Six o'clock Sunday morning found Doug, my downtown farmers market quince guy, hunched over the City Paper looking mortified. Seems he was reading it for the first time and having latched onto the Murder Ink column, was suddenly, after decades, feeling vulnerable and unsafe in the City of Baltimore. There was no convincing him that the murder rate isn't any indication of his relative safety in downtown or most of Baltimore.
While a vast majority of homicide victims have serious criminal records, some certainly do not, though it doesn't change the fact that the dead were sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, fathers, and mothers. However, as a member of a club no one would ever want to join, I get a free pass to say running such a column is just too damaging to civic confidence.
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