Once upon a time the communist rag The Baltimore Sun, had a police blotter, in which crimes and suspect descriptions would be listed. They also had a murder map. This ended when the tourist trade was threatened by the HBO series The Wire, which accurately portrayed Baltimore Police behavior and urban black culture.
The “free alternative weekly,” The City Paper then began reporting crime instead of just being a Leftist entertainment organ. Their murder map was good.
Then The Baltimore Sun bought The City Paper, and crime in Baltimore miraculously stopped! The City Paper is now just a restaurant and bar guide.
So, on this Thanksgiving week, in this most violent of American shitties, what has been reported, and how, about violence, in the three papers that offer anything on the subject?
The Sun reports that one man was shot in the arm by “an unidentified male wearing dark clothing.”
Really? I heard four shootings this week. We are supposed to believe that this man could not identify the race of the shooter? The first thing a person remembers about an attacker is the sex, then the race, then the size, and only then the attire.
The most violent place in America seems kind of quiet.
What about the suburbs?
The Avenue News has an actual police blotter, in which they reported the following crimes in Essex [white trash], Parkville [working class] and White Marsh [middle class]:
6 robberies [mostly armed] by “unknown suspects”
11 burglaries by “unknown suspects”
1 stabbing by “a known suspect” [Known? Known to be what? Was he an orangutan, a gibbon, a human?]
1 assault by, falsely identified as a fight with, a phantom being of unknown age, race, gender, size and numbers
1 threat with an unknown weapon by an unknown suspect, attempting to rob a gas station clerk, falsely reported as an assault
The East County Times, however, reports a crime the way it used to be reported back before all violent criminals were innocent unarmed youths of unknown race, and unimportant size and gender:
“Just before 8:30 p.m. on Nov. 11, the suspect entered a Baskin Robbins store in the 2300-block of east Joppa Road in Parkville. He grabbed an employee and pressed something against her side that she thought was a gun.
“The suspect then took the employee to a register and told her to open it or he would shoot her. He took money from the register and fled the store.
“The suspect is described as a 35-40-year-old African American male, 6’0,” 160mpounds, with missing teeth. He had been wearing a blue hooded Nike sweatshirt with a blue logo and jeans.”
Good job East County Times. Since all three of these papers are printed by the same man—who is my cousin, and shall remain unnamed for his own job security—I wonder how long before the staff at the East County Times is told that they are engaged in racist persecution of the black community and must desist from accurately portraying crimes they report, in such a way as to help rather than hinder the potential victims of the criminal class?
Maybe this is it; maybe this was the last crime report that will ever go into print in The People’s Republic of Maryland.
James,
I remember the East Baltimore Guide printing a fairly decent police blotter. Haven't read it in a number of years. This might have changed though. I would be curious to see if the Harford or Carroll county local rags also offer non-vague descriptions of n'er do wells in their reporting.
Do you remember when the Sun stopped reporting on the ethnicity of criminals??? Late 80's or early 90's?
Nero
The last clear description of a suspect's race I recall was in the late 80s, and it was when the four members of The Wasted Youth tried to stab me and shanked some other dude instead.
My guess is early 90s.