Like many of the people taking to the internet following an article by Tracey Halvorsen about the plight of Baltimore, I am a born and bred Baltimorean. Please allow me to make two disclaimers before I go on my soap-box for just a moment. 1) I am not a writer, nor particularly good with punctuation ,but that does not take away from my points in my opinion. 2) This is an opinion piece like everyone else’s articles out there and I am not going to attempt to hide that it will include my obvious bias towards my own life’s perspective.

I love Baltimore. I love the neighborhoods where I spend 90% of my time and I am a home-owner in the upper-fells neighborhood. As many of you know, that area has been “up-and-coming” for quite some time and it’s improvement is really only driven by Johns Hopkins and how fast they can buy up the impoverished surrounding areas and develop them into a larger medical campus. This makes some people like myself very happy to see as it is bettering the areas like Fells Point by putting more doctors and nurses into areas that were previosuly abandoned or…let’s be honest…inhabited by folks of a lesser tax bracket.

This is not a race issue whatsoever…the original Baltimore working class in the riverside/locust-point areas as well as upper fells have traditionally been white and are being impacted just as much as the African american community through this gentrification. As property values are rising, it’s becoming harder and harder for the original Baltimoreans to maintain their foothold in these areas and are forced to give way to young, professionals…the new era of urban dwelling. Us young professionals (where I include myself) are not from the “real Baltimore” where we understand and tolerate drug problems and gang violence…we prefer to get our doses through shows like “The Wire” and amazing documentaries like “12 o’Clock boys” (definitely see it http://12oclockboys.com/). My point is though…THAT IS OKAY. I do not think that we should be expected to tolerate this and be shunned for being upset at the huge issues Baltimore faces, because assuming we don’t just keep our whining to the internet, acknowledging is the first step to dealing with the problem.

Yes there is an obvious socio-economic boundary that people continue to harp on and yes I acknowledge it is part of the problem (have-nots are incentivized to take from those who have), but we cannot sit here and say that it excuses everything “because how could poor people know any better?” Poor people are not a mass group of criminals sitting on their stoops in shady parts of Baltimore waiting to come commit crimes against people like me. Criminals are their own group and should not be treated as part of any other class of folks. Yes growing up in a gang culture could make you more prone to violence…but what about all of the kids who make it out of these areas without killing someone or robbing someone? What I am attempting to say in that long winded (most likely run on sentence) above is that poverty should not be considered an acceptable excuse for violent crime in ANY neighborhood. The issue is the way we deal with violent criminals in this city is obviously not working as the benefits of commiting crime still seem to outweigh the possible punishment for it.

I am not going to go down the 2nd amendment path and say that will fix anything, because that is it’s own highly complex debate, but as it stands now criminals have the upper-hand in this city. Personally, I DO feel that more police officers would be beneficial and I honestly would complain about my taxes considerably less if I felt I was getting anything from them! The crime has to be stopped and that is an issue that lies equally on all residents of Baltimore city to figure out a way to resolve. I wish I had a solution for you, but I am just one person and honestly I do not…but I would love to see some comments with ideas from the citizens of Baltimore (across all socio-economic classes) about how we can fix this place. We depend too heavily on the government to fix our surroundings and we could be waiting for the rest of our lives for that. Use this and all of the other articles floating around on Baltimore as a starting point…and remember…if we want anything fixed we have to actually act on this as opposed to just taking to the internet. Action brings change…not words from some people on the internet.

Also, please refrain from comments on my poor writing organization and punctuation, because as I mentioned before…I am just a normal guy who is using this as his soap-box for a rant.