This year's first murder victim died of bullet wounds shortly after 3 p.m. in the 2300 block of Ocala Ave.

Chances are, if you're not a cop or a taxi driver or don't live on or near that street, you have no idea where Ocala Avenue is.

A brief mention of the killing in Monday's newspaper tried to help: "Near Druid Hill Park," the headline and the story said. "About two blocks west of the park," the article added a few sentences later.

That drew a call from the spokeswoman and chief public defender of our city recreation spots, Michelle Speaks-March, who said it forever associates the park - which, according to the city's Web site, is "commonly known for its shady lawns, rolling hills, picturesque water features and majestic forest" - with murder.

The 2300 block of Ocala Ave. is indeed two blocks west of the Druid Hill Park, though I admit even that doesn't pinpoint it, given that the park covers 745 acres.

Ocala Avenue also is two blocks from Mondawmin Mall (which is mentioned in a follow-up story on the killing) and a transit hub for metro trains and buses. It's between two major roads - Reisterstown and Liberty Heights - near where they branch off. It's three blocks from Baltimore City Community College and four blocks from Frederick Douglass High School.

It's in a small, triangular neighborhood called Liberty Square. And it goes by another, unofficial name, noted on a red street sign: Mount Lebanon Way.

So, how do we describe where this man got shot? Northwest Baltimore seems too vague to be of any use, and Ocala Avenue seems too precise to be helpful to a general audience.

So, we try to offer readers a reference point. But nobody wants the reference point to be in their neighborhood, their park, their shopping mall.

We once wrote that police found a body near a Metro station and got a call from a transit spokeswoman who complained that the account was unfair because the station was closed at the time of the killing. Years ago, residents of Guilford roared that a murder did not occur in their neighborhood, but across the street, putting it by a mere few feet in Oakenshawe.

Two years ago, a grandmother was raped in Tuxedo Park, a subdivision of Roland Park that no one outside a few square blocks had ever heard of before the attack.

We spend a lot of time worrying where bodies fall and not enough time admitting that they all fall in our city and that we can't rationalize it away by saying it's someone else's problem.

Of course, we want to accurately record crime, and we also want to be helpful. Readers know where Druid Hill Park is, but Mondawmin Mall also is a fairly significant and well-known landmark. The Recreation and Parks spokeswoman, Speaks-March, thinks we need to be more careful when describing murder locales.

"If you continue to use the reference to the park, it increases the perception that the parks are unsafe," she said. She reread the headline and said, "What do they get out of that? 'Druid Hill. Man shot. First city homicide.' "

Reputations are sometimes well-earned and difficult to shed. "The Wire" solidified Baltimore's reputation as an urban wasteland, but its local rep had been set in stone long before, earned through years of drug abuse, violence, indifference and neglect. Leakin Park is widely considered the city's largest unregistered graveyard, a notorious dumping ground for bodies, though crime rarely occurs there and its trails are among the area's most scenic.

I decided to drive to Ocala Avenue to see the street for myself.

There's a church, a senior living home and an apartment building, with one unit designated as a Baltimore police substation. I could see the park from the northeast end of Ocala, and I could see Mondawmin from the southwest end of Ocala. I could not see either from the alley where the man was killed.

Residents understandably get angry when we at the paper put a body in the wrong neighborhood, and city leaders get angry when they feel we've hyped crime to the extent we ignore other issues, good and bad. The way we talk about crime, the way we perceive crime, seems as important as crime itself.

I understand why the Recreation and Parks folks shudder when they see "murder" and "park" in the same sentence, when the murder wasn't in the park, and I understand why the police commissioner feels his officers' good works are drowned out by the crime of the day.

Police battle perception all the time. Last year, people were scared of downtown crime even as statistics showed that their fears were unfounded.

Did we in the news media unfairly stoke that fear by over-reporting isolated incidents? Or did we merely reflect fear that was already there? For what it's worth, we at the paper felt we were late in reporting on crime downtown and later found that we'd been misled by a police commander who denied that gangs were involved.

Readers call me every day and complain that we didn't report a stabbing or a shooting or a mugging they know happened in their neighborhood. And readers call me every day to complain that we reported a stabbing or a shooting or a mugging that happened in their neighborhood. To them, we're either complicit with the city in a cover-up or responsible for frightening everyone into believing that Baltimore is out of control.

On Dan Rodricks' show last week, Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III complained about this newspaper's practice in 2007 of publishing the daily homicide count as a way of drawing attention to city murders. He noted that a recent police shooting in New York's Times Square didn't make the front page of The New York Times.

"My point to you is, everyone in America knows where Times Square is, so why wouldn't that captivate everyone's attention?" Bealefeld said. "I don't think they have quite the penchant for sensationalizing violence in their city as we do."

Bealefeld said the murder box published throughout 2007 "did more to scare people about Baltimore and created more fear in Baltimore." He said that concentrating on the murder number "does a disservice to the police strategy in Baltimore."

He's not the first city chief to complain about being judged by murders, and he won't be the last. But Bealefeld once complained at a City Council hearing that the city's news media ignore most of the killings in Baltimore. I asked him Wednesday to square the two seemingly divergent statements.

"I think the media pick and choose cases to sensationalize for their own purpose," Bealefeld said. "Some kid in East Baltimore could get killed and get maybe three sentences in media coverage, but some incident that happened in a hotel in downtown gets played day after day."

He noted, accurately I think, that what he perceives as indifference "transcends media coverage" and that while news stories can focus the attention of the city and police on one particular case, he worries more about "the quote unquote run-of-the-mill drive-by drug killing" that gets little notice, little justice.

I would say that heightened media attention is not aimed only at police, but also reflects Bealefeld's call to action for every city agency and every citizen. There's a tragedy behind every story, and sometimes even the routine drug killing has a compelling tale to tell.

Yes, we in the news media need to do a better job of putting crime and other problems in perspective and writing about trends and solutions rather than treating murder as a baseball box score. But we also can't hide the bodies, or obscure where they fall.