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.
