Michael Olesker, The Examiner
2008-03-26 07:00:00.0
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BALTIMORE -

Annapolis is feeling a little frazzled these days, so there’s talk of pushing a few panic buttons. Already in 2008, murderers killed four people. This follows last year’s record-breaking eight murders. Four murders? Eight murders? The City of Baltimore has a name for such a murder count.

We call it a very slow weekend.

But we jest, of course. Annapolis is frazzled because it has correctly never thought of itself as a dangerous place. And still shouldn’t, despite the latest trouble. In Baltimore, they’re doing cartwheels at City Hall because murderers killed only — “only,” the word is used ironically, of course — 41 in the nearly three months we’ve passed in 2008.

For a city accustomed to nearly 300 homicides a year, this is a pace that cuts the killing by about half.

But all things are relative. Baltimore is a city on a 20-year killing spree, fueled by drugs and family breakdown and poverty and seething frustration passed across generations like an heirloom that’s been cursed.

Annapolis is a city wishing to avoid a growing criminal pathology and beginning to realize it cannot when so many classic symptoms leading to it are abundant.

And so, the other day, we had those such as Mayor Ellen O. Moyer, a thoughtful person, talking up the possibility of a city-wide curfew on youths — or merely on all public housing residents, as this is where much of the violence has taken place.

The mayor was not alone in her concern. Others talked about bringing in the National Guard to keep the peace. (Uh, folks, haven’t you heard? The Guard’s stretched a little thin right now, owing to that business over in Baghdad, where we’ve lost 4,000 American lives, not four.)

Or they talked about a gun buy-back program. (Baltimore’s tried those. The few criminal types who turn in their weapons use the fresh cash to upgrade their arsenals.)

And so, the other day, as the great powers in Annapolis city government pondered their way out of this, you could still wander through a curfew-less downtown and find Lester Jones. He’s one of the good guys in downtown Annapolis, and one of its sensitive thinkers.

For 11 years, he was the fellow shucking clams and oysters at the City Dock eatery. But now he’s working the soup counter at the Gourmet Commissary there. And thinking about this curfew proposal.

“Some of these kids today,” he was saying, “it’s tough controlling them. And you wonder about their parents.”

Last week, for example, police raided several homes in the Robinwood public housing community and arrested five teenagers on drug and gun charges.

“What we need,” Jones said, “is parents paying more attention. But you also need the police to be more visible. It used to be, a police officer in Annapolis walked down the street and the crowd parted. They need to patrol those neighborhoods, and let everybody see that they’re there. And not just on some schedule where the bad kids know exactly when they’re coming around.”

Some have called for identity cards, or proof of residency, for all those wishing to enter a public housing complex. Or they’ve sought a curfew that wouldn’t take in the whole city — just public housing.

That’s a discrimination lawsuit just waiting to be filed — and rightfully so.

We all live in America and are entitled to its freedoms — including the freedom to move about freely. Those sinking into the morass of drugs and guns do so because they’ve figured out the game of economic haves and have-nots. They already feel like outsiders, cut off from a legitimate shot at the good life.

To impose a curfew on a single community is to validate for everyone there that sense of living in some other America — one where they don’t have the same rights as the rest of the country.

And that leaves us with this notion of a curfew for all of Annapolis.

“That,” says Steve Duffy, owner of the City Dock eatery, “would be a very bad thing. Look, we’re all hearing about the crime. It’s become a polarizing topic. But this is a nightlife town. When it gets dark, this town doesn’t shut down just because the boats go away.

“There are restaurants and bars that do a lot of business. You walk down the street, there’s no sense of danger downtown. A curfew for the whole town? No way. A very, very bad idea.”

An idea that proclaims: We’re going to let the crimes of a handful pull down the curtain on the many.

Michael Olesker can be reached at olesker@baltimoreexaminer.com