The Politics Meister

The people down at Occupy Baltimore are revealing a very weak spot in the Baltimore City bureaucracy that many of us are already too familiar with. Occupy Baltimore is clearly breaking the law by setting up an overnight campsite in the middle of the tourist attraction known as the Inner Harbor. This is an act of civil disobedience that is supposed to focus people’s attention on economic injustices. Since there is a reason behind this there is not the kind of outrage amongst the general public as there would be if drug dealers set up an open air drug market on a random previously drug-free block in Baltimore. Occupy Baltimore is an “acceptable” example of the bureaucracy’s inability to timely enforce its own rules. The growing crackdown momentum from outside of Baltimore will easily allow the city to (very soon) get rid of the tents and sleep overs.

Those of us who are unlucky enough to have open air drug markets on our block or on numerous nearby blocks are very familiar with the city’s inability to enforce its own laws on a regular basis. Open air drug markets are the ultimate slap in the face to productive social behavior.   Open air drug markets are signs of lawlessness and anarchy. They make it clear that this block is not under the same laws that Baltimore is supposed to be under. The police make all sorts of excuses about why they can not take care of the obvious problem. One of them is that there are not enough police in cars in the district. We all know there are tons of police in Baltimore, but many are behind desks or in internal affairs or physically unable to preform their job. The kind of cop that society is so familiar with (beat cop in the car or on the street) seems to be the least common in Baltimore. The bad guys know this, they know the odds are in their favor so they continue to conduct their anti-social dealings in front of children, seniors, and anyone else who may be unlucky enough to look out their window in the middle of the day.

In my neighborhood of Reservoir Hill you are more likely to get fined for somebody else’s trash in your backyard, or a chair on your front porch, or lack of a permit for that piece of  sheet rock you had to replace than you are to see a police car stop to deal with an open air drug market.

Baltimore has enough money to fund the housing inspectors, meter maids, and all the other tools with attitudes that harass and fine law abiding productive citizens and landlords, but they can’t get the obvious drug dealers off the streets.

What would happen if the home owners and landlords took an Occupy Baltimore stand and refused to pay the harassing fines they received? Does the city have enough manpower to make everyone play by the so-called rules if most people started to ignore them?

In these tough economic times I hope the city tells its inspectors to take it easy with the homeowner occupants in the neighborhoods filled with drug related lawlessness. It really is insulting to receive a useless fine when your block is haunted by open air drug markets and all the anti-social behavior that goes hand in hand with it.  Fines for nothing, permits for everything, all sorts of punishing taxes, and uncontrollable anti-social behavioral are major reasons people leave Baltimore, do not want to live in Baltimore, and do not want to do business in Baltimore.  The bureaucracy needs to prioritize soon before it loses complete control and drives even more productive people away.