Police Commissioner

Since November, taxpayers have been footing the tab to police club-goers and college students in the downtown Market Place area, an unintended consequence of a plan to stop officers from moonlighting as security outside city businesses. Bars and clubs that once hired uniformed city officers to work secondary employment outside the establishments have not been paying into a pool intended to fund an extra shift of patrol officers downtown, a plan meant to give police authorities more control over how officers are deployed.

Incoming Philadelphia police Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey said in an interview yesterday that he thought Mayor Sheila Dixon could have better handled the process of hiring a police chief in Baltimore this year. Ramsey - who had been a leading candidate for the job in Baltimore after Dixon asked Commissioner Leonard D. Hamm to resign in July - said the city originally approached him about the position and that a draft contract had been drawn up. "The whole incident had been handled rather poorly considering the fact that Baltimore reached out to me," Ramsey told The Sun yesterday.

Eight Democratic candidates are running for mayor in the Sept. 11 primary election and most have released a plan to deal with crime. They were asked about the three most important changes they would make to reduce crime. Here is a summary of their responses: Andrey Bundley To address the rift between residents and police, Bundley would organize church members and community organizations to visit neighborhoods en masse. He envisions 1,000 people knocking on doors in troubled neighborhoods at a time.

It was late afternoon when Deputy Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III drove down a Southwest Baltimore street. He saw no hint of trouble. No open-air drug dealing. No crimes in progress. But what happened 10 minutes later on Friday illustrates the difficult task that police face in a city where many killings have all the markings of well-planned executions. Police said a man walked out of a store and one or two people walked up to him firing guns, killing him on the street before running away.

Baltimore Crime Two homicides raise year's toll to 133 Baltimore police are investigating two homicides that brought this year's total to 133 -- 18 more than the tally this time last year. Just before 8 p.m. Friday, police responded to the 1900 block of Collington Ave. after receiving calls about a shooting. They found Craig A. Hunter, 29, bleeding under a car parked on the street. Authorities said he had been shot several times in the chest. He was transported to Johns Hopkins Hospital and was pronounced dead at 8:15 p.m. Witnesses told police they saw two men shoot Hunter, who had more than 15 arrests over the past decade for drug charges, according to a public records check.

As his secretive search comes down to the wire, Mayor-elect Martin O'Malley has interviewed several candidates for Baltimore's police commissioner, including a nationally known chief from South Carolina.Sources confirm that Reuben M. Greenberg, who runs the 347-member Charleston, S.C., department, has flown to Baltimore and talked with the incoming mayor and members of his transition team.Marilyn Harris-Davis, a top O'Malley aide, declined to confirm or deny any name. "O'Malley has interviewed several people," she said, adding that they include candidates inside and outside the city force.

Baltimore hit the 300 mark in homicides yesterday for the 10th consecutive year, a decade of urban violence fueled by an epidemic of drugs that has stained the city as one of the deadliest in the nation.A 48-year-old Brooklyn man was found dead Monday night at his home in the 4100 block of Townsend Ave. Police said Larry Langley had been shot several times in the head. No motives or suspects are known, and police said it was unclear when Langley had been shot.The state medical examiner ruled the man's death a homicide yesterday morning, bringing the number of slayings since New Year's Day 1990 to 3,201 -- about the same number of people killed in 30 years of strife in Northern Ireland.

Baltimore Police Commissioner Thomas C. Frazier, an outspoken outsider hired to reduce crime and restore confidence in the city's police force, is to be named head of a top Justice Department program today.Clinton administration sources said a formal announcement is scheduled for this morning.Frazier will become the director of the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, which is responsible for allocating money to reach President Clinton's goal of placing 100,000 more officers on the nation's streets.

Col. Ronald L. Daniel was named Baltimore's police commissioner formally yesterday and immediately promised to begin an aggressive assault on crime in the city.At the same time, Daniel said he wanted to reassure residents that a variety of new policing tactics will be directed against criminals and not law-abiding citizens."There is no need to fear the police," Daniel said in an interview yesterday. "We will aggressively attack crime, not citizens."Daniel was introduced as the city's top cop by Mayor Martin O'Malley at a noon news conference yesterday attended by 100 City Council members, state legislators, police officers and downtown business leaders.

During the taping of a television show last night, Baltimore's two mayoral candidates started out warily, but then attacked each other's positions on crime, vacant houses and troubled schools.Appearing on WBAL-TV's "A Bottom Line," scheduled to air Saturday, Democrat Martin O'Malley and Republican David F. Tufaro discussed a wide range of issues and listened to the audience describe the city's problems.Asked by the show's host, Kweisi Mfume to discuss their differences, each gave a short speech on how happy they were to have won last month's primary.

