Baltimore Murder Charts - Year End 2010 Edition

I haven't been the best at updating my blog recently, but one of the few original things I post regularly are charts covering Baltimore murders. My sources remain Murder Ink from the City Paper and the Baltimore Crime blog.

Murder trends for 2010 were not nearly as exciting as 2009. Murders declined again, but not by a large number. Most of 2010 looked like 2009, the main exception being that there were far fewer deaths classified as homicides due to prior year murders. As I've been doing, any homicides classified due to an act in a prior year are counted in that prior year (by going back and editing data). So using this methodology I get slightly different numbers than the official tally, but I think it's better for tracking trends.

In 2009 there were officially 238 murders in Baltimore, but 14 of them were due to acts of violence from prior years, so I count that as 224 murders. In 2010 there were officially 223 murders in Baltimore, but 4 of them were due to acts of violence in prior years (none of them from 2009 though, so no upward modification). So while the official numbers drop from 238 to 223 (a 6.3% decrease), my count drops from 224 to 219 (a 2.2% decrease).

Still, we've come a long way since 2007. The 2010 total is down 20% from 2007. The improvements are pretty obvious when you look at the homicides by month and the cumulative plot of homicides for the last four years.



In fact, 2007 was such a higher total than 2008-10, it's actually better to remove it to compare the more recent years.


So what do we have? Looks mostly like stability. Sure, from 2008 to 2010 there were about 14 fewer homicides in Baltimore, a total of a 6% decrease. Not terribly impressive, even if murders continue decreasing at this rate we'll have to wait until 2017 to see murders become something that happens only every other day. That's not a terribly cheerful prediction. Hopefully the continued focus on reducing illegal guns in the city will continue to lower shootings and homicide rate will drop faster.

It needs to. Baltimore's per capita murder rate remains one of the worst in the country. At 35 per 100,000 (my math based on 223 official murders and U.S. Census estimated population for 2009). However, if you are African-American in Baltimore the per-capita murder rate is unbelievable. According to Anna Ditkoff of Murder Ink, 90.6% of 2010's murder victims were African-American. Based on Baltimore's demographics, this indicates that African-Americans in Baltimore face a 50 per 100,000 per capita murder rate while residents of other races experience a 9 per 100,000 per capita murder rate. To put that in perspective, residents who are not African-American are safer in Baltimore than the average Albuquerque resident (source: Wikipedia article on crime in US cities).

Finally, my favorite chart that I create for tracking murder trends:


Vertical axis magnified:

Links to previous year's homicide summaries:
2009 Year End Summary
2008 Year End Summary

Baltimore 2009 Homicides - Everyone CALM DOWN

So the opinion in this town seems to be that Baltimore had 238 homicides in 2009 compared to an official 234 in 2008. Nationally homicides decreased in 2009. DC was way down this year. Quick, everyone panic!!

Bulls&%*.

In 2009 we had 14 prior year homicides. That means that 224 people died of injuries sustained in violent incidents in the city of Baltimore in 2009. 4 of those 14 prior year assaults occurred in 2008. Baltimore logged around 140 fewer non-fatal shootings in 2009 than 2008. As much as critics and "The Wire" fans would hate to admit, the homicide rate is lower and this city is safer than it has been in a generation.

The Baltimore Sun ran a very good series of graphics on what homicides and shootings looked like in 2009. The Sun shows that in 2009 there were around 450 non-fatal shooting in the city. While you might be like "DAMN!", if you look at the graphic you'd realize that only 2 years ago there were 652 non-fatal shootings. That's an incredible drop over a period of only 2 years. This whole "fight against bad guys with guys" that Bealefield is always on about seems to be making a difference. Frankly, given the level of non-fatal shootings, I'm shocked we managed to make it up to 238 for the year.

Actually, that's where homicides due to prior year assaults comes in. As I stated in the intro, Baltimore racked up 14 CY2009 homicides from prior year assaults. That's a lot. Per my research of the Murder Ink archives, we had 5 prior year homicides in '07 and 6 in '08. 14 is a big deal and it skews the real measure of how deadly the city was last year. In 2007, when the city record an official 282 homicides, 5 were a result of prior year result, which is about 1.8% of homicides. In 2009, we have 238 official homicides and 14 prior year assaults, which is 5.9% of homicides.

What this calls out for, no, cries out for, is someone to track homicides based on the date of the assault! Thankfully, I am willing to do this. I've carefully researched Anna Ditkoff's Murder Ink and the BaltimoreCrime blog posts. I've spent time auditing my numbers. Lots of time. My girlfriend has been frustrated by the time I've spent on this. But I've got your answer.

Discounting prior-year assaults, there were 279 murders in 2007, 232 murders in 2008, and 224 murders in 2009 as of the first week of January, 2010.

"But," you might say, "I don't understand! You said there were 282 murders in 2007 with 5 as prior-year assaults, so why is your total 279?" The answer is that I'm keeping a master spreadsheet. So if someone died in 2009 due to an attack in 2007, I go back and add the murder to the date in 2007 when the victim was attacked.

This master spreadsheet allows me to track a number that I call "Trailing Twelve Months Homicides". This statistic does not appear to be tracked anywhere else, but I think it matters. Restarting the homicide count every January doesn't show you how you're really doing. If you start counting every January, by March you're comparing 33 murders to 30 and coming up with a 10% increase in homicides when really it was just a couple bad weekends. There aren't a lot of homicides, really, so the data is really noisy and needs to be considered over at least a 12-month time period. So I think that Trailing Twelve Month Murders really makes sense.

So, without further ado, here's the plot of Trailing Twelve Month Murders from January 1st 2008 to approximately the present:

(Click on the chart above if you want to a better view of it, Blogger doesn't do a real good job with graphics sometimes)

Anyway, look at that graph for a minute. It shows that two short years ago the Baltimore murder rate was around 275 for the past 12 months. Today it's sitting much closer to 225. Back in mid-2008 we dipped below 215 per 12-month period before jumping back up to around 230. Most of '09 held steady around 230 (the 30-day moving average never got close to 250 for all of 2009). During the fourth quarter of 2009 the murder rate started slowly sliding downward. By the end of the year Baltimore was doing better than we had since 2008.

Why didn't you know this already? Because around Thanksgiving the ME's office started owning up to all the people that died this year who should be classified as homicides but were actually assaulted in a previous year. Ok, maybe it wasn't the ME's office. I actually have no idea who actually "owns up" to those statistics, but the point is that it hit us hard in December. Between Thanksgiving and the end of the year we added 8 prior-year assaults to the '09 homicide tally. So right as everyone started paying attention to the annual total, it jumped for an external reason. Prior-year homicides took December from a total of 19 homicides (about average for 2009) to 25 (a pretty bad month for 2008-09).

So the moral of this story is that Baltimore is on the right track. We're holding steady against last year (the best year for homicides in two decades) and even if we hold steady on new attacks, we're likely to drop the total. Non-fatal shootings are basically the feeder statistic for prior-year assault homicides and those have been declining, so I'd expect fewer of those next year.

Anyway, I may well dig up some more statistics about murders, but let me end this post with a prediction: I predict that 2010 will have no more than 215 homicides. When you add in the prior-year assaults, I'll take 220 as an upper bound for the official homicide tally in 2010.

