There was a lot of police news on Wednesday. Cops in Arundel busted a drug network in Brooklyn Park; detectives in Baltimore County announced that long-ago death of a woman was a homicide and pleaded for help; city prosecutors went after a woman who lied to help her boyfriend escape a gun charge; and the father of a city police officer was killed when two drug suspects fleeing from cops rammed into his car in Northwest Baltimore.
So what's the top police story all day on the Baltimore Sun's web site?
WJZ sports director Mark Viviano was hit by teens as he jogged through Druid Hill Park on Tuesday afternoon. He was wearing headphones and didn't hear the teens come up behind him. He wasn't even injured, and nothing was taken.
(The second most viewed story, at least for a while, was a Laura Vozzella column item on how a pimp was angry at being called a wannabe pimp).
Yet 28,890 people clicked on the Internet version of the story by 3 p.m. (it ran as a small brief on page 6 of the print edition, but took on a life of its own on line). It's one of those Internet sensations, driven by the most popular search terms on cyberspace: crime, sports and celebrity.
Even Baltimore's police commissioner got into the act, sounding off on WYPR, on a show hosted by the Baltimore Sun's Dan Rodricks, that he was troubled that the officers who handled the complaint didn't immediately notify top commanders.
Viviano is a sports personality, but I'm not sure such a minor attack on him warrants alerts at City Hall.
The story generated more than 150 comments, many of them racist rants about how white people shouldn't jog in Druid Hill Park. To me, the elderly father of the city police officer and the suspected drug dealers who killed him is the more important story here, a tragedy highlighting the losing war on drugs and the damage to innocents it can cause.
I know we're guilty in all this because we ran the story on Viviano. But in the print edition, the park assault is dealt with in a few sentences while the dead father is a full story. On the Internet, the play often goes to the story that generates the most interest.
That should be the debate over drugs and tears for the innocent victim in Wednesday's crash.