Halloween fun or in poor taste?

There was also something else:

An arm was dangling out of the trunk, blood trickling down a white shirt sleeve, the hand limp and nearly touching the pavement. The car belongs to Jim Scales, a 30-year City Hall employee who has runs errands and made coffee for mayors and staff dating back to the Schmoke administration. Mayoral officials told me he likes to get all decked out for Halloween.

"A Halloween enthusiast," a spokesman for the mayor told me.

But my question is whether this display is appropriate in a city that has experienced four murders in the past couple of days, is burying two city police officers, one lost to violence, and is parked near a news conference where the mayor is thanking a big business for donating money to police to combat crime.

I don't want to deprive Scales or anyone else of celebrating Halloween or any other holiday, nor do I want to strip the holiday spirit from City Hall. But for city leaders ever-sensitive about how Baltimore and icrime is portrayed, this display seems oddly inappropriate.

The police commissioner doesn't like it when his cops leave shards of crime scene tape when they leave murder spots because it gives TV cameras something to tape even hours after the body is gone. But it's OK for a City Hall worker to display a fake, bloodied body at the mayor's office?

A spokesman for the mayor noted that City Hall has been getting calls about the day's killings, which include a 16-year-old shot in the head. But Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake declined to address what kind of signal is sent with a body spilling from a trunk of one of her employees' cars parked at City Hall.

But shortly after the news conference on the bikes ended, the mayor's chief spokesman, Ryan O'Doherty sent me this statement: "When it was brought to his attention it was immediately removed and the employee apologized."