Baltimore: unsafe at any speed

Baltimore: unsafe at any speed

 

Baltimore City is one of the nation’s hot zones for crime. In every category Baltimore crime rates are at the top of the list, no matter how the numbers are cooked. In 2010, Baltimore’s population hovered at approximately 620,000 with 223 victims of homicides. By 2011, the death toll from murders dipped to 197, yet its aggravated assault rate for a city with a population over 100,000 was one of the highest in the nation. In the most recent year in which statistics are available, 2012, murders again breached the two hundred mark to 217. Other crime statistics are equally as ugly including; forcible rape, larceny, arson, motor vehicle theft, violent assaults, robbery and more. Kudos to the Baltimore City Police Department, they are some of the finest people I have ever met. As a former owner of several businesses in the city, these men and women were always available to protect us whenever we called. Yet, the criminal element has overwhelmed the resources of Baltimore’s finest. An unprovoked violent attack against a tourist on St. Patrick’s Day in 2012, whose video went viral on the internet, displays the type of people causing most of the city’s crime. Over the last 30 years, hundreds of billions have been spent on Baltimore to improve its infrastructure and upgrade the lives of those who live there. Unfortunately, with all that largess poverty and drug driven crimes continue to haunt the denizens of the 24^th largest city in America. There is plenty of blame to spread around for the city’s failures; the disintegration of the nuclear family, a judicial system that favors the victimizer over the victim, an endemic use of drugs, schools that do not prepare their students for the rigors of life that reality offers and a government mismanaged at every level. As the City celebrated a great victory in the Super Bowl, multiple stabbings occurred nearby, resulting in several deaths. Crime in Baltimore never takes a rest. With recent revelations that the city is on a path to bankruptcy, less not more protection will be available for the innocents at large. Since 1960, Baltimore has lost over 300,000 residents. No doubt some of the reasons enumerated in this article drove people to leave. Could Baltimore die by its own hands, the evidence is mounting that it will. Mark Davis MD, platomd@gmail.com, Author of the book that told you lawyers are incompetent to run government entities or anything else, Demons of Democracy.