Last Friday night I was taking my coffee break up front at about 1 in the morning when a Harm County cop walked in and asked if we were having any trouble with gangs of youths. [We may not refer to them as ‘kids’ as black mothers often regard this term as a slur in the Baltimore area and will file a slander suit against any proprietor who uses the term ‘kid’ to refer to her teenage shoplifter.]
We answered, “Not tonight,” as there had been trouble earlier in the week with kids fighting, driving recklessly on the lot, and trying car doors. I stopped using my pen to take notes on the Seal Team Six book I was reading and did my best to record the cop’s monologue.
“A party just let out down the street and we have a gang of kids. I didn’t let them in the McDonalds and the drug store closed down. You cannot let them in here or they’ll just spread out and smash and grab. Is this your only entrance and exit?”
“Yes Sir,” said Bubba.
“I have backup coming. We’ll have one on the lot and one here at the door. I’m not sure if they’re from the neighborhood or from the city. If they’re from the city it could get ugly. They go onto every lot and down every street and alley trying doors. Have they been bringing in change to cash in the machine?”
“Just the other night, three of them, a whole jug of change,” answered Bubba.
“That’s mostly from cars. We have officers out their trying to break them up now, the rest of us locking down businesses. The strategy is to break them into smaller groups otherwise they frenzy. If you need anything give me a call. I’ll be out front.”
Within five minutes he had made an arrest on the lot and the property was becoming a mobile field headquarters for processing hoodlums. By 3 in the morning we had a whole squad of cops on the property, a command center for combating our feminized youth.
Although, as a loner, I am routinely harassed by cops and can expect zero help from them, when I operated a business in Harm City, they were my cavalry. I could fight guys at the door, tackle them in the store and run interdiction for vulnerable customers on the lot—and sometimes even chase guys off the property. But I was one unarmed guy. To the extent that I was successful, I was only effective because the hoodlums knew that the cops would eventually get there, and that they would back me up.
In the city the swarming tactics were pioneered by younger teenage girls. In the county it is older teenage boys. My experiences living and working in Baltimore County and Baltimore City easily equate to military situations.
In the city running a retail outlet is analogous to running an embassy while the city is being overrun and infiltrated by the enemy. You don’t get protection from the cops, but relief and counterstrikes.
In the county living in a home or running a business is like operating just across a demilitarized zone. County cops—particularly along bus lines and on the city line—swarm as aggressively as Africanized killer bees. In some cases they seek only to drive the crowds of hoodlums across the city line as there are too many to arrest.
For the most part I have been very impressed with the effectiveness of city and county cops when it comes to providing security for businesses. This makes sense from an organizational standpoint. Facility security is perfect for conventional police forces.
The differences are as follows:
1. City cops do nothing to protect homeowners, where county cops are as aggressive in their protection of residents as the city cops are of businesses. In the city homeowners and renters might as well be homesteaders.
2. County cops act as border guards where city cops exhibit no such priorities.
3. Since city cops are tasked with aggressively pursuing the Drug War* they prioritize the targeting of lone males and generally ignore groups of males. It is therefore advantageous for unarmed and armed violent criminals to operate in packs, making the city far more dangerous to ordinary citizens. On the other hand, county cops go after packs of males and teens like blue blood cells bent on stopping an invader.
4. When a city cop responds to a call his time is usually not much worse than the county cop. His problem is lack of backup. For reasons I know nothing about city cops are alone on the scene five to ten minutes into a call, where county cops are at squad strength within five minutes.
*I am giving city cops a pass here, and assuming that this harassment of lone males and their ignoring of packs of violent youths and car loads of drive-up muggers, is a reflection of the Baltimore City Police Department’s mission statement, which is certainly based on federal drug-arrest demands related to federal funding.
In any case, even though I think they exhibit questionable ethics for taking free drink and food from the convenience stores that are at their mercy, I must applaud the Baltimore County Cops of the three precincts I have lived and worked in, for operating effectively as a unit—and in quite a novel manner from a Harm City perspective—as aggressive protectors of the citizens and business owners as well.
