The gun used to kill former City Councilman Kenneth N. Harris Sr. had been fired in another crime in the same Northeast Baltimore shopping center months before, but police classified the earlier incident as a property crime instead of an attempted armed robbery, limiting the resources they devoted to investigating it.
In the Jan. 6 incident, two men wearing monkey masks walked into the BP gas station at the Northwood Plaza and walked toward a door made of bulletproof glass that leads to the cash register and the store's back office. Panicked, a 21-year-old employee ducked down and called 911 as the suspects fired two rounds from a 9 mm handgun into the door, leaving bullet marks that were still visible yesterday.
Kashif Khan, one of the owners of the gas station, said it was clear to him that the men wanted to commit a robbery.
"I showed [the detective] the surveillance and everything," Khan said. "I said, 'So you mean to say if somebody comes and shoots at the window and just because they didn't get through because it was bulletproof ... it's just property damage? I was real upset about that."
The way Baltimore police classify crimes has frequently been a political issue, with elected officials - including, at one time, Harris - questioning whether the department under-reported offenses to make public safety statistics look better. But the way a given crime is classified has a practical impact, too.
An investigation of a property crime is typically over after a report is written, officers say. However, with a robbery - a "part one" crime that counts against the city's violent crime rate - a district detective is assigned to the case and will follow up with the victim to gather more information, such as whether the incident was drug related. The detective sticks with the case and will provide additional follow-ups over time. Sterling Clifford, a police spokesman, said the January incident was missing critical elements necessary to classify it as an attempted robbery. A source familiar with the investigation said the attackers did not point the weapon at the gas station employee and made no verbal demands, apparently creating a challenge in discerning their intentions.
"The police officer who responded gathered the facts that were available to him at the time and wrote a report that corresponds with those facts," Clifford said. "Based on that information, you couldn't charge those guys with a robbery, so you wouldn't write it up as a robbery."
