A couple weeks ago, leading up to our 300th Harm City homicide, a young man, just home from college, was executed for complaining to drug dealers selling out of his front yard, in the neighborhood that I lived in for 20 years, just a 15 minute walk from my current location, which may be viewed via the map link below. Neighbors described the altercation as "fussing."

Just about the same time another young family man was executed for complaining to drug dealers that they should not use his porch for their business. I would like to remind the readers that not all of our killings are of hoodrats. All of them are by hoodrats. Baltimore is living under the rule of drug gangs. They carry more clout than the police. There are no witnesses to any of these crimes that target men who simply want to be left in peace in their own home.

I firmly believe that these gang assassins are doing the work of the Federal Government, and that they are essentially on the federal payroll. That is my own crackpot opinion, but was born of living in this very neighborhood, where I unsuccessfully attempted to buy a house for 17 years, and had to face down drug gangs myself. In my case, both gangs backed down because I made heinous threats to kill them, eat their children, rape their women, and make of their house a bonfire over which I intended to roast their family dogs. This resulted in police investigating me, and of the gangsters backing off. Unless you are a full blown psychopath—which I was at the time—then you are dead meat. If the criminals think for a minute that you are law-abiding you are toast.

In Harm City obeying the law is like waltzing across no-man’s land in front of enemy machine gun positions in broad daylight.

I am currently working on a mapping project, to supplement the inadequate crime data pin reports that you may access on your smart phone. In fact, the young people in my family are bringing me their smart phones at holidays and showing me housing listings and asking for my analysis of the area before they go view the property. If you are in such a position try the flowing:

Use the Google Earth street view function and drop down out of the sky like a Martian probe and see the area from the viewpoint of the Google Earth Car. If you see individual black man standing on the corner of two side streets, groups of black men gathering on side streets, “crews” of black youth on porches, and [my favorite] twenty-something black men covering their faces as the car goes by, then you know that you are in Harm City, which can be an area in any American city, where the reign of gang terror is in force, where men who expect to be able to walk in and out of their front door without having to ask permission from the pack of hoodrats crowded on their front porch or sidewalk, can expect to be silenced, permanently.

The police officials report that all of these murders are of gang members by gang members. But, according to my information, between 20-30% of gang murders are of non-criminals, people “outside of the game” that is so ruthlessly played by the State and the gangs.

The circle on the map below marks the location where JaQuan Holt was killed in 11/14/15. He was an honor student and star athlete in High school, who had earned his CDL and was going to interview for a truck-driving job when he was killed, in a neighborhood that a resident calls “a McDonald’s drive-through for drugs.”

This is three blocks from the elementary school my youngest son attended, where I threatened a group of three teens with a razor in 1998, and also three blocks from an 18th Century family cemetery where Dominick Mattero and I were taking pictures for a horror project this summer, and where we met a large, shirtless white man with an axe shopping down a tree in his front yard.

100 years ago this was an orchard.

50 years ago it was a nice place to raise a family.

Now it is like a bizarre slum out of a Phillip K. Dick story.