Former Maryland Gov. Bob Ehrlich Thursday attacked Gov. Martin O’Malley’s record on police enforcement, trying to pilfer support from the Democrat’s most loyal base during a testy debate dominated by minority issues.
In the homestretch of the campaign — early voting begins Friday — the duo
butted heads for the third time in 10 days, this time on Baltimore’s WOLB-AM
radio station, which serves a mostly black audience.
Overwhelming support among black voters has helped O’Malley pad his lead
over the former governor, polls show.
But Ehrlich, during the hour-long debate, said O’Malley’s zero-tolerance, imprisonment policy as mayor of Baltimore led to “mass arrests, creating criminal records for people who have done nothing more than walking down the street.”
O’Malley countered that it was necessary to combat a series of “open-air drug markets” that had proliferated in the “most addicted, most violent, most abandoned city in America.”