Summary graphs for the year:

Finally, for the big nerds out there, here's the summary of homicides resulting from prior year assaults:

2007 - 5 (1991, 1997, 2x 1999, 2005)
2008 - 6 (1985, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2006, 2007)
2009 - 14 (1988, 1994, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2002, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 4x 2008)

Also, here's a link to my static XML murder charts.

How can we set Baltimore apart from other cities?

Recently I've been thinking about quality of life in the city of Baltimore. Cynical people everywhere will assume that I am referring to how terrible it is, but I've actually been thinking about how it's been improving. I've been reading The Economist's special holiday double issue and they have a really depressing article on the city of Detroit and how it's basically disappearing back into the prairie from whence it came. It sounds terrible and depressing, but I can only imagine how depressing the city of Baltimore must have seemed circa 1994. I can only imagine because I didn't move here until 2000 and didn't really pay attention to the city until maybe 2005 or so. I've really only caught Baltimore on the upswing.

Baltimore is certainly not a world-renowned city, we are often overlooked for DC even in regional situations, but we've got a lot going for us. The Baltimore-Washington MSA is highly suburban and increasingly the suburbs are actually more expensive that the city (so there is actually reverse pressure on those who want a cheap house). Murders are down, even though 2009 will finish on par or slightly above 2008. Crime is down overall and although our mayor has been convicted of some crappy little crimes and is likely to be removed from office, I think we should see the bright side of this. Our mayor was convicted of SMALL crimes and will be removed from office. Cynics can say "well, that's all they were able to prove" - true, but it does send a bit of a message to all elected and appointed officials: "The mayor is going down over <$700 in gift cards, I'd better steer clear of gifts from developers this year." It's not much of a silver lining, but it shows that no one is above the law.

Anyway, on to improving quality of life. The Economist also had an article on America and why it's freaking awesome. Or something like that, because The Economist has a huge crush on America and the American way of life. The subtitle of the article was "The greatest strength of America is that people want to live." In the article they go on about how you can very much choose the life you want to live in the US. But it was this quote from the article that got me thinking:

If you like low taxes and the death penalty, try Texas. For good public schools and subsidised cycle paths, try Portland, Oregon. Even within states, the rules vary widely. Bath County, Kentucky is dry. Next-door Bourbon County, as the name implies, is not.

What is the quality of life factor that distinguishes Baltimore from other cities in the United States (much less the world)? There's what we're actually famous for (The Wire, eating crabs), what city government wishes we were famous for (the Inner Harbor, Harbor East, crime reduction, redevelopment successes), but what about the Baltimore way of life is really different?

For now, I'd say it's fairly typical urban, east-coast lifestyle without the cost. City school teachers can afford to access most of this city, afford to buy a reasonable home, etc (I know because I have a lot of friends who are or have been city school teachers - tough job, but reasonably well-paying for new graduates). But you can't effectively push that idea into the mainstream. People will instead point to the fact that there's no subway system like DC or New York. That crime is still too high. That the city government is corrupt.

We're a poor city, let's face it. We're making progress at green initiatives, but other cities are doing that too. The Circulator bus system is almost running (finally) and will provide great transit alternatives and the Red Line is looking like it might actually happen, but other, richer cities will always be ahead of us on transit. What we need is something that is not too expensive, does not rely on outsiders, and gives this city a sense of pride.

As you might have guessed, I've got an idea.

I think that Baltimore should start an amateur athletics league for the city. I would model it after Ireland's Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA), but maybe will a little less Irish nationalism. Basically the idea is that every little town in Ireland fields a team in Gaelic football and hurling (also Ladies' Gaelic football and Camogie). They play a regular season against other towns. What's great about this is that these are amateur athletes who live in the towns or counties that they're representing. What's crazy is just how successful this has been in Ireland - the number 1 and 2 sports by attendance are Gaelic football and hurling (per wikipedia)! The matches are covered in all the local papers and followed much the same way we follow college or professional sports in the US.

What if we founded something similar in Baltimore? This is a first cut idea, but what if we founded an amateur athletic league for adults with strict residency rules and played matches around the city? I'd set the boundaries as the city council districts because there are 14 of them and they are roughly in line with neighborhood boundaries. I'd say we start with popular, low-cost of entry sports that are popular with both genders and that would allow a lot of amateurs to try out. Here's what I'd start with:

1. Basketball - it's a no-brainer; most of the facilities needed already exist, a city-wide championship tournament would be pretty awesome
2. Soccer - low cost of entry, fairly popular, would get the yuppie's involved
3. Softball/Baseball - again, we already have most of the infrastructure available and it has a different traditional season from the other two

I'd say keep the rules simple:

• Must be 18 or older (to sign the legal release)
• Must be a Baltimore resident (BGE bill in your name at an address is good enough for the MVA then it's good enough for this league)
• Can not be a current or former professional athlete
• If you move to a new district, you can finish out the season on your old team or wait until next year to play
• Volunteer coaches get a guaranteed term of 2 years and are selected by city council person (this would definitely encourage interest in local politics)
• Open try-outs before each season (verify residency at try-outs)
• Players provide their own practice equipment, but districts can raise money to buy practice equipment
• City pays for referees and donates gym space for games (ideally we could get local colleges to donate gym space for championships, imagine the championship game held in Coppin State's new athletic center)
• Conviction on any drug crime means you must forfeit two seasons of all sports
• Lifetime ban for conviction of any handgun-related crime

If this works out, and I think that it might, you could expand to other sports with revenue generated from these sports (that's right, I think that this could have positive cash flow after a couple years). If you keep the cost inputs low (i.e. players pay for their practice equipment) and are able to get some sponsors for the championships and charge a dollar or two at the door, you could eventually afford to pay for more gym/field space and more referees for other sports. Eventually you could perhaps subsidize the cost of equipment for very costly (but popular) sports such as football or lacrosse. There's just no way you could ask players to front the cost of their football pads and expect east or west baltimore to be able to field safely-equipped teams.

Any extra revenue generated by these leagues should go towards the capital improvement budget of the Department of Parks and Recreation. The more popular that you make the amateur sports, the better the facilities around the city for children and adults to play sports.

I think you would also get a lot more of a city-wide sense of community. I bet the district 10 (Federal Hill) vs district 1 (Fells Point/Canton) soccer match-up would be a big draw. Probably the same for any east-side district versus west-side district in basketball. Better yet, the Fells Point/Canton team traveling to district 9 (solidly westside Baltimore) for a basketball game. Would the Hopkins undergrads be able to make the district 14 team or would they be unable to compete with home-grown talent?

Another thing that you could do with this is try to increase general health and athleticism. What if you added "Cross Country" to the sports and allowed each district to field a team of 100? Hold massive, city-wide 5k races every other week for a couple months leading up to the Baltimore Marathon?

