Talk about everything lining up the right way ... Baltimore cops on Tuesday night heard a disturbance, got out of their cars and watched one man shoot another. They chased the suspected gunman down and then learned the shooting had also been captured on video:
Cameras were in the news again recently, helping to convict a man in the shooting of a 5-year-old girl in Southwest Baltimore. The images showed a gunman shooting but it was difficult to make out his face, and whether he was wearing a GPS monitoring device on his ankle. Still, that and other evidence helped jurors decide.
Around that time, prosecutors continued to criticize the camera system. In early April, State's Attorney Patricia C. Jessamy sent out a news release that praised the surveillance camers, but in a back-handed way. Her relelase noted that such convictions are rare, that of the 229 guilty pleas or verdicts last year in crimes captured on video, 228 were related to drugs. One was for murder.
That brings us to Page Croyder, a former veteran city prosecutor who now has her own blog, Baltimore Criminal Justice, a forum she routinely uses to criticize her former boss, Jessamy, and her chief spokeswoman, Margaret T. Burns. In her latest posting, she also takes the Baltimore Sun to task for an editorial questioning the cost of the surveillance camera system: