The Baltimore Sun flexed its Fourth Estate muscle on Wednesday and filed a lawsuit against the Baltimore City Police Department, claiming that the department often ignored Sun requests for public information that they are required by law to provide.  The suit also claims that when the department did make requested documents available, it did so at an extremely high cost, in one instance attempting to charge the Sun $1,250 for a year’s worth of police reports about rapes.  Read the full Sun story by Jamie Smith Hopkins here.

I’m not surprised by this story.  BCPD spokesman Anthony Guglielmi is notoriously tight fisted with information that used to be made public on a regular basis.  He arrived in Baltimore just over a year ago.  In that short time, he has managed to build an impenetrable information blockade between the public and the department.  The department must now authorize any officer to speak with a member of the press, and officers who do so face stiff discipline.

Back in March, Guglielmi’s new policy of withholding the names of officers involved in shootings drew the ire of Baltimore’s few remaining true crime journalists.  Sun crime reporter Peter Hermann assembled a comprehensive blog post critiquing the new policy.  It includes this prophetic moment, from a segment on the Mark Steiner show featuring Guglielmi, former Sun reporter David Simon, ACLU attorney David Rocah, and Bob Cherry, head of the Baltimore FOP:

At one point, Simon told Guglielmi: “State officials cannot go against state law.”

Guglielmi: “David, nobody is going against the law.”  He added, “that’s why we have courts.”

Rocah: “You might find yourself there.”

And thanks to the brave remaining journalists over at the Sun who are still fighting for the public’s best interests, he has.  My hat is off to you today.  This will be a fascinating one to watch.

Today I stumbled across a report that was compiled in the wake of the BELIEVE campaign, the famed public call-to-action by the O’Malley administration that called Baltimore citizens to fight against the ills of drugs in their communities.  The report I found was a self-congratulatory assessment of the campaign by the advertising firm who worked with the city on the project, Linder & Associates, Inc., based in New York City with offices on Park Avenue.  You can view it here.

As part of their campaign, Linder & Associates conducted surveys to get a feel for where city residents stood on the problem of drugs.  Two particularly interesting statistics:

- “Caucasians in Baltimore are less likely than African-Americans to see Baltimore’s drug problem as their own problem, at least to the extent that they need to take some action to oppose it.”

- “Only 47% of Caucasians polled said they were likely to take some action as a result of BELIEVE appeals compared with 76% of African-Americans.”

Of course I realize that this was an advertising firm conducting a survey, but this is still revealing, and I think captures a fundamental breakdown in Baltimore’s efforts to right itself and truly change.  BELIEVE was a flawed effort but one thing it had right was that for Baltimore to make progress in the fight against drugs, the city will need everyone’s help, not just those living in neighborhoods most affected by the drug trade.  This is a complicated problem, but if time has taught Baltimoreans anything it’s that fixing this problem is going to take sustained effort on everyone’s part, not just those who are most directly at risk.

There are many passages in the report that time has made compelling, and I won’t rehash the full contents, but I felt that one section needed to be highlighted for irony’s sake:

“In the words of Baltimore’s Mayor, Martin O’Malley, BELIEVE is a call to the people of the city to rise up and ‘risk action on faith.”

According to a survey of 1800 Baltimore residents by the Schaefer Center of Public Policy at the University of Baltimore taken earlier this year, there is a disconnect between declining crime stats, and how safe city residents feel about crime in the city.

The Mayor’s office has decided that people’s perception of Baltimore as an unsafe city is incorrect, citing declining numbers of violent crime, down 7 percent.  In the Sun story, Mayor Dixon also offers the obligatory and ill-informed slam against the media, blaming them for the city’s image problem.

This story is an example of a breakdown in the Mayor’s office, and a refusal to handle the city’s biggest problem in an honest way.  Instead of fighting to change the perception with any number of measures (increased visible police presence, comprehensive cime prevention campaigns, frequent press conferences to keep the public informed on progress in their neighborhoods, etc.), Mayor Dixon is clinging to any statistic that shows numerical progress.  What the Dixon administration chooses to ignore is that people in Baltimore have been hearing how safe their city is for years from politicians, in the meantime they are getting mugged on their way home from work, having their cars broken into in a regular basis, and living with the spectre of crime every day.  People don’t want more statistics.

In this case, perception is reality.  Baltimore City leaders would be wise to traffic in it more often.