When I first arrived in Harm City over three decades ago, I was moving from a town near Pittsburg Pennsylvania where wife-beating and strangulation murder of women were, respectively, the leading types of assaults and murders. Upon arriving in this larger den of squalor I found murder to be predominantly male-on-male handgun. Where Baltimore gelled with Pittsburg was in wife-beating and domestic male-on-female abuse being the most common form of unarmed violence. Indeed, living in a working class environment, I can tell you that 10 of the 13 women I have dated in my life were either raped or beaten, or both, by husbands, boyfriends, uncles or fathers.
I have some good news to report. Men rarely beat women in Baltimore anymore. It happens, but is not even in the top three slices of the unarmed portion of the Baltimore violence pie. In my first week in Baltimore I saw a woman thrown from a jeep by a man while he was cruising at about 30 MPH. He then stopped, got out, pulled her up by the hair, punched her in the face, and dragged her back into the jeep and kept on trucking, slapping her all the while. That kind of stuff was common and cops could have cared less.
Now, in 2013, if your woman hits you, and you just grab her wrists and hug her while she screams, kicks and bites, you are still getting locked up! As pendulums do, this one has swung the other way.
As I write the three most common forms of violence against women are, from least to most common:
1. Unarmed mutual combat [fighting] with another woman
2. Muggings by loan black male youths, primarily for smart phones
3. Muggings by pairs of black youths, for the same
There is one new disturbing trend involving contract killings of women by male gang members at the behest of rival women.
Also, another old standby is still with us, the murder of women by an estranged man who then takes his own life.
On the other side of the coin the most common form of violence faced by Harm City males are attacks by females: armed, unarmed, group, individual, straight, gay, hookers, cops, biker babes, black chicks, white chicks...
Permit me to illustrate a common occurrence from this morning, 11/12/2013, the sixth day of 'food stamps.' This account was had an hour ago from Miss Milge, who works at HoSmart FoodMart in West Baltimore.
“Oh baby, it was off the hook up in here! I was taking my choke break at parcel pickup and down by the cars is this food-stamper mamma screaming at her man. She rolled with a stream of cuss words: ‘n-this,' 'm-effer that.’ You name it. That’s how they roll around here.
“He was your typical docile food-stamp-fed baby daddy, carrying the baby while she bought the shrimp, steaks, one-hundred dollar designer cakes and eighteen-dollar-a-pound crabmeat. He didn’t say a thing. I don’t know what he did, other than hold the baby and shield it while she beat him with her stainless steel cane!
“Oh, she beat his ass for a good ten minutes! That’s no exaggeration, ‘cause it took the assistant manager five minutes to get out there and the cops another five to roll up. There she was, whacking away and cussing up an n-word f-word storm the entire time. He must have some good legs. I can’t believe he was able to stand up through that. You could hear it from fifty yards out: ‘whack, crack, whack!’
“There had to be twenty cops there in ten minutes. They restrained her. It’s a good thing the assistant manager [a white guy] was there, and spoke up for him, because they were going to arrest him. After he gave his statement the father was released and the mother was cuffed. That baby was nine months at best—could not walk yet, and there she was swinging a steel cane at the man that was holding that child. Imagine being that kid? What does she have to look forward to?”
No comment.
