Police Station

A man claiming to be selling watches, coins and other items on Craigslist - the Internet version of classified ads - has lured four people to a residential street in Northwest Baltimore and robbed them at gunpoint, according to city police. Two attacks occurred last year, in August and November, but two others were reported to police this month. Police said they believe all the hold-ups are linked - they're occurring in mid-afternoon in the same block on Callaway Avenue, lined with single family homes and green lawns near Ashburton.

A man claiming to be selling watches, coins and other items on Craigslist - the Internet version of classified ads - has lured four people to a residential street in Northwest Baltimore and robbed them at gunpoint, according to city police. Two attacks occurred last year, in August and November, but two others were reported to police this month. Police said they believe all the hold-ups are linked - they're occurring in mid-afternoon in the same block on Callaway Avenue, lined with single family homes and green lawns near Ashburton.

A loaded handgun was found in a holding cell in a Baltimore police station this week, officials confirmed after receiving inquiries from The Baltimore Sun.  The weapon, a .22 caliber handgun with six rounds in the chamber, was found by an officer as he was placing a suspect into a cell in the Southeastern District station on March 12, according to a report provided by police. The officer had entered the detainee's information in a station log book, then walked into the cell to hand back a driver's license when he noticed a black knit glove lying on a shelf.

A fight among a group of teenagers and one man Wednesday afternoon at the Upton Metro Station sent two people to the hospital and closed the station for about three hours, according to Maryland Transit Administration Police. The fight caused chaos in the station, as the teens threw yellow cones, a mop and a trash can at the man as they moved through the station, according to Sharon Allen, an Upton resident who witnessed parts of the fight. "It was pandemonium, so you really didn't know what was going on," Allen said.

Automated teller machine robberies are to banking what plane crashes are to transportation: High-profile, much feared -- and extremely rare.The American Bankers Association reports one ATM crime for every 3.5 million transactions, higher than the odds of being struck by lightning in a year (one in 2 million). A more independent source, the Baltimore County police, has recorded 12 ATM robberies this year, 1 percent of all county robberies. Of course, when someone is held-up at a machine near your home, you don't forget.

Deterring automated teller machine robberies is simple. Just think of the place a mugger would hate and stick a cash machine there.Like, say, a police station.Yesterday, Anne Arundel became the first county in the state to have ATMs in police station lobbies. The machines, run by the Anne Arundel County Employees Federal Credit Union, are open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.Capt. Michael P. Fitzgibbons, the man who came up with the idea, called it a "no-brainer." His boss, Chief Robert A. Beck, labeled it "fantastic."

Howard County's new police substation in Scaggsville is decorated more like a luxurious private home than an old-fashioned precinct house -- with cushioned seats, cathedral ceilings and mahogany veneer doors."

A 19-year-old Columbia man and two companions were looking for the Howard County police station Thursday night so he could turn himself in for a violation of probation warrant, police said. A plainclothes police officer was walking in the parking lot of the Northern District station in Ellicott City when the men asked him where the police station was, police said. The officer noticed "a heavy odor of burning marijuana," according to police reports, and called other officers to the scene.

ROME -- A powerful car bomb ripped through a police station in Catania early yesterday, wounding at least four police officers, one of them seriously. The police said the bomb appeared to have been set by the Mafia.It was the second attack in Sicily attributed to organized crime in the last week. The first was the fatal shooting Wednesday night of the Rev. Giuseppe Puglisi, a staunchly anti-Mafia Roman Catholic priest, in Palermo.The explosion yesterday carved a crater 10 feet in diameter in the street in front of the police station and smashed apartments and automobiles nearby.

The city zoning board unanimously approved using city-owned land for construction of a Northern District police station yesterday, clearing the way for the $5.4 million project in the 2200 block of W. Cold Spring Lane.No opposition was registered at the hearing.Groundbreaking will be in the spring, said city planning director Charles C. Graves, with completion expected late next year. The city chose BCI Construction, the company with the lowest bid, for the job.An irregular-sized wooded vacant lot, 740 feet by 493 feet, will be the site of a one-story masonry building with 172 off-street parking places, city documents show.

Police and baseball go together like, well, maybe not so much. But cops and criminals are part of this city's fabric, and sometimes get just as much attention, if not more, than the ballplayers themselves. Opening Day gives us a chance to look back at the times our police and our Orioles shared headline at Camden Yards. I'm sure I've missed many, and yes, I know, this list does not include the beloved Memorial Stadium. I welcome any and all additions and contributions: 1. Ripken's No. 8 picked off - Who can forget the four hooligans who in 2009 stole Cal Ripken Jr.'s No. 8 sculpture in front of the ballpark and then paraded it through the city on the back of a pickup truck.