Expansion plans:

• Start with men and women's divisions of the three sports listed. Seasons would not overlap.
• Do not need a junior division (we already have high school sports)
• Add a "master's" division to popular sports
• For very popular sports (such as basketball), consider expanding to a "junior varsity" team or even breaking districts into smaller geographic areas (I think the link to geography is very important)

Other thoughts

• Don't add too many competing sports seasons - we want to make this popular enough that you actually get coverage in the Sun, not so fragmented that no one can pay attention
• Have the men's and women's teams compete one right after the other. That was how we did it back in my high school and it helped to ensure a bigger crowd for the less popular team (often the women's team, but if the women's team is good and the men stink...)
• Get some of the professional sports figures involved as coaches if possible
• Get local bloggers and news outlets to cover at least the championships. You could probably get local TV broadcasters out to the try-outs for the first season as a novelty news story.
• Make sure that basketball is the first season, every district will field a basketball team; not sure every district will be able to find a soccer team.
• Play up cross-town rivalries, but provide adequate security

Sports to add

• Cross Country - I really like the idea of getting very large teams together (it would pull a lot of people into the competition and you'd get a big multiplier effect as they told their friend about it)
• Volleyball - could use the same equipment as basketball, but in a different season
• Ultimate Frisbee - just because I love the sport and it uses the same infrastructure as soccer, bonus: self-refereed so you save a little money there
• Golf - we have the infrastructure and it is fairly well spread out around the city; this would draw a different demographic as well
• Track and field - takes a little more in terms of infrastructure (i.e. pole vault), but a lot of it exists at high schools and could be borrowed?
• Duckpin bowling - we don't really have the infrastructure for this, but it's a Baltimore heritage thing - let's build some more alleys and really make it a city-wide passtime

Sports to avoid (at least initially)

• Football - too expensive for players to provide practice equipment; mostly only played by men
• Lacrosse - same as football, except for the gender thing
• Cycling - equipment costs are out of reach for most Baltimore residents
• Swimming - don't think we have the infrastructure (but I could be wrong?)
• Wrestling - too many referees, too few fans of real wrestling
• Hockey - not enough infrastructure, not popular here, expensive equipment
• Weight lighting - I'd be leery of this sport given the temptation of steroids and the cost of trying to drug test competitors
• Dodgeball, broomball, etc. - recreational leagues for these sports already exist and they are considered to be more about socializing and drinking than athletics; if this is to be a serious amateur sports league, steer clear of these sports

-----

Sports unite people and give everyone a great outlet for emotions. They give people a sense of pride in their community and can create community (I definitely saw this growing up in small town playing high school sports). Think about it, this is a pretty low-cost initiative that the city could start that could eventually result in a very real advantage to the city. Even if other cities eventually copied this model, I think that Baltimore, with it's long-time dedication to neighborhoods and local community could still have an advantage. Most importantly, I think it would succeed in the city better than the county, providing that extra incentive to bring people over the line and into the city's tax-base.

A Few Questions for the Graffiti Perpetrator

Dear graffiti perpetrator*,

What is this graffiti all about? A statement of black power? A request to the Baltimore PD to end any racial profiling that you believe to be occurring?

Or did you leave out a comma? Did you intend this to say "NO STOPPING, BLACK PEOPLE" to indicate that this area was off-limits to parked vehicles and African-Americans?

Or is it something more obtuse and abstract, such as "NO STOPPING BLACK, PEOPLE", by which you that the darkness is unstoppable and will overtake us all one day and you are addressing this message to all citizens?

Please be more specific when you deface public property!

Sincerely,

A Concern Citizen

* - Sorry, not going to legitimize this vandalism by calling it the work of an artist. Semi-clever? Yes. Art? No. Crime? Yes.

Stimulate that MARC train!

I saw some good news in the Baltimore Business Journal this week. The Maryland Department of Transportation has applied for $360 million of stimulus funds to be applied to commuter and passenger rail improvements. It's a laundry list of good ideas, many of them discussed the in the strategic plan for the MARC that the MTA put out a few years ago. It's great to see that we might actually get funding for some of these improvements. If this funding comes through it should help with some of the complaints everyone has about train delays and rail capacity issues. The Baltimore Business Journal article has a lot of good information on what they're looking into, but I'll highlight a few that I think are pretty interesting.

The most important is probably the $200 million to replace three bridges in Maryland. The new bridges will be three tracks instead of two, allowing for more high-speed (well, Acela at least) trains and increased passenger train usage overall. This is really an important development because increasing train capacity on these bridges is really vital to expanding train service and improving it's timeliness in the region. This is money that will go directly into engineering and construction over the next couple years and will accomplish exactly what the stimulus was meant to do - keep companies going until the economy recovers and the private sector can provide the business. It's a great opportunity to do some good infrastructure work that we'd like to be doing anyway, but might have to pay a lot more for services if there was more demand.

Maryland's Department of Transportation has also asked for $10 million to install a GPS-tracking system in the trains (sounds a lot like what I was on about on about in my complaining-about-the-MARC post).

In the category of really-important-projects-that-we-need-to-start-immediately-because-they-will-take-FOREVER-to-complete is the work to replace/improve/expand the Baltimore & Potomac (B&P) tunnel in Baltimore. This tunnel is really Baltimore's claim to passenger rail fame right now, because it is the choke point for Amtrak's Northeast Corridor (NEC). Wikipedia has a pretty good write-up on the B&P tunnel and on the original Baltimore & Potomac railroad. Basically, the tunnel was completed in 1873 and aside from some repairs and minor improvements to drainage in the early 1980's, it is essentially a 19th century piece of infrastructure. Pretty amazing when you think about it.

The B&P tunnel is a big problem for passenger rail travel along Amtrak's NEC because, as Amtrak's 2005 report to Congress on rail infrastructure in Baltimore (see page 2-16, Box 2-1) puts it, "A sharp curve at the south portal of the tunnel prevents southbound trains departing Baltimore Pennsylvania Station from accelerating beyond 30 mph. An uphill, milelong, 1.34 percent grade further constrains train performance." That's right, if you've ever thought "Hey, it feels like we're moving really slow," why heading south on the MARC, it's because that's exactly what was happening.

(Aside: That 2005 report is pretty fascinating, if dense, reading. After reading most of it one Sunday afternoon I got a much better appreciation of why we're still using such a difficult tunnel that opened 136 years ago. Turns out it's ridiculously difficult to build infrastructure in the Baltimore area due to geography - the "Fall Line" runs directly through Baltimore. The report was actually commissioned after the 2001 fire in the Howard St. Tunnel (another piece of 19th century infrastructure (completed in 1890)). When the Howard St. Tunnel was shut down due to a derailment, CSX freight trains on the south side of Baltimore had to detour west to Cleveland, north to Albany, and then head back south to reach the north side of Baltimore.)

So, anyway, this application for stimulus funds includes $60 million for studies and engineering on how to improve this tunnel. It's not going to be cheap, actual construction of a new tunnel will be in the billions of dollars. I have to be honest, I'm not super-optimistic we'll see that starting any time soon. Replacing the B&P tunnel will only shift the bottleneck to Baltimore's Union Tunnel on the other side of Penn Station. Although the Union Tunnel would be easier to upgrade because it's shorter and already has three tracks.

Anyway, there's your story for the day on how under-investment in passenger rail for the last 60 years has left us hamstrung now that we're winding down our love affair with the automobile. Don't get me wrong, I don't think we'll ever replace cars with public transit - I'm saying that America really needs more options for transportation. And if we don't start the projects, we'll never finish.

That's why I'm excited about this project, it's the perfect use of fiscal stimulus money. These are projects that you probably want to do anyway but might not get done when the economy is humming along. Once you're in a recession with a gap between possible output and actual demand and you decide you want the government to step in a provide some temporary demand until private demand recovers. Infrastructure projects like this fit the bill because they will improve passenger and freight movement capability and capacity when things begin to pick up again.

