Another remake, same ol' Baltimore

The Baltimore Sun

There's a certain giddy if twisted glow that John Waters brings to his beleaguered Baltimore. The cheerfully perverse -- or is it perversely cheerful -- Waters clearly was born to play bard to so battered a burg.

He sprinkled some of his anti-Disney dust at The Charles movie theater Wednesday night, where the latest version of his Hairspray -- the hometown ode that was a movie, then a Broadway show and now a movie again -- premiered locally. Fresh-faced teenage girls, all Lilly Pulitzer-ed up, jammed the sidewalks or joined the rest of the shiny, happy, $150-a-ticket people parading into the Chuck -- a more pastel-clad and better-heeled crowd than you tend to see in these parts when Hollywood, and a teen idol and Hairspray star named Zac Efron, hasn't come calling.

Or maybe even when it has: A friend who happened to pass this unlikely scene -- he'd just come off a commuter train at nearby Penn Station -- tells me that just steps from the happy scene, some guy started walking a little too closely behind him.

"Bang, bang!" the guy says. "I could get you any time. Bang!"

I guess my friend was lucky the bangs were fake rather than real.

In a city where crime scenes decidedly outnumber the Hollywood ones, it never takes long for Baltimore: The Movie to turn back into Baltimore: The Reality Show. Even as the red carpet was unfurled outside the Charles, the buzz among the local reporters covering the event was about the other news of the day. The story that, if the entertainment trade paper Variety were covering it, would have been headlined: "TOP COP FLOPS; NIXED BY DIX."

The reviews had been in for a while, and the only surprise is that poor Leonard D. Hamm, police commissioner at a time when both the homicide rate was rising and a mayoral campaign was under way, hung onto the job as long as he did. Mayor Sheila Dixon had left him hanging out there, resisting calls for his resignation but at the same time showing maybe quarter-hearted support for him.

With less than eight weeks to the Democratic primary, the timing seems strange for a frontrunner who would be expected to stay the course. But maybe not: The axing robs rivals like Keiffer J. Mitchell, Jr., and Jill Carter of one of the few clear-cut, up-or-down, yea-or-nea issues in the race: whether Dixon should can Hamm for failing to control crime.

Talk about being careful about what you wish for -- if you clamor for someone's head, and the head indeed rolls, what do you clamor about now?

But the move also carries some risk for Dixon -- Hamm leaves, but suppose the murder toll continues to mount, the shootings continue unabated, the voters continue to freak out. Then what? It could be a long eight weeks.

So now the new guy tries his hand -- it's been the summer of new guys, hasn't it, from North Avenue to Camden Yards -- and maybe he'll last longer than it takes for me to get the spelling of his name right: Bealfield ... no ... Bealfeld ... no ... Bealefeld ... yes! I think he's still commissioner.

All I could think when I saw Fred Bealefeld at the press conference yesterday announcing his ascension to acting commissioner was, well, what "too" will you be accused of. We go through police commissioners around here like Goldilocks trying out porridge or chairs or beds -- everything's too hot or too cold, too big or too small, too hard or too soft. Or, rather, with commissioners, they're too New York or too local. Or too black or too white. Somehow, that fairy-tale "just right" continues to elude.

Instead, we're stuck in this circular logic where we attribute crime problems to the constantly changing leadership, so as a solution we ... change leaders again.

I was looking at some of The Sun's coverage of commissioners past, and sometimes it seemed like the only thing that changed were the names and the dates. Yesterday: Hamm ousted in the wake of rising homicides and declining police morale. Two and a half years ago, Hamm took over for the previous commissioner, Kevin Clark, at a time of rising homicides and, yes, declining police morale. Almost eight years ago, another commissioner, Thomas Frazier, exited, with a police union saying morale had never been lower than under him.

Maybe Bealefeld can turn things around -- he's a generations-deep cop, and he seems to have a brassier personality than the stolid Hamm. I'm not sure a commissioner has a direct effect on the homicide rate -- an indirect one, maybe, amid a host of other factors -- but maybe you need someone more out-there at a time like this.

Still, the switch at top is hardly the whole fix. For one thing, the department remains understaffed -- which, probably more than who is commissioner has an impact on morale, and crime fighting in general. For another, its strategy has been under seemingly constant flux for years, and remains so under Dixon: First, overtime was curtailed, then selectively allowed. First, everyone had to walk foot patrols, then everyone but the homicide detectives.

None of these adjustments is necessarily wrong. They just send the wrong signal -- that either there isn't a plan, or there is one, but it's always subject to change.

Just like the commissioner.

jean.marbella@baltsun.com

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