letter to the Baltimore Sun: Grand Prix police priorities

Here's the text of a letter I sent to the Baltimore Sun:

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Dear Baltimore Sun,

On Saturday, I crossed over the Grand Prix track via the skywalk between the Pratt Street Pavilion and the Gallery.  Racecars were driving on the track, so I lingered for a moment to see what it was my tax dollars had bought.  But only for a moment, because then three police officers ordered me to move along.  Now, I know that it wasn’t for crowd control (there were only three other civilians on the bridge besides me, so there was no congestion crossing the bridge) or safety purposes (I have seen far more people congregated on this very bridge during parades down Pratt Street without risking the bridge’s collapse), so I could only conclude that they were there on behalf of the race organizers, who presumably believe that in addition to buying the right to use the people’s roads, they had also bought the right to observe the race from any other point in space, public or private.

I was delighted.  I could only conclude that there were no homicides left to clear, no citizens in the Northeastern District waiting for cops to respond to calls, and no teenagers dealing drugs on West Baltimore corners, if three of Baltimore’s finest could afford to spend their time hassling taxpayers for standing on public property.  Surely Mayor Rawlings-Blake had therefore scrapped her plan to hire 300 more police officers, and the money saved could instead be put toward repairing our crumbling schools and reopening our shuttered rec centers and city pools to keep our children off the streets and out of trouble.

Imagine my disappointment, then, when I opened Monday’s Baltimore Sun to learn that, in fact, there had been no fewer than six shootings in the city during the course of the Grand Prix, one of them fatal.

Turns out it was just another case of our city’s administration's putting the interests of developers ahead of those of its own citizens.  I cannot help but wonder that we might do more to convince people to come visit and spend money in our city if we focused our limited police resources on reducing crime in our city neighborhoods rather than letting the Grand Prix organizers use them as taxpayer-provided hired muscle on deserted skywalks downtown.

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In conclusion: I survived the Grand Prix, but I'll be glad to have an excuse to be out of town come next Labor Day.