Mobtown Beat
Mobtown Beat
More-
Eyes On The Prize: A story of addiction and recovery
"I got back to Baltimore four months and started back up [using heroin]," Holly Botts says. She is strolling purposefully along the paved pathway of Carroll Park, with maybe 100 other walkers and a few runners, past an equal number of support people volunteering and/or working for the city's drug...
-
Murder Ink 9/21/16: 7 murders this week; 223 murders this year
In addition to 11 non-fatal shootings (one a double), one barricaded suspect (arrested without violence), and a fatal hit-and-run on a pedestrian, which does not count as a murder even though Anthony Wayne, 39, was killed unlawfully, there were six murders last week. Another person, who died in...
-
Baltimore City Power Rankings: Brandon Scott, Marilyn Mosby, Kevin Plank, more
↑ Brandon Scott Kudos to Baltimore City Councilmember Brandon Scott, who showed up at last Monday's city council meeting sporting a Colin Kaepernick San Francisco 49ers jersey, and bowed his head during the Pledge of Allegiance. Kaepernick has been taking a knee during the playing of "The Star-Spangled...
-
The Baltimore Blast return to the MASL, ending bid for new league; co-captain Healey retires
The city's arena soccer team, the Baltimore Blast, will return to the Major Arena Soccer League, ending a bid to create a separate league with a different structure. As City Paper detailed in a cover story earlier this year on the team in the midst of its most recent championship run, owner Edwin...
-
Vacants to Value program quietly cuts homeowner incentive and tells applicants to get in line
Jason Hill and Nic Thornton are planning to get married on Oct. 1. In December they plan to close the purchase of their first home, on the 300 block of E. Lanvale Street, a block north of the Copycat building. But now they're $10,000 short. "We're going to have to either get a second mortgage,...
-
Conflicts Of Interest: The Starr Report
I was sitting in an interview room on the fifth floor of the Police Headquarters and I was hungover as fuck. Two detectives sat across from me; their lieutenant at my side. I was hungover because my band played the night before and I was in Homicide because T.J. Smith, the public information officer,...
-
Police see no problem with secret surveillance
Baltimore public officials scrambled last week to learn about high-altitude surveillance after Bloomberg Businessweek revealed that a private company funded by a wealthy Texas couple was flying a plane in service of the police department that could spot and follow everything that moves in a 30-square...
-
Murder Ink 8/31/16: 9 murders this week, 200 murders this year
Baltimore passed a grim milestone this week, clocking its 200th murder of the year while police made two arrests for attempted murder and one for murder. They also found skeletal remains in Wyman Park (pending autopsy it is not, yet, listed as a homicide). There were nine non-fatal shootings recorded...
-
Baltimore City Power Rankings: Chase Brexton workers, waterways, BPD, more
↑ Bloomberg Businessweek Last week, we found out that Baltimore City Police have been watching us from above—via a plane mounted with surveillance cameras—for months. It would still be a secret today if not for the piece Monte Reel wrote for Bloomberg Businessweek. Not gonna lie: we sometimes feel…well…a...
-
BPD violates the Constitution and federal law, DOJ finds
The Department of Justice released its 163-page report on Baltimore policing last week. It is arguably the most damning of the 67 produced so far in cities and towns around the country. Dense with anecdotes and heavy with statistics, it relentlessly documents the lived terror and humiliation of...
-
Family, police experts, and activists challenge the official scenario in shooting death of Baltimore County woman
Not long after Baltimore County Police shot and killed 23-year-old Korryn Gaines last week, the questions started. Had police really disabled her social media accounts? How was her five-year-old son injured? How could a warrant for a simple traffic stop end in a death? After barricading herself...
-
Op-Alt: Why you should read Justice Sotomayor's opinion in Utah v. Strieff
As the United States Supreme Court's latest term came to a close in June, the court decided a critically important issue concerning illegal police stops, a case captioned Utah v. Strieff. The majority of the United States Supreme Court decided that police officers who carry out illegal stops can...