Today, Jan. 1, 2009, seems as good a day as any to tell readers what I learned in 2008.
I learned that the country was willing, at the behest of a talk-show host, to elect as commander in chief of our armed forces a man with no military experience and only three years’ experience as a U.S. senator.
President-elect Barack Obama’s prior political experience was as a state senator in Illinois. If we’re willing to elect a state senator with only a few years’ experience as a U.S. senator to the highest office in the land, maybe we should have looked at the hundreds of other state senators across the land. Some of them might make better presidential material than Obama.
I learned that Baltimore can reduce the number of homicides without a mayor who resorts to “let’s lock up as many people as we can” policies.
Gov. Martin O’Malley’s elevation from mayor of Baltimore to the gubernatorial mansion may have benefited the city more than we know. With Mayor Sheila “Big Sheil” Dixon, we have a different approach to fighting crime on the streets, one that will see the year 2008 end with fewer homicides than any of the O’Malley years.
And Dixon did it without O’Malley’s zero tolerance approach, which involved police patrolling the streets and locking up people for even the pettiest of crimes. That policy was criticized by elected officials. Private citizens criticized it. Some journalists and the American Civil Liberties Union took issue with our former mayor turning our town into Stalag O’Malley.
The policy was even criticized by some police officers. Not the brass, of course. It doesn’t get paid to tell its boss, the mayor, what he or she doesn’t want to hear. It gets paid to toe the line.
But the Fraternal Order of Police took O’Malley to task about the zero tolerance policy, at the behest of beat cops who saw something wrong. During my travels one of my journalism colleagues asked me about Baltimore’s homicide numbers, which in previous years have been notoriously high. I told him that under Dixon, we might see our lowest number of homicides in decades.
“I hope,” I added, “that Baltimoreans haven’t been electing little boys to do a woman’s job.”
I learned state prosecutor Robert Rohrbaugh might have a vendetta against Dixon.
In October, Rohrbaugh’s office issued a second series of subpoenas for witnesses to testify before a second grand jury investigating whether Dixon violated any laws in her relationship with Baltimore developer Ronald H. Lipscomb. Dixon was romantically linked with Lipscomb when she was City Council president and voted on development projects that Lipscomb was involved in. The two also exchanged gifts, not uncommon for people involved in a romantic relationship.
Several witnesses subpoenaed to testify before the first grand jury got their chains jerked and were never called. Rohrbaugh needs to be careful that he doesn’t jerk the taxpayers’ chains. We tend to be a testy lot about things like that.
I learned that the trial for the men accused of murdering corrections Officer David McGuinn may not occur this decade.
McGuinn was fatally stabbed in a brutal attack at the Maryland House of Correction in July 2006. Two inmates serving life sentences were charged with the crime. Both have had a couple of appearances in Anne Arundel County Circuit Court. The last was earlier this year, when attorneys for the accused made a motion to have the files on investigations into corrupt corrections officers at MHOC made available to them.
We’ve heard nothing about the case since. Defense lawyers have argued that their clients killed McGuinn — a by-the-book C.O. who followed the rules and granted inmates no favors — at the behest of corrupt MHOC corrections officers. The claim may be completely bogus, but shouldn’t somebody in public office tell us what the delay is in holding the trial?
Do public officials think that because MHOC is now closed that no one is going to ask questions and demand answers? Because if they think that, then I think they need a reality check.
Gregory Kane is a columnist who has been writing about Baltimore and Maryland for more than 15 years. Look for his columns in the editorial section every Thursday and Sunday. Reach him at [email protected].
