Visiting British police reporter Mark Hughes left Baltimore after a week with no interview with either the city’s police commissioner or the mayor (who is on trial on theft charges), says Baltimore Sun crime blogger Peter Hermann. For all the city does to counter the image of Baltimore as The Wire, the silence of the two leaders on the topic of crime left him the impression they’ve got their heads in the sand, Hermann says. Coupled with the crime he did see — a murder while out with union cops and a shooting just moments after he arrived at the train station — our leaders didn’t do much to dispel the notion of a dangerous city to our friends overseas.
Hughes went home feeling snubbed and Baltimore’s image of crime and its inability to deal with it only reinforced. Sun staffer Justin Fenton, reporting from London, found that cops there don’t report breaking crime, usually until an arrest is made. He quoted one spokesman saying that reporting, say a body that was found would only incite the public into thinking crime was worse than it really was.