Homicide Unit

The Baltimore Police Department is poised to shake up its homicide unit for the first time in 50 years and assign detectives to geographic beats, hoping to reduce the murder toll in the nation's fourth-deadliest city.Under the plan, which significantly alters the way the homicide unit has worked since it was formed after World War II, detectives will answer to a new commander who will also oversee nonfatal shooting investigations and a task force that targets youth violence.The changes are part of a departmentwide overhaul that makes district lieutenants responsible for groups of neighborhoods on a 24-hour basis, turning the lieutenants into mini-chiefs with discretion over officer deployment and money.

BALTIMORE ended the first quarter of 1999 with a 25 percent decline in homicides. Even though this is still a tentative trend, it is tremendous news. With the annual number of homicides exceeding 300 during each of the past nine years, Baltimore has been one of the most lethal cities in America -- at a time when the national murder rate has steadily declined.Reasons for Baltimore now joining this decline are not obvious. Swings in crime patterns seldom are. But since an overwhelming majority of killings in Baltimore are drug-related, it may be that violence associated with the crack trade has begun to level off. This has happened over the past couple of years in other cities, where the crack epidemic hit earlier.

Frustrated that arrests have been made in fewer than a third of the city's nonfatal shootings this year, Baltimore police are moving detectives who investigate shootings to district stations.Col. Bert L. Shirey, acting police commissioner, said yesterday that 29 detectives, three sergeants and a lieutenant will be transferred Jan. 2 from the homicide unit in police headquarters to the city's nine police districts.Although some soon-to-be transferred detectives are resisting the move, Shirey believes the plan will help the department return to neighborhood policing.

Baltimore police abolished a much-criticized six-year policy of rotating officers through different assignments, saying yesterday that it crippled the department's effort to investigate homicides and bring killers to justice.Top department commanders said the "rotation" policy was directly responsible for a plummeting homicide arrest rate, which dropped from 70 percent five years ago to below 40 percent today, and an exodus of experienced detectives.The change is one of a series of moves announced yesterday, some of which are linked to Sunday's mass killings of five women in a rowhouse.

In Baltimore CityArundel man charged in rape of student near Loyola CollegeA District Court judge ordered an Annapolis man held on $50,000 bail yesterday after his arrest on charges that he raped a Loyola College student early Saturday at an off-campus party.Johnathan Wellington Cline, 21, of the 200 block of Nottingham Hill was charged with second-degree rape and two counts of assault. Cline, a former Loyola student and lacrosse player, transferred this year to Anne Arundel Community College.

Five veteran Baltimore homicide detectives have either quit or been transferred in recent weeks, a venting of talent that upsets the city's top prosecutor, who is worried that more murders may go unsolved.The detectives, who had investigated slayings for a combined 88 years, left because of a controversial rotation policy in which officers are moved every few years. It was implemented for the first time in the homicide unit last month.Police union officials say that if the rotations continue as scheduled, nearly all homicide investigators will have less than four years' experience within six months.

A businessman who was fatally shot Wednesday afternoon near Bolton Hill might have been trying to sell his white Lexus, his family told police.The family of William E. Gilbert, 51, expressed concern about him traveling around Baltimore to meet prospective buyers.But homicide detectives stressed yesterday that they have no concrete leads or names of people who might have been interested in the $40,000 four-door car with distinctive vanity plates "GOFORIT" that Gilbert had advertised this week in the City Paper.

After questioning police homicide commanders for nearly two hours about a decline in arrest rates, the chairman of the Baltimore City Council's Legislative Investigations Committee said he was "partly" satisfied with the explanations offered at a hearing yesterday.Though he expressed concern over the decline in solved killings, a decrease in the number of veteran investigators and claims of "a breakdown of accountability between supervisors and detectives" by a homicide unit supervisor, committee Chairman Martin O'Malley said he was pleased by the department's efforts to improve its clearance rate.

As City Council members prepare to question police homicide commanders today about the declining rate of solved slayings, a homicide squad sergeant is urging regular reviews of cases to improve the unit's accountability.Detective Sgt. Mark Tomlin made the suggestion last month in a memo to Maj. Kathleen Patek, who heads the unit, as a way to improve the clearance rate. A clearance occurs when a slaying is solved, usually by an arrest."In a random sampling of open cases from 1997, it is clear that a breakdown of accountability between supervisors and detectives has caused many cases to be left unattended, or simply pushed to the side," wrote Tomlin, a 19-year veteran of the department who has been a homicide unit supervisor for the past three years.

Troubled by Baltimore's homicide rate, City Council members are calling for an end to a controversial police department policy of rotating veteran homicide detectives into other jobs.In a resolution passed during last night's meeting, the council said it "demands that the [Mayor Kurt L.] Schmoke administration halt its policy."The resolution's sponsor, Councilman Martin O'Malley, called the policy "foolish" because officers with minimal homicide investigative experience would be responsible for solving some of the city's toughest crimes.

