When Biden took office, one of his first acts was the elimination of our border security. Like a power-hungry dictator, Biden simply decided to ignore our immigration laws. His catastrophic border policy resulted in untold millions of unidentified foreign citizens from around the world pouring into our country. Its impact is now being felt in cities across the country. The worst is yet to come. PETER LEMISKA - AND WE'RE ALREADY THERE!!!
Wednesday, January 1, 2020
3 MORE KILLED IN RAT INFESTED DEMOCRAT PARTY CONTROLLED SANCTUARY CITY BALTIMORE
Baltimore crime crisis: How about trying something that worked before?
Crime scene tape stretches across Christian Street at the scene of bloodshed following a shooting at a Southwest Baltimore corner store. (Karl Merton Ferron / Baltimore Sun)
You get a pastor to open a church on a weeknight. You have parole and probation agents identify 20 people they worry about — those who are unemployed or underemployed and who previously were incarcerated for robbery, assault or any crime involving a gun — and order them to the church.
You get the U.S. attorney for Maryland and one of his assistants; the Baltimore state’s attorney and one of her assistants; the police commissioner and one of his commanders; the Maryland attorney general and one of his deputies; the mayor, someone from the office of employment development, and five experienced social workers on loan from each of the surrounding counties.
You bring them all into the church to face the 20 parolees or probationers and, over the next hour, these officials lay down the law: “If you get caught carrying a gun in Baltimore, because you are a felon you will go back to prison. If you commit another crime of violence — a carjacking, for instance — you will be prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney and go to a federal prison.”
You hand out a list of crimes and their penalties. You provide a few examples, with mugshots, of Baltimore felons now doing time in prisons far from home. You present reality in the harshest terms: Those assembled face life in prison or death in the streets.
You do this every other week, with different groups, all year.
Ex-offenders in their 20s or 30s are potential re-offenders. They need to be told about the penalties. They also need to be encouraged to build a new life, and to take advantage of the help being offered in the church.
As Baltimore ends another year of insane violence, with a triple killing on 43rd Street and a depressing per capita homicide rate overall, I have to offer something, and the idea here is intervention. I’m an intervention advocate.
Now, the kind of intervention I described for those on parole or probation is not new, and it’s not my idea. But it was tried in Baltimore before and it worked. It had some persuasive effect on violent offenders who might have offended again had they not heard about punishment directly from those who could deliver it.
The last time this type of effort had the coordinated support of state, city and federal partners was the last time Baltimore’s annual death toll from homicides was under 200. The program, launched when Rod Rosenstein was U.S. Attorney for Maryland, was most effective from 2006 to 2012. Murders dropped by 30 percent, shootings by 40 percent and adult arrests by 43 percent. Homicides hit a three-decade low of 197 in 2011. The only extra cost for the program was a federal grant for the salary of an ex-offender who served as a mentor for those who participated.
We have the interventionist approach in place in certain areas of the city. Safe Streets does good work, resolving conflicts. Roca focuses on getting young offenders on a better track. But we do not have the kind of go-to-meeting, come-to-Jesus confrontation I described above taking place on a regular basis and on the scale that is needed.
I put it out here again because, as a citizen of Baltimore, I have to offer something. The year that just ended, measured by the number of people who were shot and killed, was horrible. Things got worse, not better. But we can’t give up. This is our city. We have homes and businesses and Lamar Jackson here. We can’t all just move to Hickory.
The next election for mayor and City Council takes place on April 28. It is the most important municipal election in nearly 50 years. Let’s not settle for weak or suspect leadership this time. If we think the election won’t matter, or that there’s no hope to end the violence and move toward a relatively peaceful and progressive city, the crisis will continue.
We have to pull out of this tailspin. Electing a Type-A mayoral candidate who sees victory in April’s Democratic primary for what it is — essentially her or his first day in office — will send a signal that the days of low expectations and failure could be behind us.
Stemming violent crime must be the next mayor’s top priority.
