Fight Crime

It has become a mantra. Ask a candidate what's on voters' minds and the answer always includes crime.Sara Engram is editorial-page director of The Evening Sun.

When passersby drive through West Baltimore's Sandtown-Winchester community, they won't see flags symbolizing unity or notice traces of an affluent town. What they will see is a neighborhood once riddled with drug trade and prostitution, now being transformed with the help of activists like Pastor C.W. Harris. A native of Sandtown-Winchester, Harris is one of 15 BMe Leadership Award recipients being recognized as black men doing their part to better Baltimore. Funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Open Society Foundations, BMe (Black Male Engagement)

CRIME IN AMERICA ranks high on the list of worries of American voters. And no wonder. Whether it's the searing sound of gunshots in city streets or the theft of a child's bicycle in a quieter neighborhood, fear of becoming the next statistic has become a fact of life for too many people.Voter disgust with crime has registered with politicians, and they have responded. Yet in one of the fascinating contradictions of American politics, while the trend in many other areas is to cut budgets and return more power to the states, crime-fighting legislation is producing escalating expenditures for law-enforcement and prison budgets.

Baltimore City Police Commissioner Anthony W. Batts is still relatively new on his job, so it's probably unfair to make too much of his unfortunate response to a question last week about the recent spate of gun violence that left nine people dead on the city's west side. "Though we're having a spike in homicides," Mr. Batts said, "our organization is working better, faster and smoother, and you can see it in the overall stats. " There was nothing factually wrong in Mr. Batts' answer; department statistics show an 8 percent drop in crimes of all types over this time last year.

Baltimore Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke asked about 250 people at the War Memorial last night for their opinions on how to battle city crime, and he received advice ranging from sanitation removal to bringing back prayer in the schools.While some spoke of traditional crime-fighting methods such as increases in patrols and tougher criminal penalties, many had more unusual strategies in mind."It would be a step in the right direction if everyone went home tonight and threw away their television," said Rusty White, president of the Northwest Citizens Patrol group.

Charlie Stull does business out of two storefronts in the 1400 block of W. Baltimore St. -- a used-furniture store and a second-hand clothing shop. One day last month, he was standing in the clothing shop when a guy walked in with a bed frame. He asked if Charlie wanted to buy it. Charlie squinted and closely examined the frame, and something apparent became obvious: It was Charlie's bed frame; the guy had lifted it from the store next door, walked about 30 paces, and tried to sell it to him.Charlie grabbed the guy. His wife called 911. "Do you know it took 37 1/2 minutes for the police to come?"

Baltimore County Executive Roger B. Hayden announced a program yesterday to help communities fight crime: grants of up to $2,000 for things such as block-watch signs and walkie-talkies for community patrols."

Murder and other violent crimes are getting out of hand -- and local followers of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi intend to put a stop to them.How do they propose to fight crime? Through twice-daily, 20-minute group practices of Transcendental Meditation (TM). If enough people in an area meditate together, they believe, they can change the social and economic climate.This is called the "Maharishi effect," and followers of the Maharishi have recently launched such a program at a center in Pikesville and a dozen or so TM centers in the greater Washington area.

In two new HotSpot grants announced yesterday, Brooklyn Heights will receive $123,000 in state funds next year to fight crime and get tough on absentee landlords with shabby homes, and Parole will get $105,700 to boost the Neighborhood Watch program and help clean the community's streets.The awards are among 36 grants announced by the Governor's Office on Crime Control and Prevention. The $6.3 million statewide expansion of the program adds 26 communities and expands the boundaries of six others.

Five Carroll County groups have received $13,000 in state grants to help them fight substance abuse, alcohol abuse and crime. The money, from Gov. Parris N. Glendening's Neighborhood Crime and Substance Abuse Prevention grant program, will enable the groups to communicate their messages more effectively, state officials said. The projects include purchasing goggles that simulate the effects of alcohol, promoting an anti-drug CD and launching a neighborhood watch program. The Carroll County Sheriff's Office's Substance Abuse and Violence Education Program will buy equipment, such as the goggles, with a $2,150 grant to help teach students about the dangers of drunken driving.

