Are you still poking your ass out after delivering your last fart into high wind? Well then, let's move on to the small shard of substance you somehow contradicts any fucking thing in th thread to which you attempted to respond. So, put down that crush porn mag and pay attention:
Your claimed insight is that I am clueless that informant information, cooperating witnesses and a general willingness of the populace to help police address the violence is elemental to solving crime. You do this to suggest that the problem in Baltimore is not the drug war...
...as I assert, but rather that the folks being policed are to blame because they won't assist the police in protecting them. That was your blurted attempt at argument in sum. Except, yeah, you forgot who I was and that I spent a year in the homicide unit to write a book and...
...a second second year on a drug corner for another, and fifteen years covering city violence for the newspaper, and so your imagined target hasn't repeatedly asserted in print time and again, over and over, that a cop is as good as his CI and that detectives solve crimes...
...when the phone rings and that good cops talk to people and find out what they don't know. Okay, but what's even more incompetent on your part is that you read, I assume, the thread to which you attempted to respond, and...
...read right the fuck past that part about changing the mission and re-emphasizing intelligence gathering in the department, which of course means giving primacy to information, informants and developed sources in communities. Meaning, I fucking said it plainly. Now then...
...why can't the Baltimore police do this anymore. Well, I can help you with that directly -- assuming you aren't completely beyond anyone's help. In 1988, when I was in the homicide unit for a year, I could sit at a desk with bad coffee and listen to Frank Barlow or Ed Brown...
...or any one of a half dozen veteran investigators complain ad nauseum about the decline in cooperation throughout the city, about how the phone didn't ring with tips and identifications as it used to, about how refusing to cooperate with the police was becoming increasingly...
...a problem. It wasn't like the good old days even a decade earlier when the phone rang off the hook in the homicide unit and the clearance rate was, wait for it, 90 percent. That's right. In the early 1970s, at the height of Baby Boom demographics, when a huge lump of...
...young males were cluttering the criminal justice system, Baltimore police were able to close 9 out of 10 homicide cases. 15 years later and two decades after Nixon declared the War on Drugs -- which, mind you, Bob Erlichman has openly acknowledged was declared as a wedge...
...issue to split the American left and marginalize minority populations more vulnerable to that war. The motherfucker actually said it aloud. Look it up -- Baltimore had fully engaged in that war and the city was ratcheting up narcotics arrests and corner sweeps that....
...produced not merely drug cases, but thousands and thousands of loitering or failure to obey arrests, "humbles" in police parlance, that sent people -- drug runners, touts, passing pedestrians, school teachers, retirees -- to Central Booking for no fucking reason...
By the time Martin O'Malley -- a Democratic mayor, because again, as in the thread, I have zero interest in doing anything other than condemning both political parties for buying into this shit -- was trying to become governor and doing whatever the fuck he could...
...to claim a victory over crime in Baltimore, the BPD was making 110,000 arrests a year. Let's pause at that number because at the time, there were 630,000 residents in Baltimore. So many people were being thrown into jail vans so fast and for so little that the...
...State's Attorney had to station a prosecutor at Central Booking 24-7 to sift the bodies. And so many criminal arrests were ridiculous on their face that tens of thousands had the charges dropped right at intake if they would only first sign a waiver promising not to sue...
...for false arrest. You don't believe it? Okay, look up the city's settlement with the ACLU where they acknowledged this shit and finally promised to stop, which they did once the gubernatorial election was over and O'Malley no longer needed to fret the crime stats...
In any event, what the fuck do you think happens when you make mass arrest your goal and policy as a police department? For one thing, you have to lie about the legitimacy of your probable cause in court on a routine basis because there is no probable cause to being...
...on your own rowhouse steps and being arrested for "Loitering in a Drug-Free Zone." Yeah, that's right, Baltimore lawmakers declared much of the inner city to be a drug-free zone and claimed that police had cause to arrest anyone loitering there. Even residents...
