While serving an eviction notice this summer in East Baltimore, a team from the sheriff's office opened the door of vacated rowhouse to find two pit bulls left behind with no food or water — a black one waiting by the entrance, and a brown one in the living room, locked in a cage barely big enough to hold it.
A few months earlier, if they had found animals like this, they would have called animal control to pick them up, end of story. Now, however, with the dogs safe, sheriffs launched an investigation to find their owner, hoping to have him charged with abandonment and neglect.
It's a tiny victory for Baltimore's fledgling efforts to crack down on animal cruelty. But in a city that just dropped charges against a man who clubbed a small dog to death, and then, to the horror of animal advocates, ordered him to work with rescued dogs and cats, animal rights reformers say they have a ways to go.
In the year and a half since twin brothers were accused of pouring gasoline over a young pit bull and setting the dog on fire, bringing national headlines to the city's animal abuse problem, a coalition of animal rescuers, law enforcers, government workers and concerned residents has puzzled over what exactly is wrong with the way Baltimore handles cruelty cases.
A lot, they've found.
"We've got pretty decent laws," says Randall Lockwood, a forensic and animal cruelty expert with the ASPCA who is guiding Baltimore's new Anti-Animal Abuse Task Force. "It's getting [law enforcement] to know what they are and how they can be used and then getting prosecutors to give a damn and judges to know what to do."
As the task force struggles forward, encouraging officials to track abuse and trying to raise its status on law enforcement's priority list, dozens of cats and dogs in the city are still being burned and beaten, stoned and starved, and only rarely is anyone being held accountable.
There was the emaciated cat wearing a collar found in the dead of winter near Mondawmin Mall. There was the pit bull shot to death in April and dumped at the Maryland Zoo. Another pit bull was found in June, hanging from a chain near an abandoned building on the west side. A few days later, people in Cherry Hill saw juveniles stoning a cat that was nursing 4-day-old kittens.
There is little or no hope of an arrest in any of those cases, the task force says. And that's typical of the 55 cruelty cases and 70 instances of neglect that animal control has already counted in the city this year.
Police have arrested some suspects and a few trials are pending. There's a trial in progress this month for two juveniles accused of beating a puppy to death last May at the Carroll Park golf course. And after repeated postponements, a January trial is scheduled for the brothers charged with burning the pit bull known as Phoenix.
But animal advocates learned last month that even trials won't necessarily bring their idea of justice.
Police charged Derrick Chambers, a West Baltimore man, with felony animal cruelty after he confessed to beating his miniature pinscher to death with a pipe. At his Sept. 8 trial in district court before Judge Charles A. Chiapparelli, prosecutors agreed to "stet" the charges, meaning they would drop the case if Chambers stayed out of trouble and performed 50 hours of community service at the Maryland SPCA.
Officials at the shelter, who weren't contacted before the deal was made, said they were appalled that anyone would send an abuser to work with rescued dogs and cats and have rejected the move, saying Chambers is not welcome,.
Prosecutors defended the outcome, insisting it was the best they could do with the evidence presented.
"I think there's just intense pressure for people to be held accountable because they have not been," says Caroline Griffin, who leads the task force and tries to follow each abuse case that she hears about. "There's always human error that prevents a conviction. It's been so many different causes, so many different reasons."
Griffin and the task force have concluded, however, that most of the blame for flubbed cases and missed opportunities rests with Baltimore's lack of a police team dedicated to animal cruelty.
Baltimore's Bureau of Animal control, the first line of offense in cruelty cases, has no power to arrest suspects or pursue criminal investigations. Only police can. Yet the task force says police and animal control haven't been working together in anything close to a smooth tandem.
For instance, sheriff's deputies who spotted cruelty or neglect while serving warrants or protective orders would commonly call animal control, who they assumed would investigate. But animal control was only picking up the dogs or cats and ferrying them to a shelter. No one took any action. No one pursued the people who starved dogs, hoarded cats, skipped town and left their pets behind.