It's like a recurring bad dream. March: Hackers allegedly steal the credit card numbers from 1.5 million Visa and MasterCard customers by breaking into the computer systems of the company's payment processor in New York. The thieves stockpiled the stolen credit card numbers for months before beginning to use them. August: Cyber attackers disrupt production from Saudi Aramco, the world's largest exporter of crude oil, taking out 30,000 computers in the process, according to press reports.

Jon J. Grow, a former Baltimore police detective who became a nationally recognized bunco expert and co-founded and served as executive director of the National Association of Bunco Investigators, died Sunday of pancreatic cancer at his Parkton home. He was 70. The word "bunco" is derived from the Spanish word for banking and means a swindling game. Mr. Grow's work targeted the con artists, swindlers, pickpockets and confidence men and women who preyed primarily on the elderly and trusting.

The Sun's recent "Your turn" commentary regarding downtown crime ("A 10 t h floor view of crime," May 26) speaks the truth. We certainly need more such pieces to properly understand Baltimore's crime problems and to address them. What we are hearing from the city's mayor repeatedly is that there is no real problem, that the crime situation in downtown Baltimore is distorted and that "statistics" show that violent crime is down. But who really believes her? We kid ourselves if we believe so. We don't want to go to where we are outraged with the crime problem.

Sunday's story on violence at St. Patrick's Day attracted many reactions. Most people writing me emails and in comments at the bottom story said the city had become scary. It's further proof of the uphill battle the city has trying to show improving crime numbers when one incident such as this can undermine the stats. Many readers, as they do time and again, pressed for why the racial makeup of the crowd was not reported. Simply put, we don't include race unless there is a racial issue to the story.

Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake climbed into a cherry picker Wednesday morning, rising above Harford Road to install a new surveillance camera in Northeast Baltimore, one of 33 the city is adding to a network that has grown to nearly 600. The new cameras, which have been installed along East North Avenue and will eventually spring up along Harford and Belair roads around Clifton Park, are funded by federal and local grants. Rawlings-Blake has overseen the addition of 100 cameras to the network since taking office.

In a Woodlawn office park, police can collect and analyze tips that can help find an al-Qaeda cell or a Bloods gang member. Investigators there — representing more than two dozen law enforcement agencies across the state — have access to a wealth of information from their colleagues around the country and the federal government. So when a beat cop from Baltimore needs information on a drug dealer from Los Angeles, the answer can come almost instantaneously. The investigators in such offices in Maryland and around the country are supposed to be focused on identifying terrorists and potential risks.

To make travel on its subway, light rail, commuter trains and buses as safe as possible, the Maryland Transit Administration may soon call on the largest and most expert security team available - the tens of thousands of people who ride public transportation in the Baltimore area each day. Text messaging, those short little bursts of information fired from a cell phone, Blackberry or similar device, could let transit police know when and where crime is...

A TELEVISION commercial a few years back popularized the slogan, "Image is everything." Some residents of Harper's Choice in Columbia seem to agree. They have opposed pursuing state resources to fight crime Maryland "HotSpots," because they fear their village would suffer from such a designation.No such qualms are evident a dozen miles east in Brooklyn Heights in Anne Arundel County's industrial north end. The neighborhood is also a candidate for HotSpot help.Both communities are mature suburbs, which, as urbanologists point out, suffer from problems more akin to those in cities than in more distant, newer suburbs.

Rhonda Eldridge had pulled an all-nighter July 27 to pack. She, her husband, Anthony Johnson, and her four children were to leave that weekend for a four-day vacation in Ocean City . At 2 a.m. a neighbor came to get her. Just a few feet away from her home in Northeast Baltimore's Belair-Edison neighborhood, she said, her husband lay in his car, slumped over the steering wheel with a bullet to his head. From a window of the house, Eldridge's oldest daughter watched as police and paramedics surrounded the scene.

A meeting to address public safety concerns in Long Reach raised issues of image and community-police relations on Friday, Aug. 5. The meeting, organized by County Council Chairman Calvin Ball in response to the July 27 stabbing death of Long Reach resident Christian Lendell Hall, 17, drew about 30 community members. Another Columbia teenager, Xavier Trevon Bates, 18, has been charged with murder in Hall's death. Howard County police presented figures showing that crime in the neighborhood is down compared to last year.