{"id":76406,"date":"2022-01-22T14:56:11","date_gmt":"2022-01-22T20:56:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=76406"},"modified":"2022-01-22T14:56:11","modified_gmt":"2022-01-22T20:56:11","slug":"76406","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=76406","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cSafe streets worker\u201d (replacing police) gunned down in Baltimore.<\/a><\/p>\n

During the course of the madness that promoted \u201cdefunding\u201d or abolishing the police, there was an emphasis placed on replacing police in some circumstances with \u201ccommunity safety\u201d workers who would supposedly act as unarmed \u201cviolence interrupters\u201d and reduce the number of lethal use of force incidents by police officers. In Baltimore, Maryland\u2019s violent gang territories, an existing organization known as the \u201cSafe Streets Program<\/a>\u201d gained a lot of attention and municipal support in this effort. The goal of the program is to deploy former gang members (or \u201cformer\u201d) into areas controlled by the gangs to negotiate nonviolent resolutions to conflicts. Unfortunately, as we\u2019ve seen with other proposed \u201cviolence interruption\u201d programs in major cities, sending someone with a clipboard out to resolve a beef between gang members isn\u2019t always effective. That was sadly this case this week when one of Baltimore\u2019s Safe Streets workers\u00a0was shot to death<\/a>\u00a0along with several other people on the East side of Charm City. (Baltimore Sun)<\/p>\n

A quadruple shooting in East Baltimore on Wednesday night left three people dead, including a Safe Streets worker, and one person injured, police said. Three others were injured in separate shootings in West and South Baltimore.<\/p>\n

At about 7:25 p.m., Eastern District patrol officers responded to a ShotSpotter alert in the 2400 block of E. Monument St. Once there, officers located four men suffering from apparent gunshot wounds.<\/p>\n

A 28-year-old man was pronounced dead on the scene. Medics transported three other victims to area hospitals, where a 24-year-old man and another man were also pronounced dead.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

Just to be clear, I am not an opponent of the Safe Streets Program and this murder was particularly appalling, even in a city where murders are literally a daily occurrence. Tragically, the murder rate in Baltimore is still higher than what you see in Kabul, Afghanistan during any given week. If they can find people who are able and willing to go out there and talk some of the gang bangers back off the edge instead of settling their beef with illegal firearms, God bless them. They need to be willing to try anything at this point.<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s not as if the program has been wholly ineffective. In the specific neighborhoods that Safe Streets focuses on, there have been some measurable (if not drastic) reductions in shootings and homicides at times. Last summer, the Cherry Hill neighborhood was able to celebrate\u00a0a solid year<\/a>\u00a0without a single gun death on the streets, though that winning streak sadly ended a short time later.<\/p>\n

But this killing also underscores the fact that violent crime, particularly when we\u2019re talking about gang violence, sometimes requires a legal, violent response. The Baltimore Police have been cut down in numbers and in a type of retreat ever since the Freddie Gray riots. The city\u2019s government has spent more time trying to prosecute its own cops than the gangs that have largely retaken control of the streets in many parts of Baltimore. When law enforcement is viewed as being weakened or ineffectual, the gangs move in to fill the power vacuum.<\/p>\n

Further, while I applaud the efforts of the Safe Streets Program, it also serves as an unpleasant reminder of the bizarre nature of the crime problem in Baltimore and how the city government chooses to address it. We\u2019re at the point where a municipally-endorsed program is actually negotiating with the gangs in an effort to convince them to stop killing people right and left. This is an absolutely dystopian situation. Lawful citizens expect the government to keep them safe and law enforcement is supposed to not only deter, but investigate violent crime and bring suspects in for prosecution. When did we reach the point where the government has to send out negotiators to try to convince them to behave like decent human beings rather than murderous animals?<\/p>\n

The new Mayor and the new City Council President have now been in office for more than a year. (Though the City Council President is probably a bit distracted at the moment by\u00a0the legal problems<\/a>\u00a0he and his wife are caught up in.) Both of them, like most of their predecessors over the past couple of decades, ran for office on a promise to get the gang violence under control and reduce the rate of bloodshed. The people of the city need to hold them accountable and demand their right to step out of their homes without the constant threat of being immediately gunned down. And if these people can\u2019t get the job done, replace them with someone who can.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cSafe streets worker\u201d (replacing police) gunned down in Baltimore. During the course of the madness that promoted \u201cdefunding\u201d or abolishing the police, there was an emphasis placed on replacing police in some circumstances with \u201ccommunity safety\u201d workers who would supposedly act as unarmed \u201cviolence interrupters\u201d and reduce the number of lethal use of force incidents … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,50,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-76406","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crap-for-brains","category-goobermint","category-law-order"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76406","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=76406"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76406\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":76407,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76406\/revisions\/76407"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=76406"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=76406"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=76406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}