…Someone with way too much time on his hands made this. And I love it. Homies meet Baltimore’s Eastern District. I love Homies. And I love the Lego police motorcycle paddywagon that zooms through.
Amazingly, this isn’t the only stop-motion animation with Homies and cops. But it is the only stop-motion animation with Homies and cops that promotes my book. Guerrilla advertising at its best.
Here’s the You Tube link.
At least for the first three months of 2008. Hopefully it will last. Here’s the Sun’s story by John Fritze and Sara Neufeld.
There’s a nice Sun news graphic in the story. It’s rarely mentioned that what looks like a steady decline in homicides in the 1990s correlates pretty well with the decline in the city’s population. So while the numbers dropped, the rate didn’t.
My thanks to Marni Soupcoff of the (Canadian) National Post for her kind words about my blog. She’s right, the real purpose of this blog is to get people to buy my book, Cop in the Hood. And she did! So thanks, Marni. Hopefully the weak dollar will inspire many others up north to buy a copy as well.
I particularly like Marni’s quotable take on Baltimore, her old college home. I love Baltimore, poor Baltimore. “Horribly flawed but strangely lovable… inspires an arresting honesty”! These compliment my own line very well. “Baltimore: it means well.”
The Sunreports that a man was sentenced to 11 years for dealing crack. That’s a lot of years for crack, I thought. Of course, like everything with crime and criminals in Baltimore, that’s not the whole story.
This 28-year-old man, William Floyd Crudup, shot two city police officer in 2005. His trial ended in a mistrial because one juror, “refused to participate in the looking at the evidence and told the judge that she had made up her mind about the case at the start of the trail.”
This is not the place to experiment with Jury Nullification.
Sometimes people are just ig-nent. This isn’t the first time a Baltimore City jury refused to convict a guilty man for shooting or killing a police officer. It’s why police officers don’t trust city juries. Baltimore is a place where it is all too common for one person in twelve to believe it is every man’s right to kill police officers. I remember the shock and disbelief I felt when the killer of Officer Kavon Gavin walked free (he too has since been imprisoned for something else). Other officers were not surprised.
Crudup was still behind bars. Three years later the retrial of Crudup was still in the works. But back in 2005, a few days after he was charged with shooting the police officers, police raided Crudup’s homes and found drugs and guns and ammo.
The Feds took the case and got Crudup to cop a plea (3 years later). So it’s not 11 years for crack dealing. It’s 11 years for shooting two police officers. It just happens that they got him for crack.
Justice is a game. Everybody involved in the system knows this. The good guys play to win, too.
Get this… this is a story about two men. So there’s this man, right? And it’s like 4am and he gets jacked in West Baltimore. A man comes up to him and pulls out a sawed-off shotgun and tries to rob him. In response, the man getting robbed pulls out hisfake handgun. Somehow, fake-handgun man takes the shotgun away from shotgun man.
Fake-handgun man, shotgun in hand, orders the man formerly known as shotgun man to strip naked in the middle of street. Fake-handgun man takes $800 from now-naked man and then marches naked man into a nearby laundry room. There, fake-handgun man (now actually new shotgun-man) starts beating the naked man with the butt of naked-man’s sawed-off shotgun. The man wearing clothes is shouting that he’s going to kill naked man unless naked man gets moremoney. Or a cell phone. Or something.
You still with me? Wack, wack! “You better get me some more money, bitch!” Wack. “N***a, I’m going to kill you if don’t get me some motherfucking cash or a cell phone!”
BOOM!!! The shotgun goes off. I imagine this as a movie moment: two men; a fight; one loud gunshot.
A pause.
[Bang bang, I shot you down.]
The shotgun flies against the wall from recoil and clatters to the ground. Blood is everywhere.
The men look at each other. Who got shot? Who’s going to slid down the wall, leaving a trail of blood behind him!?
[Bang bang, you hit the ground.]
Here’s the irony, it’s hard to give someone a good beatdown holding the butt-end of a sawed-off shotgun. There’s not enough weight in the barrel for swinging leverage. The man giving the beatdown (aka robbed-man, fake-handgun-man, man-now-holding-the-shotgun and man-now-banking-a-naked-man) is holding the barrel of the gun to better hit with.
[Bang bang, that awful sound.]
The shotgun round rips through the stomach of the man holding the gun. He’s dead.
The naked man runs away and ends up in the E.R. to treat cuts he gets from running barefoot over glass-strewn streets.
Now I suspect there’s a little more to this story than meets the eye, and the complete Sunaccount is here. A sergeant in the homicide unit says, “It is sort of like one for the books.”
[Bang bang, my baby shot me down.]
The death will be ruled accidental.
This one, if the Sunis to be believed, sounds wild. Though if the Sunis to be believed, this happened in East Baltimore (you know, where bad things happen). Best I can tell it started in the Central and ended in the Northern.
Officer Anthony Jobst, 47, was in his patrol car in the first block of E. Lafayette Ave. about 2:30 a.m. when he heard gunshots and saw a white Audi speeding away. Jobst, who was joined by four other uniformed officers, drove after the Audi and followed it for about a mile to an alley in the 400 block of E. Lorraine Ave. in the Harwood neighborhood.
