Police

On the lighter side…

…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.…

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Police

Homicides down in Baltimore

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…

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Police

Well meaning, Balto is

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…

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Police

Justice?

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…

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Police

You can’t make this up. You just can’t

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…

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Police

Wild gun fight. Police shoot bad guy. Officers shot.

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…

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Police

No more “Moving Day”

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…

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Police

The fire-bombing of 324 car

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…

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Police

Humanizing the Corner

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…

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Police

You see this cat is a baad mother–

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-Eleven By Gus G. Sentementes Sun reporter 8:33 AM EST, March 5, 2008 A man who was shot several times in South Baltimore…

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