Buried in the news cycle of David Hogg organizing a temper tantrum, something, something, Trump Russia, and ICE executing children or however CNN has chosen to frame the issue of unaccompanied illegal immigrant minors, there was an overlooked story of a police officer in Baltimore who was killed.
Officer First Class Amy Caprio was run over by four youths in a Jeep. The four youths were arrested and have been charged with first degree murder.
The internet pundit Iowahawk famously said “Journalism is about covering important stories. With a pillow, until they stop moving.”
There are some details that have come out in the death of Officer Amy Caprio that explain why the national media is going to try an smother this story.
The youth driving the Jeep was Dawnta Anthony Harris. He was under house arrest at the time of the murder, and was wearing an ankle monitor. He had a lengthy juvenile record at the time.
The West Baltimore teen’s crime spree began in December, prosecutors say, and, over the subsequent months, he stole four cars, skipped court dates and escaped from a juvenile center.
In fact, Harris’ mother was so concerned that she requested that her son be detained before he stole another car.
Accused killer Dawnta Harris had been in and out of the criminal courts so much lately that, at his most recent hearing, his own mother asked the judge to detain him.
“Numerous times, I asked them to detain him, to keep him so nothing like this would happen,” she said.
Her son, who was supposed to be under house arrest, was nowhere to be found.
In fact, court documents show he’d gone AWOL.
He wasn’t present at his own court hearing, even though his parent and prosecutors requested the teen be detained.
In what has become a trend of law enforcement shitting bed when a youth throws up red flags, the Baltimore juvenile system let him go and failed to prevent a murder.
A court document shows juvenile service officials requested he get alternatives to detention.
That agency now confirms that document was filed by mistake.
Oops, we fucked up!
Juvenile justice officials maintain they sought detention for Harris.
Only after the local media asked “WTF happened?”
The judge, however, decided not to decide, and to continue the case until the following week.
The day before Harris was scheduled for his next court appearance, he was arrested and charged with the murder of Officer Amy Caprio.
Only one person was murdered as a result of this fuck up. That’s 16 fewer than Broward’s fuck up. Maybe somebody will get a medal.
Defense attorney Warren Brown says the judicial system failed in so many ways.
It did, but that’s not an excuse for your client.
“There’s going to be a ripple effect, and some people may lose their jobs, quite frankly,” said Brown.
HAHAHAHAHA, bullshit. Nobody will get fired for this. The bureaucracy will never admit is fucked up that badly.
The Juvenile Services secretary admits the system failed in this case, and it’s now reviewing how to prevent it from happening again.
The person who fucked up will be promoted to the point where they can’t make this kind of decision anymore. Maybe the judge will become a state Senator.
The Fraternal Order of Police in Baltimore is blaming the City Attorney, Marilyn Mosby, of the Freddie Gray riots and trial fame.
There are fingers being pointed at everyone involved, by everyone involved, and yes, there are disappointments aplenty. The failure, however, lies with State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby and her continuing inability to understand the importance that her office plays in combating crime in Baltimore City.
The safety of our citizens is dependent on a relationship between the Police Department and the judiciary, including Ms. Mosby and her staff, a relationship that honors the common goal of providing for the public protection. For too long now, that relationship has been strained by Ms. Mosby’s apparent “catch and release” philosophy of criminal enforcement.
Dawnta Harris is the latest on a long list of those who have posed an obvious danger to the community but who have, for whatever reason, been released pending trial or in many instances have not even stood trial. Whether or not the home detention system used to hinder his movement was equipped with a GPS locator is not the failure in this sad saga. The fact that he was sent home pending trial at all is the true failure here. Mr. Harris has a history of criminal activity and escape. He undeniably presented a danger to our citizens and should have been detained accordingly. It was the responsibility of Ms. Mosby, as the Baltimore City State’s Attorney, to ensure this outcome. She did not, and we are angry that a brilliant young woman who dedicated her life to public service is now gone from us.
It seems that once again, a lot of social justice soft on crime politics allowed someone who should have been in jail to roam freely, ultimately resulting in murder.
This is bad.
