A Worldwide Audience Gets A Look At Our Streets

"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.