I have been spending most of my time indoors, leading the life of a literary hermit, doing solo training at the gym, dedicating little of my time to researching the crimescape of Baltimore, other than in mapping the town block-by-block, as a public service, an effort that seems to be three weeks from release in this first edition.

From speaking with people who are on foot more than I am, and checking in the smaller community news papers, we are looking at a focus in the City itself on property crime, due to the decreased mobility of police during the blizzard and the pathetic half-assed clean-up, that is still not complete nearly two weeks on, with warm weather for half of those days. The fact that hoodrats are not, apparently, all-terrain bipeds, but pure pavement crawlers, has cut down markedly on beatings and muggings in the city, with no mob attacks I know of over the past two weeks. Part of this is due to schools being closed for a week.

In Harm County, however, the Baltimore City Housing Authority initiative to buy houses and pay for rental space in outlying municipalities is paying off. Shootings in the Essex precinct are up. Home owners and renters are fleeing Essex faster than any other county precinct. Armed robberies and home invasions are up across Eastern Baltimore County, although they are being reported as simple assaults and burglaries. Essex was fairly well been abandoned by the police at night, ever since the April 2015 race purge, during which not one single Baltimore County officer was seen on patrol by myself or anyone I spoke with for a full week, as gangs of armed black men prowled main streets and beat lone white men with impunity—none of which was reported through hospital channels or in the papers, even the local papers—as resources are diverted to Towson. In fact, my son is now moving from Essex to Towson, in part, for this reason.

Eastern Baltimore County is being abandoned by county police even as:

1. Resources are diverted to the Towson City Line

2. Record numbers of Baltimore City welfare families are being resettled in Eastern Baltimore County [the Dundalk, Essex, White Marsh, Parkville precincts]

3. Actual violence has doubled or tripled in Eastern Baltimore County and stayed static in Towson [the County Seat].

4. Violence is not decreasing in Baltimore City, other than the winter weather event

5. Police in Baltimore City respond to 911 calls at less than half the frequency, do not check 311 calls until days later, and are observing no-go zones where no violence that does not produce a body is reported.

6. A 20-agent Federal task force is helping with major crimes.

7. Baltimore County is forgiving the roughly quarter-million dollar debt of Baltimore City for help during the riots.

8. BPD tactical caravans—ten to 15 vehicles deep, with marked cop cars front and back, unmarked cars in the front and tactical vehicles in the center—are striking into west Baltimore daily between 3:30 and 5:00 a.m.

9. The DOJ is pressuring municipal police departments to get rid of their tactical vehicles, which were the only units of the BPD who were able to stand up—let alone go after—the teenagers that rioted in April/ of 2015.

10. According to the motorists I speak to, traffic stops have increased in frequency three-fold since mid 2015, in the County, but not in the City, where they remain the same.

I leave the reader to draw their own conclusions.