The Audi crashed in the alley, and the driver ran out and hid behind a brick wall. When officers approached him, the man opened fire, shooting Jobst in the foot and grazing the left leg of 27-year-old Officer Hadyn Gross, Bealefeld said.
Officers returned fire, striking the man several times in the upper torso, but the gunfight was “protracted” because he was wearing body armor enhanced with steel inserts.
…
Back at Lafayette Avenue, where shots were first fired, police found Rico Alston, 27, with two bullet wounds to the chest. Alston was taken to an area hospital.He was in serious but stable condition yesterday, police said.
[March 19 update: 88 rounds were fired. The bad guy died Monday night. The Sunreports, “At one point, the man signaled to police that he was surrendering – but police said he used the lull in gunfire to reload the Smith & Wesson.”]
There are many day-to-day things in the ghetto that start to seem normal, or at least routine, when you’re in too deep. These are things that would shock most outsiders.
Take evictions. Every day you’d turn your police car into a street and see the insides of an entire home neatly piled up in the street. This structure often looked like a trash dumpster, but there was no dumpster. Just a whole lotta shit, piled high. Somebody would often be sitting by sadly, trying desperately to guard or sell the more valuable stuff while arranging for transport and a place to stay.
And while I know it’s not nice to make fun of people’s misfortune, cops love morbid humor. Luckily, evictions were not the job of city police. So the sad sight of people lives on the street might be greeting with a Groundhog-Day like exclamation of “Moving Day!” Hey, at least nobody died.
Well it turns out that having all your shit piled on the street actually is a Baltimore thing, hon. And now, happily, it’s a thing of the past. The city recently started prohibiting landlords from tossing evicted tenants’ belongings into the right of way. And guess what? Evictions have fallen 25 percent. Better yet, the number of tenants present for eviction day (the city sheriff keeps track of these things) dropped almost 40 percent.
Why is this? Because, as the Baltimore Sun reports:
Previously, after a landlord got approval from a judge to remove a tenant, the landlord would call the sheriff’s office to schedule the eviction. Although the court would notify tenants that an eviction was imminent, they were not told the date when the sheriff would arrive.
No wonder people had their belongs thrown out: they didn’t know whenthe eviction would happen.
The number of times Department of Public Works crews have been called to pick up personal property has fallen from about 580 a month to three in January and none in February.
…
The new ordinance requires landlords to inform tenants of the date and to send that notice three times, by two different forms of mail, 14 days before an eviction and, a week before, with a posting on the property. City officials said that providing a firm deadline gives tenants time to plan whether to move their belongings or pay their rent.
That seems like a no-brainer.
But what dothey do with all the stuff?
About a year after I left the B.P.D., this happened. 324 car got firebombed. Some locals didn’t like the officer driving it because he could outrun and catch anybody in the district who tried to run from him. Somebody led him on a foot chase while his friends torched the car. It was our best car, too. 
The only one with a computer.
It got torched.
And burnt-out shell.
The yo-boys celebrating their victory. 
What can you say about a group of mostly kids, all in white T-shirt and jeans, celebrating their victory? It’s 1AM, do you know where your child is?
[originally posted 9/07]
I just stumbled across “Murder I Wrote” (from a link related to Bradford Pulmer’s blog).
In 1997, David Simon, producer of The Wire (the best TV show ever), wrote in The New Republic how corner boys were recruited for a day to be slinging extras for the TV show Homicide(not the best show ever). The boys complained about how unrealistic it was.
“Damn,” said Manny Man, walking back to his position. “This ain’t gonna look right. People in other cities gonna see this show and think the crews in Baltimore don’t know how to carry it.”
Most of the boys are now dead.
Simon understands that yo-boys may not but model citizens, but they’re living breathing people. I was strangely moved by Simon’s article.
What would you do when you get shot? Get a Slurpy? Shut your mouth!
From today’s Baltimore Sun.
Can you dig it?
Man gets shot, takes cab to convenience store
He hailed taxi, went to S. Baltimore 7-ElevenBy Gus G. Sentementes
Sun reporter
8:33 AM EST, March 5, 2008
A man who was shot several times in South Baltimore last night didn’t call an ambulance, but instead hailed a cab whose driver took him several blocks to a 7-Eleven store, authorities said.
The shooting occurred shortly before 8 p.m. when police said a 32-year-old man was wounded on the first block of E. Heath St.
Suffering from injuries to his neck, arm and body, police said the man jumped into a nearby taxi and rode a half mile to the convenience store on South Hanover and Hamburg streets.
Police said the man went inside the 7-Eleven and that someone inside called for an ambulance. The victim was taken to Maryland Shock Trauma Center and treated for non-life-threatening injuries, according to police.
Police said they had made no arrests and did not know whether the man had paid his cab fare. The name of the taxi company was not immediately available.
Undoubtedly, he’s a complicated man.
[Basic crime stories are usually so dry. I love that fact that Gus Sentementes, a well-seasons crime reporter (who has never called me, by the way), asked the tough question, “did he pay his fare?!”]