A man accused of killing a former Baltimore police commissioner's stepdaughter was found guilty of assault Tuesday and sentenced to eight years in prison. Joseph Antonio Bonds, 36, entered an Alford plea, which allows him to maintain innocence while acknowledging that prosecutors likely had enough evidence to gain an assault conviction. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison, with all but eight years suspended. If convicted of murder, he could have been sentenced to life in prison.

A city attorney resigned Thursday immediately after failing to persuade an internal disciplinary board to recommend firing a police officer convicted of administrative charges of assaulting a man outside a Federal Hill pizza shop in 2005. The attorney, Sandra Holmes, got a partial victory in her case against Officer Michael D. Brassell - an assault conviction and a recommendation to the police commissioner that Brassell be suspended 60 days without pay. But the board found the officer not guilty of lying to investigators, which carries an automatic termination.

The commander of the Baltimore Police Department's Southeastern District was suspended Wednesday, pending a review into a personnel matter, according to chief police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi. Maj. Roger Bergeron was stripped of his police powers and ordered home without pay, the spokesman said. He has commanded the district since Feb. 1, 2007, and has been a member of the police force since March 1991. The Southeastern District includes Fells Point, Little Italy, Patterson Park and Canton.

Two 16-year-old boys have been arrested and charged as adults with attempted murder in the Thursday night shooting of an off-duty police officer in front of his Northwest Baltimore home, according to the city's police commissioner. Craig Tillett and Kevon Wilson are also charged with robbery and other offenses in the attack on Detective Aaron Harris, a 16-year veteran of the police force, authorities said. Two assailants tried to rob Harris as he approached his porch about 10 p.m. in the 6000 block of Highgate Drive, police said.

The police won't get to watch patrons down beers at Shirley's Honey Hole after all. Baltimore's police commissioner is planning to veto a condition worked out by the bar's owner and a city attorney that would have allowed law enforcement to monitor live video feeds from surveillance cameras inside the tavern, according to the department's chief spokesman, Anthony Guglielmi. It was one of several concessions the owner, Shirley Barner, had agreed to this week to keep authorities from padlocking her business after a spate of shootings outside and accusations that drug dealers were using the vestibule to sell and store narcotics led police to label the bar a public nuisance.

The agent for a Baltimore Ravens rookie linebacker said his client was targeted by police at the Inner Harbor because he is black, a claim that has sparked debate over racial profiling as police step up enforcement there in the wake of a recent shooting. Tony Fein was charged Sunday in the assault of a white police officer who received a tip from Harborplace security that a group of men were passing around a large silver object suspected of being a firearm. The device turned out to be a mobile phone.

Two dozen people showed up for Wednesday evening's Citizens on Patrol walk through Southwest Baltimore's Carrollton Ridge neighborhood - six weeks after a stray bullet hit a 5-year-old girl there. It seemed like a good turnout, until one scanned the faces. One person was from Violetville, another from Union Square. A community leader from South Baltimore came, as did two representatives from the mayor's office, two Guardian Angels, six police officers, the commander of the Southwestern police district, the police commissioner, two from his media office, two television cameramen and two television reporters.

Fundraising efforts to save the Baltimore Police Department's vaunted horseback unit are off to a slow start, but officials say they have had conversations with potential donors and are optimistic that the unit can be kept intact. Only $550 in donations have been received in the days since the agency announced that it would need to come up with $200,000 in private money to keep the unit intact for the next year. An official from the Baltimore Community Foundation, which is managing the fundraising efforts for the police, said the donations have mostly come from individuals in chunks of $25 to $50. Sheryl Goldstein, director of the Mayor's Office on Criminal Justice, said those donations have come via the Internet and that any checks sent via mail likely haven't arrived yet. Meanwhile, Goldstein said a few people have talked to the police commissioner's office about making "sizable" donations, and the Downtown Partnership is soliciting contributions from businesses.

A Baltimore police spokesman has been suspended as the department looks into an allegation that he inadvertently sent a nude photo of a woman to a television station. Officer Troy Harris, a nine-year veteran who has served as one of the department's spokesmen since 2002, was suspended Friday by the director of the public affairs section and the police commissioner, the agency confirmed. Officials declined to comment further, saying that the issue is a personnel matter. Sources said Harris was trying to send a mug shot of a criminal suspect to a newsroom e-mail account at WBAL-TV on Thursday night and attached a cell phone photo of a woman that had been saved to the hard drive of his city-issued computer.

Baltimore City Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III was released from the hospital at 12:45 p.m. Sunday after becoming ill while running in a 10-mile charity race Saturday. Physicians observed Bealefeld for 24 hours and determined the commissioner suffered from dehydration, said Anthony J. Guglielmi, a city police spokesman. "They checked him out from head to toe," Guglielmi said. Mayor Sheila Dixon said she visited the commissioner Saturday. "I had to tell him to relax," Dixon said.