Commentary

When Michael S. Harrison was sworn in as Baltimore police commissioner in 2019 by then-Mayor Catherine Pugh, he pledged to achieve at least two things. He said he would make the city safe, while helping it meet the requirements of a court-ordered consent decree. In short, fewer murders and more constitutional policing. Four years and three months later, it was announced Thursday that he would be stepping down before the end of his five-year contract in March 2024.

These words came to me exactly 55 years from the day I first heard them: “As he said many times, in many parts of this nation, to those he touched and those who sought to touch him: ‘Some men see things as they are and say, “Why?” I dream things that never were and say, “Why not?”’” Those were the last words of Ted Kennedy’s elegy for his slain brother Bobby, delivered June 8, 1968, at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York.

Marty Wasserman fell off his horse. Sitting in the screened-in porch of his Ellicott City home on Monday, he told a story of how he was riding his horse, T, last summer when the animal was startled by a noise and threw him. At 80, any fall can be a disaster. But this was a full-on flop to the ground from the saddle of a tall bay. Wasserman injured his face and his ribs.

Ivan Bates emerged victorious in the pivotal Democratic primary last July to become Baltimore’s state’s attorney with the message that he would not only get tougher on those who commit acts of violence but that he would also hold accountable low-level offenders. Not that those convicted of loitering, drug possession or public drunkenness would all be locked up and the key thrown away, but that there would be enforcement and “consequences” depending on the “case and offender.”

The government’s right to take privately owned real property by means of eminent domain is one of few circumstances where a private property owner may be forced to part with his or her property. We saw an example of this with Baltimore's use of eminent domain in the Poppleton neighborhood to make way for an apartment complex.

I was going over my monthly Amazon subscription order a few days ago and settled on my regular haul of KN95 masks I’ve kept on hand since the start of COVID-19. I wondered if I’ll ever be comfortable taking them out of my cart. Well, certainly not this week! That distinctive haze and terrible burning smell across the state and up the East Coast is the result of wildfires in Canada that have put the air quality at a code red, making it dangerous to breathe.

I remember hooting when I watched “Reefer Madness” at some point in my college days, when smoking marijuana was secretive but common enough that no one was either shocked or scandalized. The movie, released in 1936, was straight up propaganda, warning parents that if their children got ahold of “marihuana,” there would be a direct line from a toke to a life of crime and depravity.