SHAME, GUILT SHOULD FOLLOW ANGER OVER 6 KILLINGS

Anger Over Mass Killings Should Be Followed By Guilt

Mass Killings Should Induce Guilt

Anger Over Mass Killings Should Be Followed By Guilt

Mass Killings Should Induce Sense Of Guilt

WHERE'S THE anger? That's the question callers and letter-writers to The
Sun have posed in the 13 days since five women were executed in East
Baltimore's Belair-Edison community, allegedly by members of an O'Donnell
Heights drug gang.

Specifically, cantankerous citizens want to know why those who expressed
such outrage at the recent fatal police shootings of Larry Hubbard and Eli
McCoy have been noticeably silent on the deaths of Mary McNeil Matthews,
Mary Helen Collien, Makisha Jenkins, Trennell Alston and LaVanna Spearman.
Tavaris McNeil, Matthews' son, was found shot to death near his mother's
home. Police have theorized that the four suspects in custody committed the
killings to exact payment for a drug debt.

So those of you who have reacted with anger to the killings are quite
justified. You have the admiration of those of us who have reacted to the
killings with a sense of sheer terror.

Perfect love casteth out fear, the clerics tell us. Maybe perfect fear
casteth out anger. Those of us who have family members involved in the drug
lifestyle as either users or dealers face the prospect that we may pay for
the debts of our loved ones with our lives.

We haven't quite reached the anger stage yet.

Drug dealers have taken their code of retribution to a frightening new
level: executing those who have nothing to do with the business. That's
scary. Also scary is the sheer stupidity of whoever it was who committed
these killings. To collect payment on a drug debt, they execute six people.
They bring down the wrath of an entire city - and probably the state -- and
subject themselves to a manhunt almost unparalleled in Baltimore history.
They now face murder charges that may get them the death penalty. And the
stupid miscreants probably didn't get their money.

Such idiocy is truly terrifying.

But there are at least two other emotions Baltimoreans should feel in light
of the horror of Dec. 5. Shame and guilt come most immediately to mind. We
should all feel ashamed and guilty. We all know that the overwhelming
majority of crimes are linked to drugs. Thus, our self-righteous anger
aside, the six killings should hardly come as a surprise to us. But we
should feel ashamed and guilty that, with all the data linking crime to
drugs available to us, we haven't taken seriously the calls of some to
decriminalize drugs and treat the problem as the public health crisis it is.

A. Robert Kaufman, Baltimore's curmudgeon-in-residence and aging activist,
has made this plea for years. He reiterated it during his recent campaign
for mayor. Did we listen to him? Nah. Instead, we went for the candidates
who advocated the same business-as-usual approach to the war on drugs, a war
everyone knows we're losing.

"I'm kind of getting tired of saying it," Kaufman said from his West
Baltimore home Thursday night. He wrote his own letter to The Sun , taking
to task those who have insisted that the only reaction to the Belair-Edison
killings should be one of anger.

"The killings will stop when the profit is taken out of drugs and addiction
is treated as a public health problem," Kaufman wrote. He dismissed almost
with derision those who have hinted that those who have protested recent
police shootings might better spend their energies protesting the mass
killings in East Baltimore.

"Drug dealers wouldn't give a rat's patoot about a protest," Kaufman
continued in his letter. He stopped reading from the letter and went on to
rail against a society that focuses too much on punishment and not enough on
prevention, noting the recent furor over juvenile boot camps as an example.

"These kids have had too little love and caring in their lives," Kaufman
continued, "and instead of giving them the love and caring they need, we
subject them to the same macho violence they've been getting all their
lives."

State officials clearly dropped the ball by ordering juveniles sent from one
abusive environment to another. Baltimoreans are blundering in the war on
drugs as well. One segment of the population is mad at the cops. The other
is mad at the criminals. Neither can see through the anger long enough to
consider that what's needed to fight crime is a new and radical approach to
the drug war.

"Why," a Howard County (http://www.co.ho.md.us) woman asked me, "don't
Baltimoreans use Church Hospital as an inpatient, long-term drug treatment
center instead of closing it?"

"Because people in Baltimore ain't thinking," I answered. If we were, we
would use Liberty Medical Center for the same thing. But all we've gotten
from city leaders is lip service on the subject of treatment on demand for
addicts.

And a chorus of angry rhetoric from the masses.