For some reason totally unknown to me, God continues to smile upon Baltimore. Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake is "tongue-lashing" the Fraternal Order of Police because of the fall-off in city arrests and a corresponding increase of crime ("Do your job, too, Madam Mayor," June 18). The mayor needs to be educated on a fact of life which is that there exists such a thing as "cause and effect." She and her clown-like administration have caused the fall-off in arrests and now they can't deal with the effect of having done that!
Those police officers who were on the front line against those thugs received absolutely no support from the city administration, not the mayor, not Police Commissioner Anthony Batts and certainly not Baltimore City State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby's office! The only reason why those officers would have so obviously stood down is the fact that someone above them had ordered them to stand down. This mayor stated in public that she wanted "those who wanted to destroy, to have some room to do so." She said that and the moment is on film to prove it! That statement alone is an order for the police to stand down. A functional police department would not allow room for some thugs to "destroy" if they had not been ordered to look the other way.
I cannot understand why Baltimore's business community is not shouting for some accountability from this administration. After all, didn't this genius of a mayor also say as to the looting, "It's only property?" Both of those statements, in my opinion, pinpoint her idiocy but apparently, she isn't done yet. She has issued a not-so-thinly-veiled threat against the FOP in which she says that police need to do their jobs and earn their pay. Hey, Mayor Rawlings-Blake, here's a wake up call for you: That's exactly what those officers wanted to do before you tied their hands behind their backs!
Keep on piling on with your obvious incompetency, Madam Mayor, and you will see even more "effect" of that incompetency! If you think that things are bad now in "The City That Bleeds," keep up with what you're doing and cause the police to walk out! You think crime is bad now? As the circus barker (and your administration is like a circus) would say, "You ain't seen nothing yet!" Why don't you give Commissioner Batts yet another raise — he certainly has earned it — for swallowing whatever pride he may have had as a police chief. And good luck in your new role as leader of the U.S. Conference of Mayors. What a gift! You certainly didn't do anything to earn it.
Robert DiStefano, Abingdon