Martin O'Malley was reportedly chased from a community forum about the aggressive police tactics O'Malley has implemented in Baltimore.
I don't know if anyone else has heard or read about this, but I heard about it first hand from people there. Apparently the Baltimore City Police have implemented an overly aggressive campaign in which police officers will randomly stop and frisk any individual walking down the streets of Baltimore.
At a community forum to discuss this event, Martin showed up only to be chased from the forum when the crowd turned on him and started to heckle and boo him.
Consider the following two facts about Baltimore:
- It is one of the largest (if not the largest) base of Democrat voters in the state.
- It is predominantly African-American.
Now...If O'Malley wants to win the primary against Duncan, I would think he needs Baltimore voters to turn out in mass for him. Furthermore, whoever the Democrat is for governor will need these voters to turn out for them in order to win against Ehrlich.
Sending the police out into the neighborhoods of Baltimore to randomly search anyone walking down the street seems like a poor way to "energize your base", unless of course you are trying to energize a Republican base.
Is this Martin O'Malley's true DLC colors showing through? Is he trying to show he is "tough on crime" to the detriment of his base? Is this Duncan's chance to move into Martin's territory? People in Baltimore have other concerns (and rightly so) than Duncan's destruction of the environment via the developers that fund Duncan's campaign.
I shamelessly ripped this off another email list:
----- Original Message -----
From: Melissa Berger
To: D4MDiscuss@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Sunday, January 08, 2006 11:11 AM
Subject: Re: [D4MDiscuss] Re: Info on voting records of some Montgomery County delegates
Please do not turn responses into attacks upon other members of the list!!!
At 12:25 AM 1/8/2006, you wrote:
It's interesting Jay's definition of "progressive". Apparently he thinks O'Malley meets the criteria of a "progressive".
Let's see:
O'Malley has ignored the needs of renters and moderate income folks during the entire tenure of his administration.
O'Malley routinely harasses progressives who peacefully assemble in Balimore city, whether to get health care petitions/ hold a candlelight vigil in conjunction with Cindy Sheehan nationwide/ or protest at Wal-Mart.
O'Malley shares complicity in the deaths over over 2 dozen jailees in central booking over the past 2 years.
O'Malley has his police undertake a campaign against African American people in the city, routinely arresting them-then not charging them.
O'Malley has sicced his cops on the citizens, using a "stop and frisk" policy of more than 130,000 people in Baltimore in just the first 9 months of the year, a policy severely criticized by the ACLU, whose staff attorney, David Rocah, said "It was not meant to be a license for police to conduct random searches of people on the public streets, which is what it has turned into". (Baltimore Sun, 11-17-05).
O'Malley pressured the City Council into agreeing to a several hundred million dollar hotel/convention center boondoggle- and then only after the City Council forced him to make concessions for scholarships, senior citizen facilities, and other investments in the neighborhoods of Baltimore (where the people live), actions he was not otherwise going to take (apparently, those neighborhoods didn't contain big developer friends of O'Malley).
O'Malley, a real "progressive".
Chris