Friday, February 18, 2005

A once proud city...

An OP/ED piece in the Baltimore Sun talks about the embarassing murder rate in Baltimore city, and compares it to other cities (and mentions thier outrage at murder rates about half that of Baltimore).

There are a number of issues at work here. I think the main one is the huge drug problem in the city, exacerbated by the large numbers of un/underemployed and unemployable. I'm not sure what the solution is, but the decriminalization of drugs would be a start. I also think some crackdowns on other property crimes might help, as well as the citizens taking responsibility for what happens in their neighborhoods. We can't wait for the police to show up to run off hoodlums - we need to be able to do it on our own.

What I find more interesting is our acceptance of these statistics. The murder rate here gets the occasional mention in the news, but not much noise is made. I guess that has something to do with the fact that the people dying are those in the drug trade, and maybe we don't have much of a problem with drug dealers killing each other off.

I bet it gets more play when the Mayor runs for Governor.

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