind of dorky now. But I swear it was kinda cool then.
On WNUR we played, as they say in the Blues Brothers, both kinds of music: rap and house. Our signal was limited. And though I would often boost the power illegally, our signal never went as far south as the Loop (but that didn’t stop me from giving shout-outs to the White Castle at Stony Island and 79th).
This was the first and at the time only radio show in Chicago to play rap music on the air. Chicago was a house town. Even today, name a single Chicago rapper. It’s not easy. [ed note: OK, I’ve been called out. Maybe it’s not too hard. Kanye West and Common are two. Still, name a third rapper from Chicago, if you can. Then think of all the rappers you know from New York and L.A.]
At the time, we were trying to bridge the huge split between fans of rap and fans of house (can’t we all just get along?).
I was finally kicked off when somebody caught on that I wasn’t a Northwestern student.
Each night we had a midnight house mix. Here’s a sample from what was probably my show! Alas, I have no tapes of my show. We played mixes from Lil’ Angel on Wednesday night. I was usually on Wednesdays and Fridays, from 10 to 1AM (2 in the summer, sometimes all night, if the “freeform” host didn’t show up and I was in the mood to keep spinning records).
Our biggest name, in hindsight, was Derrick Carter. Personally, I was partial to Lil’ Angel (he was such a nice guy and a new father last time I saw him 28 years ago) and Georgie “Mixin’” Porgie (also cooler sounding then than now).
I fell out with hip-hop when Gangsta Rap took over. Chicago house stagnated for about a decade (hip-house, anyone?) until discovered and reborn in Europe. And in the dark years of college in New Jersey, I was very far from any good music scene. I moved to Amsterdam in 1994 and discovered the joy of the European rave scene. Techno, drum and bass, trance, gabber. I love them all!
So it meant a lot to me when I arrived in Baltimore in 1999 and discovered a whole new style of music to love: Baltimore Club. Music is important to cops. If you’re in a car with somebody for 4 to 8 hours, what radio station you listen to becomes very important. Usually we rode alone. Radio choice was the main reason I liked riding alone.
Most officers listened the commercial country station. Not my favorite, but I can live with it. One officer liked jazz on public radio. We got along just fine. Another liked Rush Limbaugh. We also got along just fine (though I still think there’s something very wrong about policing the ghetto while listening to Limbaugh spout his conservative crap).
I liked to listen to NPR all night, and then Morning Edition until the short Q92 morning wake up mix came at something like 7:35. It was hard enough to find a cop interested in either station. To find someone who liked both was pretty much out of the question.
If you policed listening to 92-Q during the summer days, as I sometimes did (and I may have been the only white cop do do so), you had the privilege of being tuned to the same station as half the neighborhood, which was kind of cool as you drove around and heard the music fade in and out.
I think I became friends with one of my squadmates solely because of our mutual appreciation of dance music. If, in 2000, you saw two cops in a car in the Eastern going crazy to Kernkraft 400’s Zombie Nation (now so mainstream it’s played in ballparks), it was probably us.
So all this comes back to K-Swift. She was the best. I didn’t go to Club Choices (as a white cop, I was afraid to go in with a gun, and afraid to go in without one). But I listened to her during her all-too-brief radio mixes. I have 6 of her CDs. K-Swift Volume 5 is my favorite. Too bad there won’t be any more.
During any given year, a 15- to 34-year-old man in the Eastern District has about the same chance of being killed as a U.S. soldier stationed in Iraq.
That’s just wrong.
The Eastern stats are from page 203 of my book. The Iraq stats are taken from DonHodges.com.
I bring this up because of an interesting comment from a good reader of this blog. There are a lot of people out there who are willing to say, “fuck ’em. That’s their problem.”
As a police officer who’s worked the Eastern, I kind of understand this. You try and help. You put your life on the line day in and day out. And nothing ever changes. Plus, for your efforts, you’ll get called a racist.
Once I half-jokingly accused my partner of simply not liking black people, he responded passionately, “I got nothing against black people. I just don’t like theseblack people” (that’s in chapter 3 of my book, by the way).
On the Leonard Lopate Show the other day, the host asked me, was it not true that most people I policed were “decent, hard working people.” I could not take the easy (and politically correct) path and just say “yes.”
Here’s what I said:
“I don’t want to be too insulting, but I do have a tough time, having policed the area, calling the people I dealt with decent people, by and large. We didn’t get along well.”
[“But they saw you as the enemy almost immediately. Didn’t they?”]
“Yeah, I mean, but I was. My job was to lock them up. If I were them, I wouldn’t have liked me either.” (listen to the whole interview here.)
I don’t feel that most of the people I policed were decent people. Most people in the Eastern District may be decent, but as a police officer, you don’t police most people. You police the problem-people.
But decent or not, we’re all human beings. And this country is founded on the idea that we’re endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights. Life is one of the those rights.
