Residents hear gunshots. It stands to reason they want to know what happened.
It's not an easy task.
People near Canton Square woke earlier this week to the sound of men arguing. They heard three rapid pops, and some looked out their windows and saw two men walking down the street, one holding a gun.
One person looked in the newspaper the next day and, finding nothing, e-mailed The Baltimore Sun and then sought help from the Baltimore Guide.
That prompted calls to Baltimore police and an e-mail exchange that ended with more confusion than answers. It turns out the shooting was not really a shooting, according to police, but a discharging, and required no formal report. No one was hit, and the intended targets didn't hang around to talk with officers. All they left behind was shattered glass and bullet casings at South Potomac and O'Donnell streets.
"Unfortunately there are a lot of them," said Donny Moses, a spokesman for the city police, referring to calls for shots fired. "If we get there and don't find anything, we aren't writing a report."
The problem is not the lack of a police report. The crime isn't hidden; it's recorded in the police computers, and in this case, appears to have been accurately described and categorized. But it won't show up on the Baltimore Police Department's public Internet crime map because that lists shootings and assaults, among other serious crimes, but not the discharging of firearms.
It's so minor it probably wouldn't make the list of crimes that officers give out for police blotters in the Guide and The Baltimore Sun. And a call to police by residents curious about what happened prompts a cursory check and the initial response that nothing happened.
That fuels rumors and leads people to conclude police are under-reporting or downgrading crime. The reporter for the Guide, Mary Helen Sprecher, had trouble confirming the incident. She e-mailed the person who had contacted her: "Just checked with the police. There hasn't been a report of a shooting in this jurisdiction this week."
The person, who did not want to be identified for fear of retribution from the gunmen who are still on the street, heard the argument and the gunfire and walked to the crime scene when police arrived. The person e-mailed me after trying in vain to get police to confirm it: "In this case, I guess it never happened."