But it gets worse. Jean Marbella of The Baltimore Sun just had to Porgsplain to the rest of us why we racists are really responsible for Officer Caprio’s death.
Baltimore County police officer’s death ignites a racial firestorm
It’s hard to think of a more volatile mix: Four young black males from Baltimore City, accused in the death of a white female police officer in Baltimore County. Authorities say three of the teenagers were breaking into homes when the fourth ran the officer over in a stolen Jeep.
Black kids, white cop, that’s what’s important. The burglaries and stolen car, not so much.
Predictably enough, social media, call-in radio and other forums blew up. A sampling from the Baltimore County Police & Fire Facebook page:
“I was hoping they’d kill him during apprehension. What a waste of life. He’s currently breathing air some decent person could be breathing.”
Damned racists really having a problem with people who kill cops.
“I personally am tired of good for nothing hood rats committing adult crimes and people STILL saying crap like, he had hard times growing up, society made him do these things because he had no role models.”
That may be a little racist, but the central idea that being soft on crime for reasons of social justice just makes crime worse is correct.
“I hope all you whites have the same level outrage next time one of your youths decide to shoot up a school of innocent children,” another wrote. “Y’all are a disgusting group of devils.”
Since that is exactly what happened in Broward County, it is a legitimate concern.
No previous case has generated as much online reaction, county fire spokeswoman Elise Armacost said. Authorities pleaded repeatedly for civility, and county staff took down comments that contained profanity or were typed in all caps. But they have struggled to keep up with the avalanche of angry postings — many of which called for the accused driver to be hanged, shot, run over or raped.
This is the same county that had the Freddie Gray riots, right?
“Sadly, these comments are a microcosm of the conflicts and lack of civility we see in the country right now,” Armacost said.
No it’s not.
Stephanie DeLuca, a Johns Hopkins sociologist, has long studied Baltimore youth. She’s also the daughter of a 40-year veteran of the Chicago Police Department. She described the “absolutely awful” case as a kind of perfect, polarizing storm.
Repeat offender given leniency kills cop. I can see how that pisses a lot of people off.
“It touches on all these intersections — of race, policing, city-county,” said DeLuca, co-author of the 2016 book “Coming of Age in the Other America.”
Someone needs to boost book sales.
“Once fear is sparked, anger is sparked,” she said.
What do they have to fear that causes so much anger? Black people right?
Authorities say the teens were burglarizing homes in Perry Hall Monday afternoon when Baltimore County Police Officer Amy S. Caprio approached the Jeep. They say driver Dawnta Harris, 16, of the Gilmor Homes public housing project in West Baltimore, ran her over.
These kids were just burglarizing homes. That’s nothing to fear, it’s just kids stuff. That they were willing to kill a police officer… eh. What would have happened if they broke into a house with the home owner still in it? Nothing to fear there, I guess.
Harris deliberately ran Officer Caprio over, but from this you’d think it was an accident.
Caprio died a short time later. Harris and three other youths were charged as adults with first-degree murder.
Caprio just sort of died and the four nearest black kids were charged with murder.
That the black youths had driven to the county, populated in no small part by decades of white flight from the city, fueled heated exchanges online and over the airwaves.
It’s your fault you white racists. Baltimore may be the 7th most dangerous city in America. The (still serving) mayor may have had to cut essential services years ago as Baltimore is one of America’s most bankrupt cities. Baltimore has below national average employment, and has been called “the next Detroit.” But the real reason you don’t want to live in Baltimore is you don’t want to live next to black people.
So you move out to the burbs. So when some youths just want to have some fun by breaking into people’s homes, they have to drive out to the burbs. Now they have to steal a car. When a white police offer responds to reports of burglaries, they kill her with that car.
If you didn’t white flight out of Baltimore, those youths could have just walked to your home to break into it and that cop would still be alive.
The logic here is impeccable.
Where some saw predatory “animals” and “thugs,” others saw demonization and a rush to judgment. Finger-pointing between city prosecutors and state juvenile officials only added to the fire.
We must be sympathetic to kids who break into houses for fun and run over cops. They rank up there on the sympathy list nest to MS-13. The white cop and her husband, not so much.
Also, the sympathetic juvenile fucked this one up badly.