And candidates need to describe their ideas.
I have already written a couple of columns on candidates Thiru Vignarajah and T.J. Smith. I will get to others soon. I’m told City Council President Brandon Scott will release his plan on crime on Thursday.
A “call-in” program, as I’ve described it, is not the single answer to the crisis. Baltimore police obviously need to arrest more of the people doing the shooting and killing across the city, and prosecutors, starting with the state’s attorney, need to make clear that convictions and harsh sentences are what violent criminals face.
But that is not clear right now. The Baltimore Police Department’s clearance rate on homicides is dismal, and the state’s attorney generates more attention for announcing exonerations and telling us about allegedly untrustworthy cops than she does for bringing major criminal cases.
In 2020, the message needs to change: If the city can’t close a case against a violent suspect, the feds will, or the Maryland attorney general will, with an enhanced staff of prosecutors in the offing. And the consequences will be severe.
Making that clear to the public is important, but not half as important as making it clear to ex-offenders one trigger-squeeze away from their old, bad ways.
3 killed, 1 injured in second multiple shooting in final weeks of violent year in Baltimore
Baltimore Police Commissioner Michael Harrison holds a news conference about the three people killed in Baltimore last night.
Down York Road, not far from the intersection of East 43rd Street where three men were fatally shot and another seriously injured during a late-night shooting Monday, Lisa Jones asked anyone who will listen to bring an end to the city’s violence.
On the 500 block of East 43rd St., the crime scene tape and bloodstains have largely been cleaned up from the residential homes that police had combed over the night before, looking for clues to why the four men were shot inside a North Baltimore home. Customers were already back at the 43rd Flavor Barber Shop and Beauty Salon at the corner of the street by Tuesday afternoon, not 1,000 feet away from where the shooting occurred.
Jones, the director of Safe Streets Baltimore for the city’s Woodbourne neighborhood, had a simple message that she yelled over a speaker outside on York Road, as other speakers spoke about piercing through a sentiment that the city has become numb to the violence.
“It is not acceptable for us to shoot each other," she yelled into the microphone, eventually leading a gathered group of about 50 people in chant as drivers honked their horns as they passed by.
“It is unacceptable for us to hurt each other. No more mothers should lose their children,” she said.
Safe Streets Director Dedra Layne speaks about the triple homicide on the 500 block of E. 43rd St that took place Monday evening.
As of Tuesday afternoon, at least 349 people had been killed and more than twice as many hurt in shootings in Baltimore in 2019. The city recorded its highest murder rate per capita this year, and homicide detectives have struggled to solve the cases, clearing less than a third of them, one of the unit’s lowest success rates in three decades. The city was also nearing the all-time record of 353 homicides from 1993.
Police Commissioner Michael Harrison said Tuesday that responding officers located three men suffering from gunshot wounds inside a home in the 500 block of East 43rd St., off Greenmount Avenue, in the North Baltimore neighborhood of Wilson Park. Two men were pronounced dead at the scene, while a third man was taken to an area hospital where he died. The fourth victim, who is in serious but stable condition, arrived at a hospital with gunshot wounds about 10 minutes after the shooting, police said.
Police said that all of the victims were shot inside a home, “which means the perpetrator was likely known in some way to the victims and was allowed entry into the residence," Harrison said at a news conference at police headquarters Tuesday morning. He said he did not know how the victims knew each other, but responding officers found no evidence of forced entry.
At the Safe Streets rally on York Road, those gathered discussed what they knew about the victims, if anything, as speakers looked to address a culture of violence that’s increasing to record highs.
“We have to send a message, loud and strong. And the message is violence is not normal,” said Dedra Layne, director of Safe Streets Baltimore.
“We all have the capacity to love somebody, and that’s the thing we’re not talking about, but that’s the thing that’s required,” she added.
City police said 44 other homicides this year occurred inside a home, which Harrison said generally indicates the perpetrators were likely to be known to their victims. The majority of the killings — 204 — occurred on the street, according to department figures.
