Vandals

Another Baltimore County speed camera has been vandalized. County police received a phone call at 7:25 a.m. Aug. 17 to report that the newly installed camera on Cromwell Bridge Road near Loch Raven High School had been spray-painted, said police spokesperson Elise Armacost. The camera was not damaged. She said light red paint was used to spray expletives on the camera casing, and the lens was also painted. But the camera has been cleaned and is back in operation. "People need to remember that this is a crime," Armacost said.

Vandals hit 18 different cars in a Fountain Green neighborhood Thursday night. Between about midnight last Wednesday and 6 a.m. Thursday, tires were punctured on at least 18 vehicles in the 1400 and 1500 block of Redfield Road off Route 543, according to Monica Worrell, spokesperson for the Harford County Sheriff's Office. They also stole sunglasses, a GPS and a case of Gatorade from one vehicle. Police have no suspect information. Anyone with information can call the tipline, 410-836-7788, or the southern precinct, 410-612-1717.

When the 50-year-old driver handed over his slingshot, he admitted to pelting the speed camera van with glass marbles. By the time Bruce L. May of Ellicott City was arrested and in Howard County police custody Tuesday night, police said, he had revealed he had taken it personally when he was issued two tickets in the past six weeks after being captured by speed cameras. The incident near a Howard County elementary school is just the latest in a spate of Baltimore-area vandalism against speed cameras.

Five months before a Morgan State University student was charged with dismembering a family friend and eating his heart and parts of his brain, a school instructor flagged the 21-year-old's erratic behavior, describing him as "a Virginia Tech waiting to happen. " That ominous depiction is contained in a campus police report written after Alexander Kinyua allegedly punched holes in an office wall in early December. It was the first of several outbursts and violent episodes leading up to the gruesome killing last week in Joppatowne.

Hate speech is a form of vandalism. It defaces the environment, and like a broken window, if left untended, signals to other hoodlums that the coast is clear to do more damage. But unlike the proverbial broken window, which urban police departments and criminologists urge us to repair to maintain the aura of social order, nobody seems to be in much of a hurry to nip hate speech in the bud. That's because since the ill-fated attempt by several universities to regulate hate speech in the 1980s and 1990s, any discussion of reining in racist taunts inevitably degrades into charges of political correctness and ends abruptly with the invocation of the First Amendment.

The personal vehicle of Baltimore's deputy mayor was vandalized over the weekend while it was parked outside of her Baltimore County home, county police said. Baltimore County police confirmed that Baltimore Deputy Mayor Kaliope Parthemos contacted police at the White Marsh precinct Sunday afternoon to report that her 2011 Mercedes E-350 had been defaced with red magic marker and an expletive directed at "Kelly," which is a nickname. The incident occurred sometime between Saturday night and Sunday afternoon, she told police.

Baltimore police are searching for a man who torched a speed camera Friday morning on the border of Bolton Hill and Mid-Town Belvedere. Anthony Guglielmi, a city police spokesman, said the incident occurred about 7 a.m. at North Howard Street and Park Avenue. Police had no description of the vandal, but said someone threw or poured an accelerant onto the camera and set it on fire. Adrienne Barnes, a spokeswoman for the city's Department of Transportation, said the camera was a mobile device and placed on a stand on the ground; it was not on a pole.

The Carroll County Sheriff's Office has released surveillance photographs of a suspect wanted in connection with the vandalism of two Westminster-area schools on Christmas Day. Just before 3 p.m. on Dec. 25, deputies responded to a burglar alarm at the William Winchester Elementary School on Monroe Avenue just outside of Westminster. On Wednesday, Jan. 11, the Sheriff's Office released a surveillance image, and said it shows a white male, approximately 25 years old, with a brown hair, seen approaching the school from the Englar Road side with two bricks in hand.

A Baltimore police officer watching for vandals in the Dickeyville community arrested a 15-year-old boy Sunday and charged him with slashing the tires on two cars. Police said someone cut the tires of at least two vehicles, and possibly more, Friday night or Saturday morning. The incidents occurred in the 2300 and 2400 block of Pickwick Road. The community is located on the western edge of Baltimore, near the start of Interstate 70. After residents called police, an officer in the Southwestern District went on alert and kept a close watch on the neighborhood, said Detective Jeremy Silbert, a city police spokesman.

A series of cars and fences were found covered in spray paint Sunday morning in Bowleys Quarters, Baltimore County Police said. Police said they responded to three calls from residents in the 3700 block of Holly Grove Road around 6:45 a.m. They said the lines of spray paint appeared primarily on cars and that there were no suspects in the case. childs.walker@baltsun.com Text NEWS to 70701 to get Baltimore Sun local news text alerts