I continue to be fascinated as to how easily the new Speaker of the House is moved to tears.  What better way to share those tears than to cry alongside Don Draper and (shudder) Glenn Beck.

Surprisingly, though, the one thing that I expected from her never took place.  She never made that one terrible gaffe while in office.  Granted, I never found her to be a erudite speaker in public or on the airwaves.  Still, she did not “screw up” as I had expected.

There were some policy changes that I still disagree with.  While the tree-huggers who inhabit my fair city have been brainwashed into thinking that the change to trash pickup in this city was a good idea, I still despise it.  I need not look much further than my neighborhood to see the rigorous enforcement of the various laws around trash that has clearly taken place.

Now, we await the assumption of the power by current City Council President Stephanie Rawlings-Blake.  Never have I been more dismayed over this turn of events.  From the stories I have heard from her time in the Baltimore Office of the Public Defender to my personal experience attending social events where she has been present.  In all of my dealings, she has always seem to me to be detached and somewhat annoyed to be where she is.  To me, she offers nothing more than the cachet of her father’s last name.

Maybe Rawlings-Blake will be a surprise in office.  I can only hope.

I do take issue with calling Barack Obama’s victory a mandate.  There is no mandate being delivered by his victory.  If anything, I think this victory is the culmination of a long festering desire to return politics to the center.  While the President is somewhat powerless in what is legislated by the Congress, he is still the embodiment of political leadership.

Personally, I have always viewed the American body politic as a centrist-entity with conservative tendencies.  The last eight years have seen the fruits of the tree that was planted at the beginning of the Reagan Revolution of the late 1970s.  Unfortunately, the Revolution for which standard-bearers such as William F. Buckley Jr. loudly trumpeted lost its way under the current Administration and Congress.  The foreign policy of the Bush Administration is truly a mess, and it pains me to even think about it.

Still, I do not think that Obama’s victory means that, to borrow the lyrics from Irving Berlin’s “Blue Skies,” “Blue skies/Smiling at me/Nothing but blue skies/Do I see.”  There are lessons in recent history that display what happens when members of the same party control both the Executive and Legislative branches of government.  One only needs to look at the disappointing results of the first part of the first term of Bill Clinton for that lesson.

I sincerely hope that the words Obama uttered in his victory speech do not ring hollow:

Let us resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long. Let us remember that it was a man from this state who first carried the banner of the Republican Party to the White House — a party founded on the values of self-reliance, individual liberty and national unity. Those are values we all share, and while the Democratic Party has won a great victory tonight, we do so with a measure of humility and determination to heal the divides that have held back our progress.

As Lincoln said to a nation far more divided than ours, “We are not enemies, but friends… Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.” And, to those Americans whose support I have yet to earn, I may not have won your vote, but I hear your voices, I need your help, and I will be your president, too.

Even in defeat, John McCain’s words also reached a similar note:

I urge all Americans who supported me to join me in not just congratulating him, but offering our next president our goodwill and earnest effort to find ways to come together, to find the necessary compromises, to bridge our differences and help restore our prosperity, defend our security in a dangerous world, and leave our children and grandchildren a stronger, better country than we inherited.

Whatever our differences, we are fellow Americans. And please believe me when I say no association has ever meant more to me than that.

Maybe, for the first time in a very long time, our leaders can finally see beyond the differences of party–of red-state and blue state–and do what is necessary to address the important issues facing our country.

“Don’t blame me.  I didn’t vote for Dixon.”

To describe myself as non-plussed by Dixon becoming Mayor last Fall would be an understatement.  I was suspect of her and the ethics problems that had been at issue since she first became City Council President.  Additionally, I like my politicians to have above average public speaking skills, and Mayor Dixon certainly does not rank first among her peers in this category.

So, to see new coverage of the ongoing investigation into her dealings with the awarding of contacts is not terribly surprising.  What has been fascinating–and highly annoying, actually–has been the focus on the Dixon’s spending habits.  She apparently bought some fur coats, some expensive shoes, and some other womanly accessories.  Of course, if one were to read the local rag, you would find nothing but article upon article about what Dixon purchased as opposed to the investigation, its history, and other pertinent matters.  If I read another article about her expensive purchases, I will tune out this investigation.

Ultimately, how surprised would one be if there was ill-gotten gain for Dixon and her associates as a result of her position of power?  In the continuing evolution of urban poltiical machines, is this terribly surprising?  Yesterday’s Tammany Hall has evolved into today’s nameless political machine.  By no means does this make it right, and it certainly is not an indictment of every local politician.

Nonetheless, I demand more substance to the coverage of this investigation.  Would it be too much to ask to actually get investigative journalism as opposed to the style of tabloid journalism that is currently being exercised here?  Thus far, that desire seems a bit outlandish.

And that just about sums up my impression of his campaign thus far.

As everyone knows, Barack Obama won the “Potomac Primaries” yesterday.  I have to admit that I am a bit amazed at the coverage Obama has received in the media and of their fascination with his message of change.  Look at the crowds that greet his various public appearances.  I am a bit nonplussed by a candidate whose only message is that of change.  The policy geek in me wants to hear more of his plans for foreign and economic policy, for starters.  I do not want to just hear about his plans for the Iraq war.

The message of change worked for another Democrat in 1992, but Clinton’s candidacy was punctuated with policy prescriptions.  That’s part of what I want to hear, and this goes for the other candidates as well.  I wonder how much of this problem is caused more by our 24-hour news cycle and the continuing decline of quality journalism.

