“The gang initiations are very real and we must practice safety at all costs,” a portion of the e-mail forwarded to me in late November reads. “The e-mails and text messages we are receiving about the killing of women during Halloween night is a real initiation.”
The original e-mail was sent by a woman no doubt concerned that gang members were singling out members of her gender for attack. That should come as no surprise; gang members by their very nature are poltroonish. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t find it necessary to join a gang.
But it was the source of the woman’s information that caught my attention: She said the info came from someone in the Baltimore Sheriff’s Department. That source also gave the primary locations of four Baltimore gangs: the Bloods in the Park Heights-Cold Spring Lane area; the Crips in the Baker Street to Poplar Grove Street area of West Baltimore; the Black Gorillas (when will these idiots learn that the prison gang Black Panther George Jackson allegedly started is called the Black GUERILLA Family?) in the area of Barclay Street and North Avenue up through 25th Street; and MS-13 in the area of Broadway and Eastern Avenue through Potee Street.
The e-mailer even told readers what to look out for when they’re driving: The “car bump tactic.”
“The car bump tactic is the most common way [gang members] get people out of their cars to either steal the car, rob you and steal the car, kidnap you and steal your car or kill you and steal your car. If someone taps your car, do not get out unless you are sitting in front of a police station. … Stay in your car and keep driving.”
The advice about the “car bump tactic” makes sense even if it doesn’t apply to a gang initiation. And making the public aware of the specific areas of the city where gangs are known to hang out might advise the public about which areas of Baltimore to avoid. But the Baltimore Police Department, on Halloween night, no less, issued statements saying that initiations involving gang members singling out and murdering women were rumors.
So when a source forwarded the e-mail to me I immediately saw a dilemma: One Baltimore law enforcement agency said the gang initiation murder plot was a rumor; a member of another city law enforcement agency was not only saying the initiations were very real, but also giving specifics about what the initiations involved.
So I sent an e-mail to police Commissioner Frederick Bealefeld, asking him if the department stood by its original claim that the gang initiation murder plot was nothing but a rumor. He had Officer Troy Harris of the BPD’s public information office get in touch with me. Harris said there has been not even one incident of a woman murdered in a gang initiation plot. He added that he talked to members of the department’s gang intelligence unit, who keep their ears to the street and work enough informants to know, and they repeated that the talk of gang initiation plots is a rumor.
“It’s an urban legend,” Harris said.
I called the Sheriff’s Department and talked to a spokesman who said this was the first time he had heard about the details outlined in the gang initiation plot that a member of his department gave to some staff members of the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute in late November. But the spokesman did say that the Bloods have for the past couple of years put out flyers describing such a gang initiation plot around Halloween.
So either we have a very real plot by real gang members or a bunch of gang wannabes — a group of malicious, malevolent clowns, really — pulling a very vicious prank every Halloween. I sent portions of the e-mail to Sgt. Governor Tillery in the Sheriff’s Department, who said he would forward them to Sgt. Carla Lightsey, the department’s official spokeswoman.
Lightsey would be back to me “as soon as possible,” Tillery assured me.
Lightsey was off Friday as deadline approached. (A word of advice to the folks in the Sheriff’s Department: Delegate, people, delegate.) The official response of the Sheriff’s Department about gang initiation murder plots in Baltimore will be the focus of my next column.
Gregory Kane is a columnist who has been writing about Baltimore and Maryland for more than 15 years. Look for his columns in the editorial section every Thursday and Sunday. Reach him at [email protected].