The young woman who was held up at gunpoint last weekend in South Baltimore is certain she identified the correct two suspects for police. She focused on their faces, she said Tuesday, knowing "it would be the only thing that would get them. " But the mother of one of the men charged in Saturday's attack is just as certain that he was sitting in a Federal Hill pizzeria at the time, and the shop's manager says he has video to prove it. Tuesday evening, relatives protested the arrests outside the Southern District police station.

A 37-year-old man was shot and killed in a quiet Southeast Baltimore neighborhood after a gunman drove up alongside his vehicle at an intersection and opened fire. Police did not immediately identify the victim. The shooting occurred in the Bayview neighborhood near the Johns Hopkins hospital of the same name, in the 6400 block of E. Pratt St., where only one shooting has been reported since 2008. Officers responding to a report of gunshots found the victim sitting in a Chevy Malibu, slumped over and suffering from multiple gunshot wounds to his upper body.

A loaded handgun was found in a holding cell in a Baltimore police station this week, officials confirmed after receiving inquiries from The Baltimore Sun.  The weapon, a .22 caliber handgun with six rounds in the chamber, was found by an officer as he was placing a suspect into a cell in the Southeastern District station on March 12, according to a report provided by police. The officer had entered the detainee's information in a station log book, then walked into the cell to hand back a driver's license when he noticed a black knit glove lying on a shelf.

An article in the March 8, 1962, edition of the Herald Argus and Baltimore Countian reported the near completion of a new police station. The new Wilkens Police Station, which will combine the services of the Catonsville and Halethorpe police stations and the Traffic Division, is nearing completion at Wilkens and Walker avenues. Occupancy of the one-story and basement structure is anticipated about May 1 of this year. The personnel of the Catonsville and Halethorpe Districts, totaling 71 men, includes: Captain Clarence Bradley ; four lieutenants, George Neeb, Joseph Schwartz, Robert Andrews and Frederick Senkel ; 66 sergeants, corporals and patrolmen.

During what was supposed to be a festive homecoming week, the campus of Bowie State University was instead quiet and somber Friday after a student was arrested and charged with killing one of her roommates. According to police, Alexis D. Simpson, 19, fatally stabbed 18-year-old Dominique T. Frazier on Thursday night in the dorm where they both lived. Charging documents show that the confrontation was sparked by a seemingly innocuous act: Simpson turned off Frazier's iPod as they prepared to go out, records show.

THIS FALL continues to lead me around the city to some marvelous buildings where, in the course of the tour, I migrate to the windows and get a new perspective on our old, ever-rebuilding city. On a windy afternoon this week, I found myself under the roof of the old Southern District Police Station, Ostend and Patapsco streets. I was gazing out at some first-class 1896 rounded casements and taking in the steeples of the Holy Cross and St. Mary's Star of the Sea churches, along with a lot of South Baltimore roof asphalt.

Michele Volke says the births of all of her children were quick. But none quite as speedy as her son's arrival Easter Sunday.Trevor, the Pasadena couple's fourth child, was born in the family van in the parking lot of Eastern District police station on Mountain Road about 9:30 p.m."I didn't have time to think," said Mrs. Volke, 34. "I was comforted by the fact that there were other people there besides my husband."Mrs. Volke, her husband, Ed, 44, and their three children left their home in the 1800 block of Poplar Ridge Road about 9 p.m. Mrs. Volke was in labor and the couple planned to drop the children off at a nearby relative's home before going to the hospital.

The cops and the politicians talked about gangs and guns, about combining disparate databases from law enforcement agencies spread across the state, allowing police to track offenders of all types and quickly spot trends. Through a program called Dashboard, put together by the Governor's Office of Crime Control and Prevention, there are ways to pinpoint on maps people convicted of gun crimes, on probation, on lists of sex abusers, and those wanted on arrest warrants. There's facial recognition software that allows cops in Maryland to compare surveillance photos to a database containing 2.1 million mug shots.

A Baltimore City Police officer was shot in the leg about a block away from the Central District office Tuesday night. The officer was shot in a parking garage in the unit block of South Frederick Street, police spokesman Donny Moses said. The unidentified officer was taken to Maryland Shock Trauma Center. His condition was not immediately available. The garage is open to the public but police officers in the Central District often use the garage, which is a block from the station, to park their off-duty vehicles.