Prosecutors of course knew that statute was ridiculous and unconstitutional, but police kept using it nonetheless because the stats, for them, counted. I stood in the narcotics unit as early as 1990 and watched the commander proudly display a chart that showed that if they...
...could manage 54 drug arrests citywide every day, they could beat the all-time record. Stats were promotions and overtime and court-pay. Never mind the quality of the arrest, or the effect on anyone's post or community, or what police might otherwise be trying...
...to accomplish to reduce crime and serve their city, no, they needed to make a record number of drug arrests. So guess what? No need to learn how to target violent offenders, or cultivate informants, or learn how to write a search and seizure, or even debrief arrestees...
...All that shit is hard and it requires skill sets and takes time. Why do that when you can be paid and promoted by going up to corners, jacking up a dozen guys and going through their pockets. Why bother learning the 4A or how to testify in court without perjuring yourself....
...when you can become a sergeant and lieutenant just for drug warring and filling wagons. Except those sergeants and lieutenants were the people who would be running homicide squads and robbery squads and training the next generation, and all the actual skills required to...
...fight crime in Baltimore were pissed away in two generations. That's one thing that happened. The second dynamic is the one to which you allude and to which I acknowledged in the original thread:
When you lock up 110,000 a year in a city of 630,000, and you lie on many of them in the charging documents, arresting them for horseshit, you are no longer simply policing criminality, you are at war with many of the very people you want to help you, destroying your credibility.
Mind you, police need to make arrests -- essential arrests -- but if you grab everyone, on every humble and even manufactured charges, as happened -- then you are taking many ordinary people -- and also the fathers, brothers, sons, cousins, friends of many other ordinary people..
...who now know that the police lie and lie routinely, that they have no regard for the communities they police and that they see everyone as fodder for a police wagon. So the calls stop coming to homicide and now the clearance, by the end of the O'Malley era, is hovering at 50%
...and now, today, at around 30%. And prosecutors can't voir dire 12 Baltimoreans without discharging 140 or 150 others who have been arrested on bad charges or who will acknowledge that they have a past in which they no longer believe police testimony....
...and yes, "stop snitching" becomes a rallying cry because it's now been proven for decades that the police are not trying to protect any real estate or serve any community, but are chasing stats and pay only. Hell, the last three years has shown that in Bmore, the cynicism...
...accelerated to the point where whole plainclothes units were not only stealing cash off drug dealers -- an ancient problem -- but off suspects, absent charges, and stealing drugs from dealers and then selling them back on the street. You can look that up as well. The Drug...
..War destroyed policing in my city. It solved nothing. It did not make drugs less available or damaging. It simply devoured civic treasure, brutalized thousands and ignored every actual crime, with felony arrest rates collapsing for everything from murder to burglary....
...and it butchered whatever elemental trust or even relationship of necessity that existed between inner-city neighborhoods and law enforcement, because in the end, there was no discernable difference between the BPD policing West Baltimore and the South Africans...
...policing Soweto in the 1980s, or the Israelis on the West Bank now. They were not policing shit. They can't arrest people for crimes or protect anyone's home or business. All they do is snatch bodies and pull stats. They are an army of occupation, and an incompetent one.
So, sweetpea, let's leave this up her as a means of responding to every idiot who comes on this thread to blame the people being so badly policed for the failure of our civic institutions to do their job -- but also a national strategy of drug prohibition that those...
...followed with vigor and devotion for fifty years. This came from Washington and from both parties. It began with Nixon, was bumped by Reagan and Clinton both and every Senator save five from both parties voted for the 1994 omnibus. It defies the weak-shit sniping of useless...
...ideologues. And I honestly don't give a fuck who you are unimpressed with or of what you can be convinced in posting this thread. You've been used as a prop only. Which, based on your performance, thus far is about all you seem good for.