Quietly Awesome

One of the most under-appreciated things about Baltimore is out park system.  Baltimore was on the leading edge of the urban parks movement in the 19th century and it shows today. However, many of these beautiful parks were a little too “urban” for the middle class at the beginning part of this decade.  The gentrification in Canton led to the rediscovery of Patterson Park as “Baltimore's Backyard.” In South Baltimore, Riverside Park is now a popular dog-walking location in the evenings – a far cry from the drugs and crime that troubled the South Baltimore area 10-15 years ago.  Still, if your world revolves around communities that border on the harbor, you're only seeing a fraction of the green space that Baltimore has to offer.

I think that most people have noticed that Baltimore has some pretty big parks.  However, I also think that a lot of people don't spend a lot of time exploring in Baltimore.  Yes, it's a slightly dangerous city, but large swathes are safe for exploring.  I recommend bicycling around the city more, it's a great way to learn where streets go and explore neighborhoods.

Still, I didn't realize how much Baltimore doesn't suck at public parks until I spent some time on the website of The Trust for Public Land.  They have a lot of facts and reports about the state of public parks in America.  What I found interesting is that for cities with a high population density, Baltimore ranks #3 in acres of parkland per resident. Here's the top ten list:

Park Acres per 1,000 Residents
(City Population Density: High)
#1 – Washington, DC – 13.1
#2 – Boston, MA – 8.5
#3 – Baltimore, MD – 7.7
#4 – Philadelphia, PA – 7.6
#5 – San Francisco, CA – 7.2
#6 – Jersey City, NJ – 6.8
#7 – Los Angeles, CA – 6.2
#8 – Long Beach, CA – 6.1
#9 – New York City, NY – 4.6
#10 – Chicago, IL – 4.2

Now, obviously, there are two factors in this equation. The total number of park acres and the total number of city residents. In Baltimore, park acres are fairly constant (except for when some vacant lot is deeded over to the Department of Parks & Recreation by another city agency). The fact that Baltimore has lost a lot of city residents over the last couple of decades really helps bring that number up. I might be crazy, but I am anticipating that the population of Baltimore is about to stabilize and turn around. If we want to stay ahead of Philadelphia we might want to consider building some new parks. Next time we redevelop something like Harbor East, let's set aside a few acres for a park.

One factor that I think is good is that Baltimore gets on the list of park acres per 1,000 residents with a lot of smaller parks, not one large park. Baltimore barely cracks the top 100 on largest city parks (#89 – Gwynn Falls / Leakin Park). That's good because it means that the city parks are spread across the city and more people therefore have access.

Finally, Baltimore has two of the oldest city-run parks in America:

23rd Oldest Public Park – Patterson Park, 1827
55th Oldest Public Park – Druid Hill Park, 1860

So, if you haven't checked out some of these parks, I highly recommend that you do some exploring.   There are some really great parks in parts of the city that you normally don't go. Carroll Park, Lake Montibello (with a great bike loop around the lake), and even Middle Branch Park are great places to go and just be outside on a nice summer day.

Once you visit those parks, you'll probably ask yourself the same question I did - “How did we not screw this up?”  The answer actually lies pretty far back in history.  In 1859 the mayor of Baltimore decreed that no railroad would be given franchise to operate in Baltimore unless they paid 20% of gross income to the city for park building.  That's an incredibly high tax, but railroads paid it because Baltimore was such an important port at the time.  So from 1859 until the 1940's, the parks had this incredible source of income for operating costs and capital improvements.

All that history can be found in a really interesting report from the Baltimore Parks and People organization.  It's called "Discovering Baltimore's Parks" - if you're at all curious about parks in the city of Baltimore and their histories (collective and individual), then you should check out that report.

What's in a Name?

I'm sure that more than a few people have wondered about the title of my blog. Well, here's a link that explains it all: Baltimore - 'Home of 1,000 Slogans'

Baltimore Homicide Rate Update

Update (7/25/09): The data in this post is now fairly out of date. I think the discussion in this post is still relevant and worth reading, so I do recommend that you keep reading. If you're looking for the most recent data, check out here.

----

As any resident of Baltimore City knows, there are a lot of murders in this town. I remember when I first discovered Murder Ink in the City Paper years ago and first tried to comprehend the tremendous number of murders in this city. Hundreds per year! And for every murder there are how many attempted murders / shootings each year? It's just plain madness.

I was excited as anyone as 2008 progressed and it started to look like Baltimore was having an out-of-trend year for murders. Despite a few very violent months (March, June, November and December were particularly bad last year), Baltimore ended 2008 with the lowest murder tally in two decades. Baltimore's per capita murder rate is still shockingly high as there are far fewer city residents today than 20 years ago, but last year was a marked departure from the rest of the decade (as I detailed in a post in January). In that post I noted that we shouldn't necessarily lose hope just because November and December had been pretty violent and January opened with 14 murders in 9 days.

Three months later I am happy to have been proven more or less correct. One of those 14 murders was determined to be justified as self-defense and the finally 22 days of January saw only 8 murders (not awesome, but not bad either). Since January I've been keeping track of murderous events and plotting them on some charts. A couple weeks ago I figured out how to make some nice Flash graphs of the data and put them up on a static website. In this post I publish some data as of 3/27/09, but the charts on my 2009 Baltimore Murder Charts site are updated approximately weekly.

According to my records, 228 murderous acts occurred in 2008. The official homicide tally was 234, but there were 6 people who died of injuries sustained in prior-year incidents. Since I'm interested in how deadly the city is right now, I don't track those numbers (although the FBI and others do). I have the opportunity to go back and edit my data, so if someone dies in 2009 from 2008 injuries, I'm going to back and count that on the date the incident occurred instead of the when the death occurred.

Anyway, the main reason I wanted to track murders this year was to be able to produce a "Trailing 12 Months Murders" chart. I think it's pretty informative and gives a good feel for whether or not murder rates have increased or not. For example, based on a very violent January, there is a perception that Baltimore is not going to be able to maintain last year's reduced murder rate. What I think has been under reported is that February 2009 had only 15 murders, the same number as February 2008.


As you can see from the Trailing 12 Months (TTM) Murders chart above, we're really not seeing any leap in violence this year. In fact, if you use a 30-day moving window to smooth out data a little, it's varied between 233.4 and 236.5. Above the 2008 total, but it certainly shows no sign of reverting to the bad old pre-2008 days of 250+ murders/year.

I think that it's important to consider some of these other graphs, just this week I heard a story on WYPR called "Murders Spike in Baltimore's Northeast District". They state that "Baltimore's homicide rate is nearly 25 percent higher then at this time last year." At the time of the story there were 47 murders in the city. Based on my records, at that time last year there were 40 or 41 murders (depending on exactly when the story was produced). By my count, that's (at most) 7/40 = 17.5% increase. Maybe I'm splitting hairs here, but I wouldn't exactly round 17.5% to 25%. I think I'd round it to either "nearly 20 percent" or "just over 15%". I guess the point of the story is that there have been more murders in the Northeastern District than normal. Still, I don't see why WYPR would want to talk up the homicide rate in Baltimore. They do note in the story that "Like other districts, the Northeast has seen a decline in robberies, burglaries and assaults from the same time last year."