“It’s time that we just turn the city over to the hoodlums and just let them annihilate themselves,” one commentor wrote on The Baltimore Sun’s Facebook page.
In some parts of the city, that’s already happening.
DeLuca said the anger obscures an important point: Most young people in Baltimore’s impoverished neighborhoods are going to school or working or both, not out on the streets and creating mayhem.
And those who are not are breaking into homes and killing cops. This is the same argument that the Left just got raked over the coals on “most (illegal) immigrants are not MS-13 so lets play down the danger of or defend MS-13.”
The difficult thing about being a law abiding, tax paying, working or middle class person is just how much you get ignored by the system you pay for. The one thing we ask for is to be kept safe from crime and lawlessness and you fail at even that, we get a little pissed.
“They’re looking for something to do, something to be about,” she said. “This is about human development, personal development, and finding meaning and dignity, and these are in short supply in Baltimore.”
College, breaking into houses, you know just something to do.
Instead, she said, it’s people like Harris, who authorities say fled home detention earlier this month while awaiting sentencing for a car theft, who are “viewed as the norm.”
“The thing I think is important to remember is this is not the typical kid,” DeLuca said. “But no one wants to hear that in the face of this tragedy.”
Because this kid, and other like him, are all over the news.
Because the system seems to exist to give this kid leniency and sympathy, and make excuses for him at every turn.
Most people are not like him, but the media and politicians ignore them. If you are a tax paying, law abiding citizen, who is not a celebrity or millionaire, it seems like nobody in politics gives a shit about you.
Where is the sympathy for the quiet home home owners who were burglarized? What about the guy whose Jeep was stolen and used to kill a police officer? Do you give a shit about those people?
And indeed, online comments tend to follow a pattern: A poster calls for the suspects to “ROT in prison & actually they should get the DEATH PENALTY!” Others chime in with similar proposals, until eventually someone demurs, perhaps expressing empathy for the youths’ families or pointing out that police have killed suspects but escaped accountability. Then that draws a backlash, and the cycle continues.
Middle class Americans really hate cop killing repeat offenders. Maybe the Left has gone too far down the anti-cop path to get that.
On the WBAL radio show hosted by Clarence M. Mitchell IV, known on the air as C4, callers have been talking about little else.
“You’re talking about a black young man from Gilmor Homes in a very, very white area, and a white female police officer — the racial dynamics can’t be eliminated,” said Mitchell, a former Democratic state senator and scion of a family of civil rights activists.
All those people who hate a recidivist cop killer are just racists.
He sees the real issue in this case as the failings of the juvenile services and juvenile justice systems. Harris had been arrested in several car thefts before Monday, and had been ordered on home detention earlier this month.
That was a huge fuck up, but is it too much to ask the youths to have some responsibility too?
Antero Pietila, who has written about the ways decades-old laws, racial covenants and red-lining created the segregation that persists in much of the Baltimore region today, said the reaction to Caprio’s death reveals the continuing tensions between the city and county.
“After white flight, a lot of people who moved to Baltimore County … felt victimized by blacks — ‘they made me move,’” said Pietila, author of “Not in My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City.”
“At stressful times, all these emotions come out,” he said. “These are not logical matters. These are matters where emotions rise, and prejudices take hold.”
Because white people are racist for not wanting to live in high crime areas where youths with extensive criminal records are let free on ankle monitors to break into homes and kill cops.
divisive political climate.
“What is part of this discussion is the demonization of certain groups that is happening at the national level,” he said. “A lot of people who have strong feelings, maybe they used to be more circumspect. Now they let their feelings out.”
This is all because Trump called MS-13 “Animals.” Run with that.
Repeat after me: “Trump is not a cause, Trump is a symptom.” Find out what the cause is, and hint, it’s not racism.
State Del. Pat McDonough, who is running in the Republican primary for Baltimore County executive, unloaded on his Facebook page Wednesday night:
“Here we go again. Another thug destroys the life of an innocent person. This time it’s a wonderful woman in law enforcement,” McDonough wrote. “The only thing these thugs are good at, is destroying lives. The radical left loves the thugs, and keeps complaining about mass incarceration while in reality none of them get locked up, But just roam our neighborhoods.”
