The replacement late last week of the two top police commanders in the city's Central District, which covers the Inner Harbor and downtown area, is an encouraging sign that Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III is taking his department's problems seriously. A recent rash of intimidating behavior and assaults involving roving groups of unsupervised teenagers had raised troubling questions about the department's ability to keep a lid on things, especially after police assurances that more officers would be patrolling the streets failed to stop several well-publicized incidents of violence.
It is to be hoped that new leadership will lead to fewer such disturbances near the harbor and surrounding downtown. As the centerpiece of Baltimore's redevelopment efforts, the Inner Harbor, in particular, is an economic engine for the entire region. Anything that threatens its reputation as a safe and secure environment for families with children costs the city dearly in terms of tourist revenues and convention bookings.
But perhaps the most significant fact about the shake-up at police headquarters is the event that precipitated the change - the failure of responding officers to correctly file a report on the mugging in broad daylight of a Bolton Hill nanny pushing a stroller. After the young woman was grabbed from behind and thrown to the ground by one assailant while another rifled through the stroller's blankets and stole a cell phone from her pocket, officers were late arriving on the scene. When they finally did show up - an hour and a half after the incident - they wrote it up as a simple theft rather than as a robbery involving the use of force. The next day, police produced a revised report in response to inquiries from The Baltimore Sun but got the time and date of the incident wrong.
Mr. Bealefeld and his top deputies were right to make an issue of that in the heated confrontation with Central District brass on Friday that led to the shake-up. The commissioner insisted supervisors should have caught the error the first time around, and he chided them for letting stand an erroneous impression that the crime had been less serious than it actually was. Mr. Bealefeld rightly pledged that his new internal affairs commander won't tolerate officers who under-report crimes for any reason. Police can hardly expect to make people in Baltimore feel safer if citizens believe they're sweeping crime under the rug to make themselves look better.