So basically what the numbers show is that crime is down in Baltimore, except for some isolated, noisy statistics like murders in a certain district. Why not just be happy that murders are pretty much within the noise of last year's number - which was the lowest in two decades?? I guess I just don't understand WYPR's angle. 2009 is just not that much worse than 2008, especially if you take a look at these charts:

I look at the data I've got on murders this year and here's what I see:

• After a bump in early January, the murder rate has been lower than last year for 2.5 months. (We were +10 on 1/9/09 compared to +5 on 3/27/09)
• If you look at how many murders occurred in the 4th quarter of 2008 the 1st quarter of 2009 looks great.
• I think we'll briefly be even with last year on cumulative murders in the first couple days in April, but probably run above 2008 until at least June.
• I see no reason to believe we won't finish the year at more or less the same total as last year -> I think we may have seen Baltimore's homicide rate reset from the 250-270 range to something in the 220-240 range.

You know, it might be just about time to end completely doom and gloom picture of Baltimore's crime rate that has become true by definition. It's bad, it's a serious problem that requires enormous improvement, and it disproportionately affects the African-American community. But it has improved in recent years. We may have to start giving the Baltimore Police Department a little credit and the fact that the city is working better with Federal law enforcement probably helps. There are also a lot of community-based organizations that have contributed to the progress that has been made. We're clearly not there yet, but I don't think that we should continue to view crime in Baltimore as inevitable and uncontrollable.

I think we have to hope that economy does bottom out in 2009 and that unemployment peaks in early 2010 (as I've heard predicted) and does not take too long to recover. Baltimore's made a lot of progress in this decade, I'm looking forward to that continuing once we get to the other side of this recession. I feel that's still the one wild card in all of this; how quickly can investment and economic activity in Baltimore recover? Can we maintain momentum and making Baltimore a nicer, safer, and more inclusive city? If that doesn't happen, if community programs start going bankrupt and can't find support, things could definitely take a turn for the worse.

Update on 2009 Murder Charts

So my project for the day has to be teach myself how to create a chart that I can update frequently and lives on a static webpage. I just can't figure out how to make Blogger work with the cool Flash-based chart that I've worked out, so I've had to sign up for another website*.

I'll post more about this later, but for now I'm just going to publish the post and update later:
You want murder charts? I've got your murder charts!

*FYI - That web hosting service is so full of advertisements, I can barely stand it. I'll have to find a better solution eventually.

It Doesn't Always Have to be Like This

In the time that I've lived in Baltimore, it's been almost true by definition that "you're never more than 3 blocks from a bad neighborhood." Tonight I was driving through the city and thought "Perhaps it doesn't always have to be like this."

When you get down to it, it's pretty incredible that I even live in this city. My parents are firmly from the generation that grew up outside the city (their parents having moved to the suburbs before they were born / from a rural area) and I think their idea of city life was cemented during the late 1970's (mid-80's at the latest). To walk after dark in an urban area is to take your life into your own hands, even at 8 PM in Mount Vernon. To me, you just have to be aware of your surroundings and in large swathes of this city you're going to be fine (although there are even larger swathes where you might want to be concerned).

So, just as my parents formed an opinion about how cities operate, I've got this picture of how cities work and I'm thinking that perhaps in a few years it will be outdated. My impression of cities (of which Baltimore is an extreme example) is that there are the "good areas" full of late-model apartments or rehabbed townhouses or warehouses converted to condos and the "bad areas" full of poverty, dilapidated housing, and crime. The transition from one to the other is very sharp (as little as a couple blocks or a bridge) and usually marked by recently rehabbed homes, construction, or real estate sale signs.

Tonight I realized that given the current financial collapse, the Baltimore real estate boom may have tailed off for good. I am still feeling slightly optimistic that Baltimore gets hurt less than the rest of the nation, so hopefully it doesn't go much the other way (I hear the B'more real estate market is holding up better than the national average). If that's true, then here's what we might see - the rich stay rich, the poor stay poor, but perhaps some middle-income neighborhoods will start to exist in between.

Seems crazy, right? For the last decade or so as fast as an area became at all reasonable to live in real estate values jumped up so quickly that only rich yuppie types could afford them. Since the rich and middle-class had been steadily departing cities for the previous few decades, that meant that they started pushing back poor neighborhoods. This has sort of ended, but if we're lucky, it won't totally reverse. If the expansion slows down then it might be possible for middle-income families to start migrating to the transitional areas near the rich yuppie neighborhoods. In time, the transitional neighborhoods could become a reasonable area.

I don't know, call me crazy, but I kind of do like Baltimore and I do want to believe that urban living can be a reasonable lifestyle in the modern world. I'm not crazy enough to think we're going to have mixed-income neighborhoods, but is it too much to dream to imagine a city with less of a bimodal income distribution?

More Thoughts on Murder - With Graphs!

After my recent post on Baltimore's low (by Baltimore standards) murder total last year, a couple people commented that we should look at per capita murders rather than the annual total.  I think that there is some truth in those comments, but after fooling around with the data a little, I can also see how you would get a misleading story.

First off, a quick word on my data sources; all data for 2000-2007 is from the FBI's annual Crime in the United States (CIUS) publication.  The CIUS summarizes the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program every year.  I'd never really looked at this before, but it's an amazing amount of information that's available to everyone.  I'm jumping the gun a little on 2008, so any numbers for 2008 are unofficial and the per capita numbers are especially suspect because the Census Bureau has not released 2008 population estimates (so I assumed no population change since 2007, which is obviously false for places like Baltimore and Detroit).  Finally, we need to remember that these are population estimates, not full Census data.  Also, I'm no trained demographer, so I'm not necessarily qualified to really analyze any of this - but I do love to make a good chart.

I chose to look as far back as 2000 because 1) that's when I moved to Baltimore and 2) after you look too far back you start wondering if you're really comparing apples to apples.  Anyway, here's a quick plot of where we've been as a city:

So you can look at graph and see that it's not immediately obvious that a reduction in murders from 261 in 2000 to 234 in 2008 might not actually reduce the per capita murder rate in Baltimore.  Before we get to per capita murders, I'd like to think a little bit more about the total murders in Baltimore.

In 2000, Baltimore was home to about 648,000 people.  At the same time East Newark, New Jersey was home to 2,377 people.  From 2000 to 2008, 2,377 people were murdered in Baltimore.  That's right, it took only 9 years for Baltimore's criminals to exterminate a population equivalent to a small New Jersey borough.  Yes, it seems silly that New Jersey have a mayor and six city council members to govern the 0.1 square miles of land and 0.04 square miles of water that comprises the borough of East Newark, but I'm sure Mayor Joseph R. Smith would be very disappointed to have his entire city wiped out. 

I'm making fun of New Jersey, sure, but the numbers really are mind-boggling.  Just trying to wrap your mind around the idea of a couple thousand murders is tough.  Here's another way to look at it: from 2000 to 2007, Baltimore's population is estimated to have declined from 647,955 to 624,237 - a decline of 23,718 residents.  Over that same time period, 2,143 people were murdered in Baltimore (i.e. the entire population of Vernon, AL).  Murders alone account for 9.0% of Baltimore's 2000-2007 population decline!

This ridiculously high murder rate is made even more tragic because of it's disproportionate effect on certain populations of Baltimore.  For example, in 2008 91% of homicide victims are African-American in a city that is only 64% African-American (source: Baltimore Sun).  It's just unbelievable; it works out to a per capita murder rate five times higher for African-Americans than everyone else in 2008!

