Baltimore + BBC = Bloodshed

[CountDeMoney]

By all means, Brits...please come to Bodymore, Murderland.  We need the tourists!

A worldwide audience gets a look at our streets

Peter Hermann | Baltimore Crime Beat
    May 20, 2009

When visitors come, you want to show off the good stuff. Crabs on the Fells Point waterfront. Sailing the Inner Harbor. Walks around Fort McHenry. The dolphin show at the aquarium. An afternoon Orioles game.

Recently, I had guests who wanted to see the other Baltimore, the one with the bodies and the bloodshed, the one with the boarded rowhouses and empty neighborhoods, the one TV news and TV entertainment have blurred into one macabre pageant of urban ills, dysfunction and misfortune.

A producer and a cameraman for the British Broadcasting Corp. visited from their Washington bureau to film a segment on crime as told by this reporter.

As if on cue, on a routine Monday at 9:11 a.m., as the film crew was driving up Interstate 95 from Washington, a report came over the police scanner of a shooting in Southwest Baltimore, on Christian Street near Samuel E.B. Morse Elementary School.

The victim died at a hospital, and police found a gun in an alley. Cops tied yellow crime scene tape to the school's playground fence. Our very own CSI unit held up the victim's pants and each of the man's white tennis shoes to photograph and put them into large brown bags. Detectives engaged in the fruitless task of finding witnesses.

The streets were gritty and seedy enough to fit the image you get watching the cop-show dramas, and thus perfect for BBC's international audience.

The segment is scheduled to air at 7 tonight on BBC America and is about six minutes long; they shot endless feet of tape over two days that included shots of me buying my own newspaper and reading it outside the downtown courthouse on a bench adorned with the motto: "Greatest City in America."

I'm sure that irony will be juxtaposed with the scene from Christian Street, where BBC learned that finding people to talk about what had just happened is an impossible task. People ran from the camera, and the deputy major of the Southwestern District, Charles V. Carter Sr., complained about a dearth of witnesses.

A group at a makeshift soda stand across the street from the shooting claimed not to have seen much of anything. "Nobody knows but everybody knows," Carter told me, shaking his head. A man at the stand and resident of the street for six years, David Hamilton, told me he saw four people run out of an alley after the gunshots. He said he told that to police, but they insisted he knew more.

"Nothing happens in any community if the citizens in the community don't allow it," Carter said, long after most other police had disappeared and residents started to emerge from hiding, gradually returning to their routines. "It's that simple. There are people over there that got a stand up since first thing this morning, and no one sees or heard a thing, and the shooter obviously came running out of this alley, and they don't know."

Police later arrested three people in the shooting.

The BBC cameraman got the requisite shots of the city skyline from Washington Hill near Johns Hopkins Hospital and from atop Federal Hill. He captured a nighttime shooting at Monument and Milton, the strobe lights on police cars reflected in a pouring rain, giving it that haunting, film noir feel.

Heading back downtown, the producer was surprised at the laid-back attitude of the police, the residents, the folks in a liquor store on Monument who couldn't care less that someone had been shot, the almost comical scene of a drunken woman who plowed into a patrol car blocking the crime scene and was arrested.

In London, the BBC's Sarah Gilbert told me, people would be incensed at what seems to be normal here. We accept the unacceptable. Death becomes routine. And it shows, now on worldwide television.

Here's the BBC piece in question:
http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/news/crime/blog/2009/05/bbc_crime_video.html

[CountDeMoney]

Meanwhile, in other nifty news, people are stealing Teddy Bears from an NAACP murder memorial...

Just when you thought the crooks in this city had stolen everything they possibly could, the ante gets upped: overnight, someone stole four teddy bears that were among 80 put on display at the city's NAACP office to honor victims of homicide.

I had written a column on the artist, Faith Bocian, a student at the Maryland Institute, College of Art, and blogged about the ceremony. I headed up to the building  to see what happened. At left, Officer Michael Gordon of the Northern District looks at the display with Joseph Armstead of the NAACP. "Who could have the indeciency to do somthing like this," Gordon said (I'll have a fuller story on this issue in tomorrow's column).

Armstead told me that one of the executive committee members noticed this morning that a tarp put over the display had been torn and that four plastic links securing the bears to a railing had been cut. Each bear had a nametag on it with the name of a person who had been killed this year.

Just why would anyone steal a bear that honors a murder victim?

"It's a real touching memorial," Armstead told me. "Times are hard. Maybe a junkie would figure he could get a bag of dope for four teeddy bears. A parent with some crazy thinking might think her babdy might like this. Or maybe someone anti-establishment wanted to destroy the piece. Who knows?"

At 1 p.m., Armstead was headed back into the city to call police -- "For the statistic, I guess" -- he told me. Meanwhile, the "I Can't, We Can" drug rehab group has vowed to help Faith keep the project going so that by the end of the year there is a bear for every person killed in Baltimore.

Faith told me she might move the exhibit to a museum or even to a rolling display so that everyone in the city could see it. I was touched that one of the city police officer's who responded to investigate the theft took the time to actually look at the display and find names of victims from cases he investigated.

In that way, Faith's idea to provoke thought worked, even it if took something bad to get it going. Armstead said he thinks students from nearby Margaret Brent Elementary School took the bears and he told me the vice principal is going to make an announcement tomorrow to get the bears returned. Armstead said he wouldn't press charges if a child took them; he even agreed to help mentor kids and to take 50 of them to an Orioles game.

Maybe something good can from this after all.

NOT

[Syt]

The streets were gritty and seedy enough

[Tonitrus]

When I was over there last month, I was visiting a friend who was also TDY in town up by BWI in Linthicum.  I missed an exit on the freeway and ended up heading towards Baltimore itself.

It was pretty damn amazing....passing the city limits was like passing from the light into the darkness.  Like entering Mordor.

Taking the first exit I came across to turn around, I wondered if it was a mistake to leave the freeway.  There was a cemetery right near there, so terribly run-down, it seemed as if zombies could erupt from the earth at any moment.

[The Larch]

Blame "The Wire", it seems it's all the rage in Britain right now. 

[CountDeMoney]

Blame "The Wire", it seems it's all the rage in Britain right now. 

So why the fuck couldn't they remake it, like we did with The Office, and set in Manchester or Leeds or some fucking place?

[Viking]

Blame "The Wire", it seems it's all the rage in Britain right now. 

So why the fuck couldn't they remake it, like we did with The Office, and set in Manchester or Leeds or some fucking place?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_%26_Order:_UK

Law and Order UK?

[Ed Anger]

Might as well just watch Taggart.

[Viking]

Might as well just watch Taggart.

They could set it in some Rustbelt Shithole like Cleveland. Or Jersey, just to get a dubious accent.

[Viking]

On the topic of The Office, it's set in Slough

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slough

from the page "The Russian KGB secret service made detailed 1:10,000 maps of most urban areas of the UK, but did not bother to make a map of Slough." in the section Negative Perceptions.