Sometimes, during my drive to work, I listen to Clarence Maurice Mitchell IV, host of the Baltimore’s WBAL C4 radio show. Mitchell was formerly a member of Maryland’s House of Delegates and its Senate. In recent weeks, Mitchell has been talking about the terrible crime situation in Baltimore. In 2018, there were 308 homicides. So far this year, there have been 69. That’s in a 2018 population of 611,648 — down from nearly a million in 1950. The city is pinning its hopes to reduce homicides and other crime on new Police Commissioner Michael Harrison.
Another hot news item in Baltimore is the fact that Johns Hopkins University wants to hire 100 armed police officers to patrol its campuses, hospital and surrounding neighborhoods. The hospital president, Dr. Redonda Miller testified in Annapolis hearings that patients and employees are “scared when they walk home, they’re scared when they walk to their cars.”
Philadelphia’s Temple University police department is the largest university police force in the United States, with 130 campus police officers, including supervisors and detectives.
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In 1957, I attended night school at Temple University. There was little or no campus police presence. I am sure that people who attended Johns Hopkins, University of Chicago, and other colleges in or adjacent to black neighborhoods during the ’40s, ’50s and earlier weren’t in an armed camp. In the nation’s largest school districts that serve predominantly black youngsters, school police outnumber, sometimes by large margins, school counseling staffs. Again, something entirely new. I attended predominantly black…