Violence has numbing effect

In some parts of the city, every day could be a memorial day. The tough guys pull out their little pistols, and then everybody mourns the dead and braces for the next round of killing. Two days ago, the Baltimore City Council walked away from a new proposal to confront the violence, offered by Council Vice President Robert Curran, because it sounded too close to martial law for everybody’s comfort. But everybody understood the instinct behind it.

Out in Howard County, the slain young man, Trae D. Allen, was no stranger to arrests. Two years ago, at 17, he was charged as an adult with first-degree assault and armed robbery. In Columbia, this is considered an aberration. In Baltimore, in certain neighborhoods, assault and robbery are considered foreplay.

This is what prompted Curran’s proposal. He comes out of Northeast Baltimore’s Harford Road area. He says the rising violence in his district has “sent me ballistic.” His proposal would have given the mayor the power to lock down streets and close liquor stores and bars in neighborhoods where emergencies are declared.

As this is still America, the language sent a chill through City Hall. Everybody said Curran was acting with his heart instead of his head. A Baltimore lifer and veteran councilman, he’s tired of late-night calls from frightened constituents and tired of reading about the body counts.

Tuesday morning at City Hall, as he headed for the weekly Board of Estimates meeting, he mentioned a recent telephone call.

“A woman in my district was coming home Sunday night,” he said. “She pulls into her driveway and sees two kids walking down the street. A white kid and a black kid, 15 or 16 years old. She waits until they pass her. She gets out of her car, and they come back, wearing masks now, and put a gun in her face. Stole her purse, hijacked her car.

“One of ‘em took off the mask and says, ‘Who’s inside the house? You got any money in the house?’ The woman’s about 45 years old. She’s scared to death.”

Nobody on the City Council needs further explanation. There’s a level of violence in parts of Baltimore that far exceeds anything in Howard County — and anything acceptable in a civilized world. But, across years of murderous behavior and dry body counts that replace the actual faces of murdered human beings, we’ve grown numb to it.

“That’s what really prompted this proposal,” Curran said. “I’m trying to express my outrage over this violence, and I want to hear some outrage from the rest of the council. There’s no outrage. I want to hear some outrage. They don’t even want to discuss it. We’re all feeling the pain, whatever part of town you live in. The question is, how do you bring the discussion forward?”

For years, much of the bloodshed came from the relentless narcotics traffic. Somebody gets hit over control of a street corner, or failure to pay a tab. But a few weeks back, Police Commissioner Leonard Hamm said that’s changed. Now, there’s a generation of young people who simply reach for the gun when they feel they’ve been slighted.

These are people who have grown up without ever knowing a family’s full embrace. The city is filled with fatherless homes and overwhelmed mothers, and we’re left with the idea that we can turn everything over to the schoolteachers and the cops.

When he ran for mayor several years back, Carl Stokes talked a lot about extending school hours. Why do kids have to go home to empty apartments and rough street corners in the middle of the afternoon? But such an idea costs money and thus goes nowhere. Better to spend millions on new prisons, after the damage has already been done.

Now we have Mayor Sheila Dixon putting money into community programs that try to take the place of missing parents. But the money’s only a fraction of what’s needed.

So we had Curran calling for neighborhood lockdowns during emergencies. But why do we continue to face such emergencies in such awful numbers?

“You want an answer to that,” Curran said. “You gotta give me the Nobel Peace Prize.”

Please send news tips to Michael Olesker at olesker@baltimoreexaminer.com