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More from @AoDespair

10 Jun
You clueless wonder. They reached a breaking point because the BPD cannot solve violent crimes and arrest those offenders in meaningful numbers. Why? Because we trained the last three generations of cops to make horseshit drug stats and not to do essential police work...
Baltimore is a city in which we spent decades drug warring and mass incarcerating our way to a 350-percent increase in drug arrests while the clearance rates for murder, rape, robbery, and agg assaults collapsed by more than 50 percent. Why? Because we lost ourselves...
...clearing corners and throwing everybody into jail wagons and promoting and paying the cops doing that bullshit. Meanwhile, sergeants and lieutenants couldn't train a squad to retroactively solve a crime or properly protect a post to save their fucking lives...
Read 16 tweets
3 Jun
Thread: Grand and bittersweet that Baltimore now has the full answer to one of its most quaint and enduring crime mysteries. Christine Tkacik did the best thing a reporter can do. She went back to ask again, and finally, for the family, it was time.
news.yahoo.com/baltimore-bloc…
2) Salsbury's whereabouts were a source of fascination if you were a police reporter in Baltimore and in the 1980s and early 1990s, I bought drinks now and then and tried to stay friendly with Pam Gail, his former girlfriend and ex-burlesque queen. Salisbury left her...
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Read 15 tweets
6 May
Short thread:
Interesting. Netanyahu's confidence and bluster in stiff-arming any two-state solution to the Palestinian question was predicated on Israel's emergence as the first "Jewish-Sunni" state -- a backchannel alliance with the Saudis and Egypt against Iran...
...in which SA, Egypt and the Gulf States were willing to de-emphasize the Palestinian cause while Israel delivered for them as a bulwark against Iran. With the Sunni flank secured, Netanyahu could bluster and middle-finger and settlement-build as if he was playing...
...the long game. But that requires a few things to continue: 1) The Shia-Sunni divide isn't ever pacfied or bridged. 2) The U.S. continues to go all-in on combatively engaging Iran and giving the Saudis no reason to stand down or compromise with Iran. And 3)...
Read 8 tweets
29 Apr
1) Thought we could just let this empty-suit, grifting, self-absorbed sociopath ooze into oblivion, but no, the bloated mook keeps blurting out horseshit to whatever lickspittle will take his calls. So, to wit, it's time to put this vaccine miracle narrative to rest. To wit:
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3) ...that medical researchers had been hard at work studying the SARS-family viral genome ever since the appearance of it years ago, so that when this variant appeared, the research was already well on the way to identifying its every characteristic and vulnerability...
Read 9 tweets
10 Apr
A thread on the legislation that would repeal the Police Bill of Rights in Maryland, why Governor Larry Hogan is no defender of good and honorable police work when he attempts to veto that legislation, and why the General Assembly should override the veto:
First, and this is based on an observed year inside the Baltimore Police Department's homicide unit and about two decades of covering the issue in that city: Even without the advantage of the existing Bill of RIghts, law enrforcement officers....
...operate with two incredible advantages in any attempt by the public to regulate or oversee their use of force against citizens. The first and greatest advantage is the legal hole -- so large you can drive a jail van through it and not scrape a lawyer on either side --
Read 32 tweets
3 Apr
Maryland's Republican governor has done three things remarkably well in order to secure his incumbency in a Democratic state. 1) At the beginning of his term, he fought a cancer diagnosis with courage and grace. 2) He has spoken out against Trumpism just enough to please Dems...
...but never enough to impair his GOP cred. It takes a callow, calculating man to arrive at the binary moment of the 2020 general election and write-in Ronald Reagan on his ballot. And 3) He has taken every opportunity to exacerbate and advance Maryland's long-standing...
bipolar political geography by shitting on and misusing Baltimore, its needs and realities at every possible opportunity to the quiet satisfaction of the populous Washington suburbs - a region in which a mass of voters enjoy the circumstance of being oriented toward...
Read 6 tweets

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