"It was like an eye-opener," says Lt. Samuel Cogen of the sheriff's office, who discovered the hole in the system while working with the task force. "It was like, 'Wow. We could be doing more.' "
The task force has asked the city to dedicate three police officers to animal cruelty — in their list of recommendations that runs more than 80 pages, that's the No. 1 priority.
It's already been denied, as has anything that will cost the budget-challenged city any money. That means animal control won't be buying that $5,000 freezer it wants for preserving evidence. No $20,000 for necropsies of dead animals. No bus and billboard campaign to encourage people to report abuse — not even posters which only cost a couple hundred dollars.
At a recent meeting, task force members tried to think of ways they could reach their goal for free. They wondered aloud how they could get a judge to join their coalition, how they could get a one-on-one meeting with Baltimore's police commissioner — whether, because newly elected city state's attorney Gregg Bernstein was photographed with a scratched sofa in his house, that means he is a cat person.
Vowing, as Griffin puts it, "not to sit on their hands" despite the financial constraints, the task force has pestered and pressured officials over its year in existence and prompted tangible changes in how the city tracks and prioritizes abuse.
The city only started counting and tracking abuse cases this year, and three weeks ago the reports were incorporated into City Hall's "CitiStat," accountability program.
Starting Jan. 1, recruits at every police academy in the state will get at least some training on how to spot animal cruelty and dog-fighting. There had been no required training on those topics. It came about because Cogen appealed to his boss, Sheriff John Anderson, who in turn convinced Maryland's Police and Correctional Training Commission to make the change.
The city Police Department is planning to name an animal cruelty specialist in each of its nine districts. That person won't be working exclusively on animal cases, but will be trained to identify and investigate abuse. Additionally, officials will appoint a supervisor to monitor the city's various pending abuse cases to make sure they're being appropriately handled.
This summer, sheriff's deputies were gathered together at roll call and told that starting June 1, they would be pursuing animal cruelty, neglect and dog-fighting as standard operating procedure. No more assuming animal control would handle it.
"It's telling them we consider it a priority," said Cogen. "A lot of police own pets themselves and they're very sympathetic to this issue. It's just that they didn't realize what the actual laws were and what they could do.
"When you start explaining to them that the kind of person that would burn a dog or torture a cat is probably beating their kids, they get that. They understand it's an act of violence and not something that should just go unnoticed."
Lockwood believes that to truly improve the city's performance on animal abuse, Baltimore's police, prosecutors and judges must start responding to cases faster and smarter. To him, that means training.
A nationwide survey by the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, soon to be released, found that while 85 percent of the public expressed concerns about people who harm animals, just 30 percent of law enforcement officers understood their jurisdiction's cruelty laws.
When people see case after case of cruelty go unpunished, Lockwood says it sends the clear message "that the city just doesn't care."
He believes that all police officers in the city should experience a minimum of four hours of training in abuse investigations and cruelty law. Every officer in New York City gets that. In Fort Wayne, Ind., it's a four-day course for every officer, plus the department has a full-time humane educator on staff.
City police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said training one officer, perhaps two, for each district is all the department can manage for now. He thinks that when the nine officers with cruelty training are immersed in the neighborhoods they know best, that will actually be more effective than having the three dedicated animal officers the task force wants.
"Animal abuse is treated very seriously in Baltimore," he said. "The police commissioner has two dogs. Everyone's an animal lover and bottom line, it's against the law."
Lockwood would also like to see mandatory animal abuse education sessions for prosecutors and judges and a "courtwatch" program so that people who are passionate about animal issues will be visible in the gallery, watching every cruelty case as it is tried.
"In Chicago, once a courtwatch was established, average sentences were longer and the percentage of convictions rose as well," Lockwood said. "It is the fear of the public response."
Baltimore state's attorney's office spokeswoman Margaret Burns said that more than training, the prosecutors office needs an attorney who specializes in cruelty cases. The office already has authorities on white-collar crime, sexual abuse and domestic violence. "It can be done," said Burns.
jill.rosen@baltsun.com