Speaking of per capita murder rates, without further ado, here's the chart you've all been waiting for:

With the usual warnings about comparing crime statistics, I'm going to launch into what I think I've learned by looking at that chart.  First of all, Baltimore's murder rate has been fairly constant, even when adjusted for a falling population.  Over this time period we've looked a lot like Detroit, but I wouldn't be surprised to see that relationship loosen up over the next couple years.  Detroit looks to be in for a much rougher economic ride than we are (knock on wood).  It is interesting that both Baltimore and Detroit saw a big dip in murders this year (but St. Louis jumped out of trend).  St. Louis's trend line is a little scary because they saw a big one-year dip earlier this decade, but then jumped right back up to a murder rate in the high 30's.  Washington DC does give us a little hope, they managed to reset to a new, lower murder rate in the middle of this decade.

Other things you might want to know (but are not immediately obvious) - the city of St. Louis has about half Baltimore's population, so you'd expect the data to be a bit noisier since the murder rate LSB in St. Louis is twice as large as in Baltimore.  DC is approximately the same size at this point (because Baltimore has lost a lot of population and DC is fairly steady) and Detroit is larger.  However, I'd expect a big upward revision in Detroit's per capita murder rate because they are losing population fast enough that my "re-use the 2007 population estimate" makes the denominator too big.

Finally, it's kind of interesting how rock-steady the national murder rate has been this decade.  It's varied from 5.5 to 5.7 - which is actually way down from the mid-1980's (when it was over 8 for a few years).  When you look at the time-series data from the 1980's to the present you really start to appreciate the drop in violent crime nationwide.  This is probably why your parents worry so much about you living in the city.  Their concept of urban crime was set a generation ago, when it was objectively more dangerous to live anywhere!

As I said in my previous post, 2008 was a good year for Baltimore in terms of murders.  We were 3.28 sigma below the 2000-2007 average for total murders (although, due to the vagaries of population estimates and a falling population we were only 1.62 sigma lower than average for the per capita murder rate).  It'd sure be nice to say that 2008 was statistically significant and that something has really changed in Baltimore - that what the police are doing different is definitely working - but the first nine days of 2009 sure haven't helped (12 murders plus a shooting victim on life support).

The problem here is that for all the good work that the police may have done in 2008, 2-3 very violent months (November to now) could spell real trouble.  Many people have criticized the Baltimore Police for jumping from strategy to strategy.  If murders stay high for another 2 months, even if it's not necessarily out of trend for the last decade, there will be pressure on the police to change tactics yet again.  Those crime rate graphs are powerful tools but as the platitude goes, with great power comes great responsibility.  It is very, very easy to make a graph say whatever you'd like.

Working in a technical field, I see plots of things ALL the time.  Even though your natural instinct is to look a the pretty lines or bars or whatever, you have to train yourself to first look at the axes, at the units, at the title, and then ask whoever made the graph "Where did you get your data?"  Or "How did you calculate x?"  Contrary to popular belief, measured data is not the end-all, be-all of engineering.  Probably about half of all charts of measured data I see have some sort of fatal problem.  That's when you start to see who the really good engineers are.  The good engineers look a plot of data, even measured data, and if it doesn't match up to what their technical intuition says reality ought to look like they'll just say "I don't believe that, I think there's something wrong with the measurement."  So after arguing about it for half an hour, someone will agree to go back and remeasure.  A bad cal on the measurement equipment, a loose connector, operator misunderstood directions, measured from the wrong datum, measured the wrong channel, measured the wrong serial number, forgot to turn on the coolant, error in the test software, error in the spreadsheet math, test equipment not sensitive enough... the list of things that can go wrong in a measurement is endless.

So what does that have to do with anything?  My point is that we're measuring physical properties at my workplace.  I mean, these are things that are governed by physics, things that can't change.  The most important thing to remember in engineering is that those measurements aren't the truth, if you're lucky you get a picture of what the truth probably looks like.  So I figure that maybe half of all graphs of measured physical data are misleading or do not tell the whole truth (eventually you get there, but it takes a few iterations).  Now we're talking about something that is not governed by a physical, or even rational, process.  We're talking about violent crime and murder, so a short-term spike gets noticed.  Even if it were just truly random process, sometimes you get a clump, the human brain tries to see patterns in randomness.  But it's hard to adjust your mind to the idea that "Yeah, even if this were random, we could get 12 murders in 9 days," it's an emotional issue that skips over that logical part of your brain.  People see 12 murders in 9 days and think "Surely this is a trend!  This is a crisis!"  But it doesn't have to be.  It could just be a random coincidence.  Just looking at the graph doesn't tell you the story.

Finally, murders are not caused by a mechanistic, or even rational, process.  So to some extent, saying "We followed X police procedure and saw a Y% reduction in murders" is a worthless statement.  There's a correlation all right, but is there a causal relationship?  Murders are not one of those things that you can afford to have a control in your experiment (not that there are not advanced statistical methods that professionals can use to evaluate procedures that do a better job of controlling for other variables).  My advice would be to take a look at how other forms of crime change, because some crimes are more rational that others.  I may yet do this, but I'm also afraid that any improvements made by the Baltimore PD might be swamped out by the huge effect of the recession and increased unemployment.  

Overall, I sure hope that they give Bealefield a little while longer to apply his strategies before forcing him to change to something new.  I like a lot of the much-reported ideas (closer work with the state's attorney and US district attorney, sending repeat gun offenders away to federal prison for longer sentences, working harder to prevent domestic violence before it turns into assault/murder, focusing on arrest warrants for violent offenders) and would like to see how they turn out.

Ok, time for one last chart even though I've said about graphs and statistics are often misleading (every engineer can tell you about the time they passed some product because 4 out of 10 tested perfect only to find out later that 5 of the other 6 would have failed).  I mean, despite all their drawbacks, a good plot or graph can sure be interesting.

(On the plot above I am counting murderous acts that occur in that year, so if someone dies of injuries sustained in prior year violence they are not counted.  Since I have this all in a file now, if someone dies in 2009 from 2008 injuries, I will update my 2008 murder count instead of 2009 (this is the opposite of how Baltimore's PD (and I think the UCR) count murders)).

PS - I spent so much time on this post, I made a PDF version of it that is easier to read.

The Wire Nostalgia

So recently I've been re-watching The Wire with my girlfriend (she's never seen them).  I'm watching Season 3 for the first time in like 2 years, it's awesome - I forgot how good Season 3 was.  As I re-watch it, I think Season 3 was really the peak of the show.  There are so many plot lines going on simultaneously yet you can still follow each of them very easily.  Season 4 is definitely a good one too, I'll be re-watching it next so I'll decide for sure then which one is better.

There is no chance that Season 5 will over-take either 3 or 4 for favorite in my mind.

Anyway, The Onion AV Club blog pointed me to an awesome collection of pictures from the abandoned soundstage used to film The Wire.  The captions do include some spoilers, so if you haven't watched the entire series, be careful!

This is definitely a good use of the internet, this is entertainment for a minute or two for a few die-hard fans of a defunct TV show - I continue to marvel at how easily we can now document, in great detail, essentially trivial things.

Baltimore - Less Deadly, Still Dangerous

So now that Baltimore has closed out it's least-deadly year in a couple decades, it's time to reflect on what it means.  I'll spare you most of the details, they've been pretty well reported by the The Sun and the AP.  2008 saw only 234 murders in Baltimore City, which is a considerable improvement from 2007 (282) and the lowest tally since the 1980's.  However, in the same breath we should mention that shootings and other violent crime are not down and property crime has slightly increased.  However, it's a new year, why not focus on the bright side?  (Because 2009's murder #1 occurred less than an hour into 2009?)

