The public outpouring of grief over former City Councilman Ken Harris’s death by gun has been swift and heartfelt and frankly pretty disturbing. Harris is one of the city of Baltimore’s 159 homicide victims this year, give or take, depending on the level of routine gunplay last night. And this figure, 159 dead, is considered a wonderful success by many who run this city and remember years when the taking of lives was so much higher.
Here’s what’s disturbing about the declarations of grief over Harris: It follows absolute public numbness over the other 158 murders this year.
Such barbarism is considered part of our municipal routine, like backups on the Jones Falls Expressway, except that we grant ourselves a psychological distance from most of these homicides so they won’t drive us nuts. They’re in some other neighborhood, some other ZIP code, we tell ourselves, and they’re acts committed by people whose lives are not like ours.
But Harris was one of us. He was a good man who sought redemption for the roughest parts of his city. His values were ours. So we can’t erect the normal walls between our lives and this latest act of madness.
Let’s face it, folks, some deaths are considered acceptable losses. We don’t say this in as many words, but we act that way. Most of the slaughter is drug-related and, as everybody knows, the war against drugs now drags on for — What? Its fourth decade? Its fifth?
How’s it going so far?
Casualties of war, that’s all.
Here’s how numb we’ve gotten to acts of crime in certain neighborhoods. Monday afternoon, on Loch Raven Boulevard, city police stopped two young people just outside the Northwood Shopping Plaza where Harris was shot to death over the weekend.
Now it was mid-afternoon, when kids were getting out of school. Some of them stood at the bus stop near All Saints Lutheran Church. The cops had their suspects down on the ground. Handcuffs came out, and guns were ready. The scene was pretty dramatic — for some neighborhoods.
Directly across the street, maybe 20 yards away, were all these teenage kids standing around — and they seemed utterly indifferent to the police action and the suspects sprawled in the street. There was no curiosity, no playful juvenile hooting, and no signs of anxiety, either.
Just another day in the neighborhood.
Harris was the victim of bad timing. Not only the bad timing of arriving at his pal’s New Haven jazz lounge at 1:15 in the morning, but the dreadful timing of the violence that does not cease.
Three hundred homicides in a year, and everybody says, gee, this is terrible.
Two hundred homicides, and everybody says, hey, we’re getting better, we’re cleaning up the city’s killing fields. Oh, yeah?
According to whom? Not to those 159 victims’ families. Not to those neighborhoods, where people continue to cringe from the gunplay, where parents send their children to school every day, or send them outside to play, and know they’re rolling the dice with their safety.
Ken Harris goes to his grave, and everyone rouses themselves and says this is terrible. Hours after the robbers hit the lounge, and one of them put the bullet in Harris, we had Mayor Sheila Dixon, City Council President Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, and State Sen. Catherine Pugh, among others, standing in front of photographers and declaring their great sadness.
They looked utterly stunned. But why? Surely, after nearly 3,000 homicides over the past decade, they’re not shocked by gunplay any more — except that this was one of their own. Harris tried to stop the precise violence that was waiting for him in the dark. He was a civilized man surrounded by incivility, and he tried to lend his voice to the city’s better angels.
But he is one of 159 or so this year, and the year still has more than three months to go. And, when we get past our routine numbness, we have to ask ourselves why such killing goes on, and the guns proliferate, and neighborhoods cringe.
For now, we’ll have our declarations of sadness and anger. Some residents gathered at the Northeast Police District to vent Tuesday evening, and there’s been talk of a public prayer vigil.
Poor Ken Harris will go to his grave with a city mourning the loss of such a fine man. Then the guns will come back, and the numb reaction to them.
And we’ll all be back to business as usual.