More than a month after former city councilman Kenneth N. Harris Sr. was murdered, his case remains unsolved - highlighting a nagging problem for Baltimore police. Despite a sharp drop in homicides this year, city police are solving murders at the second-lowest rate in 28 years, according to a Sun analysis of police and FBI statistics. In the 1980s, the department routinely solved more than 70 percent of its cases, but so far this year, the rate is 45 percent. The steady decline in the department's record of catching killers has left hundreds of homicides unresolved.

A witness told police that he observed a Baltimore homicide detective and a Baltimore County sheriff's deputy beating a man outside a barbershop last year, contradicting the detective's account and offering some insight into charges that were filed nearly a full year after the incident. Detective Terry W. Love Jr., through his union attorney, has questioned the timing of second-degree assault charges filed this month against him and Deputy Michael Herring, just days before the statute of limitations was set to expire.

BTU leader gets national post with AFT Loretta Johnson, the longtime co-president of the Baltimore Teachers Union, has been elected executive vice president of the American Federation of Teachers, making her the No. 3 official in the nation's second-largest teachers union. For the time being, Johnson will remain in the post she has held since the 1970s, overseeing the BTU's paraprofessionals chapter, representing teacher's aides and other educational assistants. She began working as a teacher's aide in the city in the 1966, earning $2.25 an hour with no benefits, according to a biography provided by the AFT. To improve her work situation and that of her colleagues, she unionized the city's paraprofessionals and negotiated their first contract in 1970.

A Baltimore County judge dismissed a $6 million lawsuit filed by the parents of a Baltimore County teenager who was fatally crushed in 2006 on the job at a landscaping company . Adrienne M. Miranda and Robert Miranda Sr. contended that the negligence of several law enforcement departments, prosecutors' offices and other state agencies to properly investigate the death inflicted "overwhelming mental distress and suffering" and "emotional grief, anguish and...

Baltimore police officials have moved a homicide commander accused of forcing his black sergeant to watch on-line Ku Klux Klan videos out of his position. The move occurred Wednesday, two days after The Examiner reported that the black sergeant had filed a federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint against the commander, Lt. James W. Hagin Jr. The complaint was filed by Sgt. Kelvin Sewell on March 5. The 20-year veteran officer alleged, among other issues, that he was ordered to watch videos of various KKK rallies for about an hour, according to The Examiner.

City police investigators examined yesterday the computer hard drive used by a white commander accused of ordering a black sergeant to watch online Ku Klux Klan videos, according to three sources familiar with the investigation. Sterling Clifford, a spokesman for the Police Department and the mayor's office, said that the police commissioner briefed Mayor Sheila Dixon on Monday night and yesterday morning on a federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint stemming from the alleged incident, but he declined to comment further on the matter.

Baltimore police officials suddenly ended yesterday a controversial but short-lived initiative that had homicide detectives pausing their investigations to don their uniforms and walk beats For two weeks, the homicide unit had been included in a police strategy, backed by Mayor Sheila Dixon, to place 85 detectives on the city's most violent streets. Faced with a staffing shortage and political pressure to rein in overtime spending, police officials had ordered homicide and district detectives to walk foot patrols at least once a week.

Detectives Ray Laslett and Mark Luther Hughes Occupation Both work as detectives in the Baltimore Police Department's homicide unit, which investigates suspicious deaths, including kidnappings and other high-profile crimes. In the news They took the lead in arresting a suspect last week in a series of murders, assaults and a rape of mostly elderly residents on the city's west and northwest sides that started in 1999. Career highlights Laslett, 45, joined the Police Department 23 years ago. He started in patrol in the Northwest District, where he spent 13 years.

Two people were stabbed yesterday, one fatally, at a Northwest Baltimore apartment in an attack that police said they believe was not a random act of violence. A person driving by an apartment building in the 4800 block of Liberty Heights Ave. about 4:30 a.m. saw a woman with stab wounds lying in the road, police said. Police and paramedics arrived and transported the woman to an area hospital, where she underwent surgery and as of last night was in critical and stable condition. Police declined to release her name and the name of the hospital because she is a witness.

Donald Franklin Waltemeyer, a retired Baltimore City homicide investigator and most recently an Aberdeen Police Department detective sergeant, died of cancer Monday at his Dundalk home. He was 58. Sergeant Waltemeyer, whose nickname was "Digger," was recalled yesterday as a street-savvy patrolman with a strong work ethic who pursued one of the city's most publicized murder cases of the 1980s. Born in Baltimore and raised in Pimlico, he attended city public schools and served as a sergeant in the Army before joining the Baltimore Police Department in October 1968.