I think there is also a little further cause to view the 234 number a little optimistically.  In that number there are 6 deaths that occurred in 2008 but were due to wounds that occurred in a previous year.  Yes, that's consistent to how things have been counted in the past, but 6 is a pretty anomaly.  The fact that there were only 228 events that resulted in a death in 2008 makes me a little hopeful.  We're still the third deadliest city in the US (behind St. Louis and Detroit, but not by much), but progress is progress.

Anyway, it certainly sounds like Bealefield (Baltimore City Police Commissioner) is doing a pretty good job.  His programs to curb violent crime started in fall 2007 and if everyone remembers, we were on track for 300 murders in '07 until they started to tail off in the fall.  November and December 2008 were particularly bad, but it sort seems like they might be able to make some progress on this.  Also, you gotta like his style: on New Year's Eve he chased down and apprehended two suspects with sawed-off shotguns!  That's right, he not only goes on patrol, but he was willing to chase a couple guys with guns.

Here's a little chart I've made that shows how murders progressed during the year.  I think I'll probably update it once in awhile when I'm curious as to how we're doing against last year's numbers.

(Source for Data:  Baltimore Crime Blog)

As you can see from that chart, June, November, and December were all really bad months for murders in this city.  I just made this chart in Google Documents (yes, I'm too cheap for Excel at home), but I think that in the future I'll pretty it up a little.  It'd sure be nice to see the 2009 line underneath the 2008 one.

Also, I think a really interesting chart that I want to make is "Trailing Twelve Months Murders" which ought to reflect any changes to the murder rate more effectively.  However, since I only have enough initiative to get data as far back as Jan 1, 2008, that chart will have to wait until later.

You know, another thing that you shouldn't discount:  2008 was a leap year.  At our current murder rate, you'd expect ~1 extra murder in a leap year.

Comment on the Red Line

If you have ever visited a major metropolitan area with great public transit (such as Washington DC, Boston, or New York City) you probably returned to Baltimore thinking "Why can't my city have efficient, convenient mass transit?"  The ridiculous mish-mash of transit modes is a joke to almost anyone who looks at it.  We have heavy rail, light rail, commuter rail, buses, express buses, and commuter buses.  Nothing connects to anything else (unless you count the stunted offshoot of the light rail that takes you to Penn Station, which I don't - see below).

In the next 6-8 years, however, Baltimore will build the Red Line.  It's actually a really good idea.  Basically it's a transit corridor stretching from Woodlawn, down Security Blvd., along the US 40 corridor through West Baltimore, cuts across downtown, Fells Point, and Canton before reaching the JHU Bayview campus.  Along the way it will have legitimate interchanges with the MARC Penn Line (in 2 places!) and the existing light rail.  Finally, Baltimore is going to invest in some transit that will connect areas where people live to area where they work and wish to go for entertainment!  It's a revolutionary concept, but let's give Baltimore the credit it deserves, as the City Paper recently pointed out, "the Red Line is, remarkably, on schedule."

In fact, this is where you, the blog-reading public, come in.  Right now we are in the public comment phase of the AA/DEIS phase of the project.  I forget what DEIS means, but AA = Analysis of Alternatives.  This is where they do a super in-depth study of the alternatives for this transit corridor.  Then they solicit community input.  Then they decide which option they will propose for Federal funding.  So right now (until January 5th, 2009), is your big chance to help campaign for a good choice.

They considered 12 different options, which I have conveniently summarized for you.  The format is "Alternative #: Title = My Interpretation"

Alternative 1:  No Build = No one wants this, but you have to do it as part of the process for getting Federal funding

Alternative 2: TSM = Don't build anything, but time the stop-lights better.

Alternative 3A-F: BRT = Bus Rapid Transit, because what we really need is yet ANOTHER mode of transit in Baltimore.

Alternative 4A-D: LRT = Light Rail; the best option

It is imperative that you go to the Baltimore Red Line website and submit a comment endorsing Light Rail, preferably Option 4C.

Pretty much everyone in their right mind realizes that 4C is the best compromise.  1 and 2 are only included for completeness as part of the Federal funding process.  Alternative 3 is included because, apparently, the Maryland Secretary of Transportation was a big fan of bus rapid transit (source is wikipedia for that).  Let's face it, buses just seem cheaper and crappier than light rail.  I don't think any upwardly mobile urban professionals have ever thought "I like this apartment because it's near a bus stop!"  But how many people do you know who live in a certain part of DC because it's close to a Metro stop?  Light rail is not as cool as a functioning subway network, but it's a hell of a lot better than some funny looking buses.

Here's a list of the organizations that endorse Option 4C:

• The Greater Baltimore Committee (a business consortium)
• The Central Maryland Transportation Alliance
• The University of Maryland, Baltimore
• Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center
• Mercy Hospital
• Baltimore City Community College
• Sojourner-Douglas College

It's pretty much the only option that is both reasonably affordable and will actually change the way people travel across the city.  It's not a completely done deal though, there is a lot of concern among community residents about how this transit corridor will work out.  However, in my view, the most important thing is that this transit corridor happens at all.  Sure, construction won't begin until 2013, but there is no way to make something this expensive go any faster.

In case you want to be more informed before you submit an online comment, there are 4 different light rail options:

A - Dedicated Surface

B - Downtown Tunnel and Dedicated Surface

C - Downtown Tunnel and Cooks Lane Tunnel and Dedicated Surface

D - Maximum Tunnel and Dedicated Surface

Here's my take on each of these:

A - Can you imagine if Baltimore and Lombard Streets had light rail tracks like Howard Street?  This is a BAD idea.

B - This is a good idea, unless you have ever been down Cooks Lane in West Baltimore, then you realize that...

C - Is the best option.  Light rail is what you want, it has tunnels to get it past bottlenecks, but is not out-of-this-world expensive.

D - Probably too expensive to get Federal help.

------------

Idiocy of Light Rail Connection to Penn Station

So it is technically possible to get from Penn Station to other places using the light rail, but my question is "Why would you?"  It's impossibly inconvenient.  It is only effective if you are at Penn Station and want to go to one of a few light rail stops along Howard Street.  Otherwise you will have to get off the light rail train you're on and wait for another train that actually goes somewhere useful.  It's design flaws like this that make Baltimore public transit a case study in how NOT to design transit.

------------

This is how the opening message on Mayor Sheila Dixon's Red Line Website:

Baltimore... We Got Next... The Next Generation of Light Rail that is.  The Red Line... OMG!

Generally I think Sheila Dixon's doing an all right job, but I think that's just embarrassing.

What is a crime worth reporting?

The Baltimore Sun has a pretty good op-ed explanation on when a crime is considered "serious" enough to be reported by the BPD.  The example they use is the "discharge of a firearm" that occurred recently in Canton but won't show up on any of their crime reports because no one was hit with a bullet.

I agree with the columnist, why can't the BPD publish a map that is updated every 24 hours that has a short blurb about each incident that has occurred, even things as small as property crime and firearm discharging.  It's not a huge technological hurdle and everyone knows that they are tracking this data.  Why not make it public information?

