O’Malley 2016 Just Committed Suicide in Baltimore - By Jackie Kucinich

[Vattel]

104. I might add that FSogol's replies are factually inaccurate.

FSogol doesn't even know when O'Malley left the mayor's office, which was in January of 2007, not November of 2007.

FSogol says: "He employed those policies when he arrived as Mayor, but moved away from them for the reasons stated. The number of arrests dropped each year in Baltimore as did the crime rate."

That is completely false. During his time as Mayor, arrests peaked in 2005, leading to the lawsuit in 2006.

FSogol says: "O'Malley, as Mayor of Baltimore (Dec 1999-Nov 2007) followed a policy of zero tolerance, also know as the broken windows policy as did almost every major city in the US."

FSogol would have you believe that O'Malley was just doing what everyone else was doing, but that completely ignores that O'Malley's zero tolerance went well beyond the basic broken window approach. As Simon says:

First, the department began sweeping the streets of the inner city, taking bodies on ridiculous humbles, mass arrests, sending thousands of people to city jail, hundreds every night, thousands in a month. They actually had police supervisors stationed with printed forms at the city jail – forms that said, essentially, you can go home now if you sign away any liability the city has for false arrest, or you can not sign the form and spend the weekend in jail until you see a court commissioner. And tens of thousands of people signed that form. . . .

My own crew members [on “The Wire”] used to get picked up trying to come from the set at night. We’d wrap at like one in the morning, and we’d be in the middle of East Baltimore and they’d start to drive home, they’d get pulled over. My first assistant director — Anthony Hemingway — ended up at city jail. No charge. Driving while black, and then trying to explain that he had every right to be where he was, and he ended up on Eager Street4. Charges were non-existent, or were dismissed en masse. Martin O’Malley’s logic was pretty basic: If we clear the streets, they’ll stop shooting at each other. We’ll lower the murder rate because there will be no one on the corners.

FSogol says: "There is a fact checker article floating around DU that shows that O'Malley did not manipulate the stats like Simon alleges. He used the FBI numbers."

Where does FSogol imagine that the FBI got their numbers from? They got them from the city government of Baltimore. Those numbers in no way show that Simon's claims about manipulating statistics are false. And I might add, the fact checker at the Washington post must really like O'Malley because the that "fact checker" doesn't even mention that the drop in homicides that O'Malley brags about is based on looking at the number of homicides in years 2007-2009 in addition to earlier years. So O'Malley is taking credit for what happened in Baltimore after the next mayor came in and stopped the mass arrest policy.