Photo Credit:  Kenneth K. Lam, Baltimore Sun, 6 December 2007

Just seeing the photo above in the Sun article on the new City Council annoys me on so many different levels.  Is it me, or is she just the most unhappiest-looking person ever.  It reminds me of when I observed her with her handlers at a festival in Little Italy last summer.  Never have I seen someone who exuded political ego as much as our new City Council President.  The image above seems to say “Yes, I deserve this position.  Thanks for crowning me, Citizens of Baltimore.”

Stay classy, most of Baltimore, for making bad choices on the ballot in November.

The discussion we had with the Southern District folks was a good one, and I think it was a necessary one for a variety of reasons. Here’s a quick rundown of things from the meeting.

Burglaries

• The Southern District Commander admitted that the burglary numbers in Pigtown have been pretty consistent over the last 7 years. Essentially, the numbers to this point in the year have consistently been over 100. This year is shaping up to be in line with years past, and according to him this is truly unacceptable.
• One of the consistent issues comes with not the common sense things it takes to not be robbed, but what can neighbors do to staunch the problem. We have alarms in place and bars on windows, but how does one address the brazenness of a burglar when they are willing to prop a ladder up to a second story window and enter the home that way?
• One of the other issues–aside from being a target-rich environment with folks moving into the neighborhood–is the notion of a deterrent. A large number of the burglaries are happening during the hours that folks are not around. How hard is it to get a “deterrent”?
• A problem with this, though, is that there is one (1) detective working the burglaries in the entire Southern District. Talk about woefully inadequate staffing numbers.

Cameras

• For a few years, Pigtown has had a series of cameras in the neighborhood, very similar to the cameras that are placed around downtown Baltimore. The problem is that the data held on these cameras is being controlled by one person. As a result, the desired effect of these cameras is not being felt. Essentially, they are expensive tools just hanging around. The persistence of the criminal element lampoons this state of affairs.

Information

• As mentioned before on the blog, the lack of good information available for analysis is a problem.  The BCPD has an atrocious website, and there is lots of information that should be free to the public.  Let’s face it: an informed public is better than an uninformed (or misinformed) one.  Let’s get the information out there; it yearns to be free.  In all seriousness, as the criminal element gets more intelligent, citizens should use all of the tools at their disposal to keep them informed.

Recidivism

• Another problem is that most of the folks who are committing these crimes are the same folks who have been busted for the same or similar problems. How do you combat recidivism in a transitioning neighborhood that has had crime problems in the past and is slowly turning the tide? I think part of that comes from a more active WPNPC. Our current WPNPC does not seem to be treating the criminal element that exists in Pigtown the way it should be treated. I, and others, are a big fan of “lock their ass up if they do something wrong all the time.”

We have a little ways to go, but the turnout at the meeting on Wednesday was certainly heartening. There are neighbors here who want to make a difference, and I think that working together, the neighborhood can be a better place. Pigtown has a realism that some other Baltimore neighborhoods no longer have, but there is no reason why that realism cannot be tempered with safety.

The spreadsheet gives a rather simple bar graph of the burglary trend in the neighborhood for the last 90 days. I should preface this data with a couple of notes. For one, I am only looking at one police district–the Southern District. Secondly, I am only looking at the criteria of Burglary as defined by the data stewards of this database. Thirdly, there are other districts and neighborhoods that compose Pigtown, and I am certain that I could possibly increase the number of statistics available by widening my scope to capture the larger neighborhood.

One of the things that is quite obvious is that there is no abatement in the pace of burglaries in the area. While data is incomplete for the month of November, we see that August, September, and October of this year are pretty consistent. Again, I would love to get older data to prove the theory I have had all year long, but I think that will be akin to pulling teeth. Nonetheless, for the 90 day period, there are a total of 54 burglaries.

I believe it is a fair assessment to say, however, that this trend is unacceptable. If one does a quick search on one of the tonier neighborhoods served by the same police district for the same period of time, one finds a shockingly low number of crimes in the same category. In my quick example–as I did not want to go through the tedium of copying cells of data–I looked at Federal Hill. For the same period of time that I looked at Pigtown, Federal Hill tallied 7 burglaries.

I will grant you that in some respect, I am comparing apples to oranges when comparing these two neighborhoods. Nonetheless, they are served by the same police district with the same leadership. Hell, both neighborhoods share ZIP codes. I realize Pigtown is not the only neighborhood to exhibit this kind of problem, but it is the same kind of problem that is being ignored or unheard in civic leadership circles, and until it is heard little progress is going to be made in changing the quality of life in certain neighborhoods in this city.

Behold the wonder that is the Baltimore City Police Department’s Online Crime Tracking Tool.

Getting data from this site is nothing if not an exercise in a nuisance. You can only access the last ninety days of information. Furthermore, it defaults to displaying a map of crimes committed in a region, but it does not allow you the ability to download all of the data into an easily importable format. Another limitation of this tool is that you can only select one police district at a time in one neighborhood.

I could see if there was a reason for this interface to be as bad as it is, but this interface is woefully inadequate in 2007. It would be great if I could run a SQL query asking for output on multiple neighborhoods and districts that would make up certain neighborhoods as we know them. Additionally, it might not be a bad idea for the BCPD to actually give this little server a name as opposed to exposing its IP address for the unwashed Internet masses to potentially hack.

I now remember why I easily forgot about this website. Valuable information is once again obscured by an incredibly bad interface. Job well done!