1 post tagged “baltimore”

WorldNetDaily has a story about a man who was held in custody by police, after trying to pay a fee with $2 bills. The story does a good job of pointing out the comedic and outrages nature of the story from the victims perspective; however, in my mind it exemplifies a major problem that still exists in Baltimore 5 years after I left. The police had no intention of doing their job. When I first started to attend Johns Hopkins University we were warned that Baltimore is #1 in crime, murders, STD's; and absolute last in social life. Based on FBI 2005 Statistics numbers haven't improved much if any. From a university students perspective my observations of the police were, what some could call, rather biased. While not a bar-goer, or much of a drinker, myself; it would have been difficult not to notice that sometimes as many as five police officers would camp out at each bar in midtown looking for fake ID's. It made me truly wonder about the safety of downtown and the Inner Harbour at night.

My feelings grew even more restless when the five o'clock news reported the alleged rape of a JHU freshman by the then captian of the campus Lacrosse team. I say alleged, because by the next day the police and news knew nothing of the incident they had reported on. With a little bit of money from a White Plains home, and the clout of the University, suddenly a freshman girl's trauma wasn't news anymore. A quick search finds that city attornies declined to prosecute based on "insufficient evidence." One wonders what evidence would have been uncovered by an investigation the police denied making the very next day.

I fear that this is just another example of how Baltimore cops would much rather deal with "safe" crime in the suburbs of Baltimore, then risk getting hurt trying to clean up the often blood-soaked streets of downtown. While we still haven't heard such quotes as "I had a feeling a law was being broken, but I didn't know exactly what" coming out of Baltimore, with incidents such as these one wonders just how far the police are from making up calls just to avoid the Inner Harbour.

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