Even though I’m not “at risk,” I’ll keep bringing up the issue of violence, black-on-black murder in particular. I think it’s a moral issue. (I also think it’s an economic issue, but that’s another story.) I think it’s wrong to ignore this level of poverty and violence, no matter whose fault it is (and personally, I doblame the victim a lot of the time). We can do better.
We’re a rich country. Supposedly we’re a caring country. And if you’re the type of person to ask “what would Jesus do?” go ahead and ask. I don’t know what He’d say, but I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be “fuck ’em.”
Back in January, the Baltimore City Paper published a good simple analysis of homicide numbers in 2007. I was just looking at it again. As we all know, violence is not equally spread out in society. It may not be politically correct to talk about race and violence, but homicide in America is disproportionately a problem of black-on-black young male gun violence concentrated in poor communities with public drug dealing. It’s concentrated in places like the Eastern District. The question, of course, is what are we going to do about it?
There were 282 murder victims in Baltimore City.
261 (94%) were African-American (the city itself is 65% black).
258 (91%) were male.
233 (83%) were shot.
The youngest was 2.
The oldest was 82.
The Eastern District took the crown this year with 50 homicides.
Too many people refuse to believe that there are some truly bad people out there. Some people are just bad. Police know this. Judges don’t.
Is it unfair to throw someone in prison for a long time for a technical violation of parole? Maybe. Maybe not. Depends on the person.
Just because you can’t convict a person doesn’t mean he’s not guilty. That’s when using probation and parole violations become so important.
There’s an attempt in Baltimore to crack down on 960 of the most violent people in Baltimore. This is exactly the kind of plan that has worked with great success in other cities to dramatically reduce violence (google: “Boston Miracle). There’s a story in today’s Baltimore Sun about a bad man, Jerrod Rowlett.
On one hand (the wrong hand) you could see this man as a victim now being locked up for a crime he wasn’t convicted of. On the other hand, the correct hand, this is a bad and violent man who can’t be convicted because his victims are too terrified to testify about his violent and drug-dealing ways. It’s bad that Rowlett shot anybody. But his last shooting is a preventable shame that should (but probably doesn’t) rest on the conscience of Judge Stewart’s.
Jerrod Rowlett… racked up a dozen criminal charges at a young age and earned such a street reputation that Bealefeld [the police commissioner] knows him by name.
…
Rowlett’s first arrest came when he was 16 and accused of first-degree murder, but he was found not guilty. The next year he was convicted of carrying a handgun, but the five-year sentence was suspended. He was found guilty of assault in 2005 and got another five-year suspended sentence.In April 2006 city police raided a drug corner and charged him with dealing heroin. He made bail, and the following January a witness said Rowlett shot another man
…
Rowlett pleaded guilty in both cases.Baltimore Circuit Judge Lynn Stewart signed off on a plea deal that suspended the 15-year prison term, allowing him to walk away with only the time he had served while waiting for the deal, and five years’ probation. This earned him a place on the state’s year-old worst-offenders list.
The judge in Rowlett’s case, who had agreed to the plea agreement, had stern words at his August hearing. “The court will work with you,” Stewart told him. “But make no doubt about it, sir. If you violate the probation, you’re going to be gone for a long time. Do you understand?”
Looking down, he mumbled “Yes.”
In April, police arrested Rowlett again on a gun charge, and probation agents jumped at the chance to send him to prison. Prosecutors dropped the charges when the victim, a family member, recanted the story, but the probation agents still sought a violation.
Since Rowlett was in the target program, a state probation agent asked Stewart to imprison him anyway by issuing a “no bail” warrant, saying Rowlett failed to tell his agent about the arrest. Stewart declined to issue the warrant on May 7.
Twenty days later, Rowlett became a suspect in a midday shooting in Northeast Baltimore. He’s now charged with attempted first-degree murder for the fourth time in his life, and he is off the streets – being held without bail until his trial.
May he stay off the streets. This is one guy I’m willing to pay for to keep locked up and far away from me.
I’m not a fan of basketball. But I am a little interested in Carmelo Anthony. The only reason I know him is that he (unwittingly) appeared in the Stop Fucking SnitchingDVD that got him and the DVD a lot of press. Bad press for him. Any press was good for the home-produced DVD.
I felt sorry for the guy who was somehow blamed for the whole Stop Snitching philosophy simply for going back to his hometown of Baltimore and not freaking out when someone recorded him with a camcorder (he doesn’t say much in the DVD other than a little against the last Olympic basketball coach).
Now he has an Olympic basketball diaryin the New York Times. His writing ain’t too deep. But still, he is in the Times. At least online.
My friend emailed me this:
I think we were able to pull that surveillance off not only because it was quiet from the rain but also because it was 1 month and 3 days after 9/11. We were rolling 3 – 4 deep and had every spare car on the road.