He keeps a notebook full of names and license plate numbers and hands the information to police. He walks out of his home and runs suspected dealers and users off his streets. Only he doesn't live in a bad neighborhood. He lives in Northeast Baltimore's Hamilton, where there are lawns to mow and towering sycamore trees and foxes running through his garden.
This is an urban suburb.
And that's what makes it all the more scarrier. He lives far enough off Harford Road that you'd think he'd be immune from the rag-tag drunks and addicts that spill from bars and run up and down the busy thoroughfare. But they come in cars, to dark streets when neat-looking bungalow-style houses and manicured lawns.
Schissler has lived in the house for more than 40 years, raised a famiy there and now entertains 13 grandchildren and 4 great-grandchildren. He doesn't want to move. He doesn't want to be killed either.
Crime is relative, and for the cops Hamilton, particularly the enclave Schissler calls home, is not a dangerous place. In fact, it doesn't even register on the Northeastern District police commander's radar. But if you like to sit on your picnic table in your garden, you don't want to watch people exchange drugs at the corner, nor do you want to pull condoms out of the flower bed you are weeding.
This is the problem for many in the city: they're not faced with daily gunfire and vacant houses, but they are watching the once-proud neighborhoods slowly deteriorate. Schissler grew up in what is now a desolate part of East Baltimore, overrun by crime and violence. His childhood rowhouse is boarded and burned. He fears his neighborhood his next.