This was not your typical tourist tour.
First stop, an Ellicott City apartment complex where thieves do their car shopping.
Later, a brief walk through the woods behind the former Tor apartment complex - where two teen-agers were found shot to death more than a year ago in a still-unsolved case.
Along the way, the tour guides - in this case, two Howard County police lieutenants - pointed out prostitution trouble spots, the paths in Columbia that allow criminals to make quick getaways and intersections troubled by fatal accidents.
"Like any cop, I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that there's a Bagel Bin in here," Lt. Steve Prozeralik said jokingly yesterday as the Eyre bus - carrying a complement of Howard County prosecutors and folks from juvenile justice and probation and parole - passed through River Hill Village Center.
For six hours yesterday, the group of about 30 traveled by bus through Howard County on a training tour, a field trip of sorts believed to be the first of its kind for prosecutors here. The plan was to show Howard County up close to the county's assistant state's attorneys - the places they refer to every day in court, the spots where mischiefmakers make their mischief.
Prosecutors in other jurisdictions, such as Baltimore and Baltimore County, said they've never arranged such a tour.
Sprinkled throughout, with the aid of various community officials who joined the tour or talked to the group at a handful of stops, was a bit of a history and enforcement lesson: of covenant restrictions, of the way Columbia was designed, of how the county has changed.
The tour was scheduled on a Monday, when there are no criminal cases in District Court and in a week when the Circuit Court docket was fairly light. Still, when their bosses first broached the idea, some prosecutors thought it was a joke.
"They thought we were kidding. It almost sounded like high school," said Michael A. Weal, the chief of the District Court division. By an hour or two into the trip, a few prosecutors told Weal that they were getting good information.
Besides, Weal said, "we got to go by where I'm building a new house."
"I'm getting a lot of background information, which is important," District Court prosecutor Claude DeVastey said.
The idea for the tour came out of a community justice seminar in Washington this fall, where Howard County Deputy State's Attorney Dario Broccolino said he talked with a Manhattan, N.Y., prosecutor whose office, which hires dozens of prosecutors a year, organizes a tour.