Same situation in Broward. It’s not about race, it’s about the failure of goverment programs to protect us from predators because that gives the Left the sadz.
Baltimore City Councilman John Bullock said some will view the officer’s death as validation of the fears that led many to flee the city for the county in the first place — and how even that won’t keep them safe.
True that.
Bullock, a political scientist at Towson University, said the first thought is, and should be, the tragedy of the loss of Caprio. But he said that shouldn’t prevent a look at larger issues surrounding the suspects: Their education, their neighborhoods, their own possible exposure to violence.
Often, he said, such discussions get shut down amid the more heated rhetoric.
“We don’t want to analyze what has brought us to this moment,” Bullock said.
He contrasted that reaction to the discussion around school shooters, who have most often been white.
“With the school shooter, there’s more psychoanalysis,” Bullock said. “That same introspection doesn’t happen in cases like this.”
Lets see. On the one hand some kids kill a cop that was trying to stop them from stealing things. That’s pretty self evident. On the other, a young man murders 17 people. That motive is a little harder for rational people to understand. People want to wrap their mind about why violence happens. Kill for money is easy to conceptualize. Kill for…. fame, thrill, other motivations? Is harder.
Kaye Whitehead, an associate professor of communication and African & African American studies at Loyola University Maryland, is the mother of two teenage boys and author of the book “Letters to My Black Sons: Raising Boys in a Post-Racial America.”
She contrasted the treatment of the four Baltimore suspects with that of the accused shooter at Santa Fe High School in Texas this month and the convicted shooter at Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, S.C., in 2015.
“With Dimitrios Pagourtzis, or Dylann Roof, we want to know the full story of this lone wolf,” she said. “Were they mentally challenged? Were they sad? Were they lonely?
“When the perpetrator is African-American, it doesn’t matter. We don’t want a portrait.”
Why did the kid in Santa Fe shoot his fellow classmates? Was is because he didn’t get a date? We want an explanation.
These kids killed a cop on a robbery spree. We don’t need an inside analysis for this.
The crimes are treated differently because they are different.
Harris’ case attracted the attention of the prominent defense attorneys Warren Brown and J. Wyndal Gordon, who are now representing him. Gordon has said Caprio displayed “aggression,” raising her weapon and firing, and Harris struck her accidentally as he tried to drive around her car and away.
That sounds like bullshit. Especially after Harris’ confession that he “drove at” Officer Caprio.
That rankled County Councilman David Marks, a Republican who represents Perry Hall. He accused the attorneys of “pouring gasoline on the fire” and making excuses for their client.
He said the lawyers were deflecting responsibility for Harris’ alleged actions.
“And I have to ask, at what point does a parent’s responsibility end?” Marks said. “Why is everything society’s fault? And I think that’s the position of so many of my constituents.”
Seems like a lot of people want to know that except the sympathetic juvenile justice system.
There are two problems here.
One:
You want to know why Trump won and there is so much anger against Illegals. Here it is. We tax paying, law abiding Americans are tired of politicians bending over backwards to spending our tax dollars on services for illegals or sympathetic programs that avoid throwing recidivist offenders in prison for life, all the time our schools suck, our streets are in shit condition, homeless are jerking off in our libraries, and it takes 20 fuck minutes for the cops or firefighters so show up. We pay for the system. We support it with out money and our effort. We should be the primary beneficiary of it. The system should exist to protect us from the likes of Harris. Not to be sympathetic to a cop killer as he steals cars for fun.
Two:
A massive fuck up by the Democrat run government that was sympathetic and soft on a repeat offender that it failed to protect the rest of us and prevent a murder. Yet that same group of fuck ups demands that we trust it. No. We’re tried of watching fuck up after fuck up lead to death and chaos. Parkland, Baltimore, the rise of MS-13, gross ignoring of a problem until death happens, then we are called racist for being upset about it.
This article was completely irresponsible. Rather than focus on the issue: the failure of the powers that be to protect society from predators. It blames white people and racism and everything else.
All these people can do is deflect from their own incompetence, meaning this will happen again and again.
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