Harrison has regularly pointed to the city’s culture of violence where shooters feel they have few consequences and readily solve disputes by picking up a gun.
“This problem by in large are between people who know each other and are solving their conflicts in this kind of way, with gun violence,” he said.
While no suspects have yet been identified, Harrison assured that detectives were working to collect all possible evidence, and has asked anyone with information to call homicide detectives.
The day before, Harrison joined Mayor Bernard C. “Jack” Young for a year-end news conference where they discussed recent efforts put in place to reduce violence, including increased coordination with state and federal law enforcement, a focus on data-driven policing and clearing more cases to get those committing the violence off the street.
Baltimore Police Commissioner Michael Harrison reflects on the past year's violence in the city, and discusses crime fighting strategies for 2020.
Amid the rising relentless violence, and the additional challenges brought by implementing reforms required by a federal consent decree, Harrison has become a regular target of the police officers’ union.
“Yesterday’s Mayoral press conference is just another example of how out of touch this administration has become. This is not the first year we have had over 300 homicides,” leaders of the police officers union wrote in a statement on Tuesday.
The union leaders also bemoaned the decline in the department’s ranks.
“Our patrol ranks remain hundreds of officers short and our detectives are handling caseloads that would make law enforcement experts gasp if they knew the volume,” they said.
When asked about the criticism Tuesday, Harrison agreed with the union on some concerns, including a manpower shortage, which he said they are working to address.
“I remain laser focused on providing the leadership the men and women of this department and the citizens of this city need and deserve,” he said.
The city and police department have launched an aggressive marketing campaign to attract new officers. Harrison said previously the department has seen a sustained spike in applications but those candidates have not yet gone through the hiring process, and it’s unclear whether the campaign will bring new, qualified officers.
Harrison also previously said the department has transferred 12 new detectives to homicide to help reduce caseloads to help improve the clearance rate, which is just 32%, which is lower than previous years for the department and the national average for cities of a similar size.
Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 3 President Sgt. Mike Mancuso said in a separate statement that the clearance rate has dropped because the use of criminal informants has “dropped drastically.”
Mancuso said fewer informants are used because prosecutors are charging fewer misdemeanor and some drug-related felonies, which have been used as leverage in larger cases.
Police face an uphill battle getting witnesses to cooperate because they are fearful of retribution and distrust police. Many of this year’s homicide victims, according to the department’s statistics, have been arrested in the past. About 150 of all the victims have been arrested for gun crimes and more than 130 have been previously arrested for violent crimes. About a third of the city’s victims, according to police, have belonged to a drug crew or gang.
Harrison said he believes that when the department improves its community engagement efforts, it will encourage witnesses to come to police with information, and help investigators to close cases. Making homicide arrests will get those committing violence off the street and serve as a deterrent to others, he said.
At the quadruple shooting scene on East 43rd Street, tinsel, garland, Christmas lights and red bows decorated the porches of several nearby houses.
A 54-year-old man who lives around the corner on York Road said he awoke to the sound of a barrage of gunshots late Monday and rolled out of bed and onto the floor for cover.
“It sounded like it was coming straight to my room,” said the man, who declined to give his name out of concern for his safety. “It’s just crazy.”
Wendell Stewart, 57, who lives on the other end of the block on East 43rd Street, hadn’t heard the gunfire. But he walked past a pair of purple paramedic’s gloves left on the sidewalk on his way to catch a bus Tuesday morning.
Stewart said he remembered a shooting nearby in 2016, when five people were shot during a Memorial Day cookout. Still, the latest multiple shooting, down the street from his front door, was a stark reminder of this year’s persistent violence.
“It’s surprising, so close to home,” he said.
Jim Mullen, 53, who lives a few blocks away from the shooting scene, said he’s seen the neighborhood deteriorate over the last 10 years.
“You don’t want to be out here when it’s dark," he said.
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