It's like being a vigilante, but with fewer bloodstains to wash out of your clothing

I've just been made aware of something called Baltimore John Watch and I think it's a great idea.  I'm personally pretty impressed that some people are willing to put themselves out there and identify the johns picking up prostitutes in their neighborhood.  It seems to be quite controversial (apparently the johns hate it, the prostitutes aren't big fans, the drug dealers hate it because the prostitutes have less money, and people who live nearby hate it because it's just causing the prostitutes to relocate).  In my opinion, it's great that someone is posting the license plate numbers and descriptions of people picking up known prostitutes while children are playing nearby.  I don't have a whole lot of pity for men paying $20 for a blow job from an addicted, diseased hooker.  More services for the prostitute themselves would be ideal, but it seems to me that compassion for the prostitutes and hate for the johns are not mutually exclusive.

Crazy Fun Things to do in Federal Hill

I've lived down here in South Baltimore for 3 years now, so I'd consider myself pretty adjusted to the average Friday/Saturday night in the neighborhood.  Perhaps it's more like a building up a resistance to a drug, for some reason the same ol' hit of Cross Street just doesn't do what it used to.

It was with that in mind that I assumed a Federal Hill scavenger hunt would be just like any other party.  Perhaps a scavenger hunt is going to have the same mean fun level as a normal party but a much higher variance, because I was very, very wrong.  It was probably one of the most fun nights of my life.  Sure, I enjoy drinking as much as the next guy (although, in all honesty, possibly not as much as the next guy in this neighborhood), but this party also combined two of my favorite things to do while drinking:

1. Doing things - especially active, unusual, exciting things
2. Competing at things - especially pointless, fun, team-oriented things

Yeah, scavenger hunt was pretty much the ideal party activity for me.

It also helped that it was superbly planned and organized.  Everyone met up at one house, had a couple drinks, then we scavenged, then post-party at another house.  The lists were even laminated!  There were like 6 or 7 teams of 5 to 7 people, so there were a lot of people running all over Federal Hill looking for viryta or Chartreuse (from my favorite bar - Idlehour) or someone walking two dogs.  The best part was how welcoming everyone was in at all the bars.  By the second half of the hunt, we'd show up in a bar with our laminated list looking to sing karaoke and people would be like "Oh, you're with the scavenger hunt!"

Of course, what really makes or breaks the hunt is list.  The guys did a fantastic job with the Federal Hill Scavenger Hunt List.  Check it out and see what you think.  We had from about 9:20 PM until midnight to gather photographs of as many of those items/actions/places as possible.

My team actually won with 860 points.  It was a little unfair, 6 of the 7 people on our team are at least casual runners - so we used speed to our advantage.  I was definitely in a flat-out sprint to make it to the second house on time after deciding to go for those last 10 points at 11:55 PM.

My favorite picture of the night:

Human pyramid (worth 20 points) and picture with "The J&P guy" (Pete) (worth 10 points) in a single picture.  There's also some random dude spotting us.  And by "spotting" I clearly mean "hoping to get a chance to fondle that girl's ass."

So word from the wise: if you're like me and you enjoy "doing things" and "competing at things" while having a couple drinks - attend the next scavenger hunt you get invited to.

Oh, and wear practical shoes (definitely saw at least one girl in heels for this... that team was unable to compete with our teams' highly appropriate footwear).

Do Something Productive for the Community

No time for any insightful analysis this morning, just wanted to post about an upcoming event:

Friends of Baltimore Parks and Middle Branch Shoreline Day

If you're from the South Baltimore/Federal Hill area, you've seen Middle Branch Park.  It's south across the Hanover Street Bridge from Port Covington.  Anyway, it's actually a very nice park, but has a tendency to get a lot of trash piling up on the shore.  There's a clean-up day schedule for next Sunday, May 3rd.  I wish I could attend, but I'll be out of town that day.  Anyway, just hoping to spread the word and maybe get some people involved.

Mount Vernon not Tacky Enough? Call MICA!

It's an unfortunate fact that, under normal circumstances, not a day goes by that I don't hear someone remark "I hate that Mount Vernon neighborhood, especially around the Washington Monument, it's just too pleasant!"

Thankfully, MICA has offered us a temporary reprieve from not only the beauty of the Mount Vernon Place but also from the unbearable usefulness of cutting through the park to cross the street!  That's right from March 16 through March 29, project Golden Chain Link Fence is on!

Why would MICA surround the parks around the Washington Monument in cheap chain link fence that they spray painted gold?  For an answer to that, you're going to have to go to http://www.goldchainlinkfence.com, or just continue reading.

The website claims that this fence is "temporarily shifting the way the space is seen and used."  This is absolutely true:

There's only one way into the fenced-in area!  

Also, notice their motto: "An Opportunity to Experience Mount Vernon Place from an Alternative Perspective."  I have two problems with this:

1. That's not a sentence!
2. Instead of "Alternative," I would suggest the words "Ugly," "Godawful," or "Tacky."

-----

I mean, can you imagine the brainstorming session for this art installation?

"We need to do something public!  Something people will notice!"

"We need art in a public places!"

"Hey, what about experiential art?  Something that ordinary people take part in!"

"But how can we do it on our budget?  How will be get people to notice?"

"What if we put something in there way?  Like they have to walk around it?"

"A statue!"

"No!  People are used to walking around things place on pedestals!  We need something that changes the city landscape!"

"Let's close a street!"

"Let's block an intersection!"

"What if we parallel park really poorly so that there's less parking around?"

"Bad parking...how will people notice?"

"We could paint the cars gold!"

"What if we get towed?"

"Let's tear up a sidewalk for unnecessary construction!"

"How will people know it's unnecessary?"

"We could paint it gold!"

"Aren't jackhammers expensive though?"

"Jackhammers are way too phallic anyway!"

"Wait!  I've got it!  We could put up a fence!"

"Where?"

"I don't know, like around some space!  Like it'll totally change the way people use that space!"

"Yeah... I get it!  I mean, normally it's open space, but now it's fenced off!"

"It'll change everyone's understanding of the space!"

"But how will anyone know that it's fenced off to change their understanding and not just because the grass has been reseeded?"

"We could paint it gold!"

-----

What I don't understand is how they sold this dumb-ass plan to the city.  "We can spread goodwill too by using the fence to create messages!"

Styrofoam cups in the fence to spell a word?  Really?  That's the best you can do?  Don't you go to an art school?  This is your plan for life?  You're going to make art that's good enough to be sold for enough money to feed you?  I mean, I know it's an art school, but isn't there someone there who has the job of saying "Hey, I know you mean well and you really want this to work out, but you just don't have any good ideas.  Perhaps you ought to go over to ComputerTraining.com and take their Online Skills Challenge, I hear that Microsoft Certification can guarantee you a good career in IT management."

They probably sold this to the city by not actually letting on how fucking ugly their fences would really be.  Instead, they probably just showed them pictures of the art installation that don't completely suck.  There are some installed pieces that are actually a little cool, so it's not completely a waste.

Plus, as I just learned this evening, they're tearing down the fence tomorrow.  I was up there over the weekend, when it was as ugly as it could be, but by this weekend you'll apparently be free to walk around Mount Vernon Place again.

Nonetheless, it was a dumb, dumb, dumb idea.  "Visitors are encouraged and possibly even forced to 're-see' and 're-consider' Mount Vernon Place from an alternate perspective." Seriously - just because you can make it sound pretentious doesn't mean it's art.