leonard.sipes@csosa.gov<\/a> or at Twitter at twitter.com\/lensipes.<\/p>\n– Audio Begins –<\/p>\n
Len Sipes: Hi, and welcome to D.C. public safety, I’m your host, Len Sipes. Ladies and gentlemen, I think we’re going to have an extraordinarily interesting show today. We have Peter Hermann from the Baltimore Sun. Peter has been around the world, in the Jerusalem bureau for the Baltimore Sun, he’s a former police reporter, and now he writes a very interesting column almost on a daily basis for the Baltimore Sun, putting this whole crime issue, the issue of crime and justice in perspective. Also at our microphone, another veteran, 20 years of newspaper reporting, Robert Pierre. Robert Pierre with the Washington Post. And again, what Robert and Peter do, I think, ladies and gentlemen, is to try to take their work for their respective newspapers, and they’re trying to put this issue of crime and justice into context, and I think that that’s interesting, because I think it’s a dying art throughout the country, or not happening throughout the country, that we’re getting less and less good solid reporting and good solid information on what’s happening in the crime and the criminal justice issue, and to discuss this, what we have, along with Peter Hermann and Robert Pierre, and Peter and Robert, welcome to D.C. Public Safety.<\/p>\n
Robert Pierre: Thank you.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes: Guys, what about that? Both of you do an interesting column, both of you do what I think is a really unique, Peter, you write that, almost a daily blog, in terms of trying to put the crime problem within the City of Baltimore within context, where most newspapers in this country are giving it 4-5 column inches in terms of a particular crime or a crime problem, and they’re putting it on the 4th page of the local section, it seems as if newspapers have almost given up, and here you are, doing almost a daily analysis of crime within a particular neighborhood in Baltimore city. Do you think what you’re doing is unique and different?<\/p>\n
Peter Hermann: I don’t know if it’s unique and different. I think papers have done a terrific job over the years, certainly covering breaking crime, and what I’ve always been criticized, probably for covering crime too much, putting it on the front page too much, it’s easy to sensationalize some of the stories that go on in a big city on a daily basis, and certainly, I think if you look at some of the crime that both the daily breaking crime, both the Washington Post and the Baltimore Sun, other papers do, it’s not even a fraction of the crime that’s occurring.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes: I understand that, but crime and criminal justice issues are huge issues in the life of any city. I mean, in some cases, they define a city, and Baltimore is certainly one of the cities where the crime issue has defined it, so if you have a crime issue that’s defining a metropolitan area, does it do it justice to put stories on the inside of the paper?<\/p>\n
Peter Hermann: I think it does and it doesn’t, and I think it all depends on the story, and I think we’re all tired of writing and probably seeing some of the same stories that we’ve seen over the last 10-20 years, and you start to wonder how it’s came to be this way, how it can be fixed, and while we’ve done a good job of putting sort of the daily breaking stories on in the paper, one of the challenges is to figure out new ways of covering some of the same old issues, trying to answer why they’re the same old issues. They shouldn’t be the same issues. We should have figured this out 20-30 years ago. We haven’t, obviously. It is, I think, a point of my frustration of being a crime reporter, and every six months, reading these crime statistic stories, which you quote the same people, and quote “crime is up,” it’s because more people are reporting it. Crime is down, the police have done a good job. You go out and call a few experts and you write a story, we’ve all done them, we’re all sick of them –<\/p>\n
Len Sipes: 150,000 times, and the readers are probably tired of listening to them –<\/p>\n
Peter Hermann: But this approach is trying to find a unique different way of covering some of the issues that we, a) always done, and other ones that we’ve missed, going into neighborhoods we haven’t gone into, giving voices to people who sometimes maybe get a sentence or two in a community meeting or a crime scene. I think residents all over, certainly Baltimore, the only time they ever see a Baltimore Sun reporter is on the other side of a crime scene tape –<\/p>\n
Len Sipes: On the other side of the roped off area.<\/p>\n
Peter Hermann: – and there are other, and they have issues that crime gets into everything. I was talking to a minister the other day in one of the communities in Baltimore, and yes he wants the kids off the street. Yes he wants loitering to stop. Yes, he wants to police to actually be more proactive and more aggressive in police neighborhoods. But he also wants more programs, and he’s talking about trying to help people get off drugs and get, of re-instilling values. He said, I’m tired of going out and telling the same kids every day to move their bicycle off my church parking lot, and eventually, now I’ve got kids selling drugs on the corner. And he was talking about values. And we don’t see that in newspapers too much, you don’t see people like that getting an extended voice through the blog, through the column, and it’s something that kinda fun –<\/p>\n
Len Sipes: And that’s one of the reasons I like, I enjoy reading the column, because it puts it in context. We’re going to go over to Robert Pierre from the Washington Post, but also, for those people who want to get in touch with Peter Hermann, it’s peterhermann (Peter?) @baltsun – B-A-L-T-S-U-N – .com. Peter also has a blog at baltimoresun.com\/crime, okay, blog at the blog at baltimoresun.com\/crime. Robert Pierre. You’ve done some really interesting analytical pieces trying to give the citizens of the Washington D.C. Metropolitan area a taste for the reality of what we within the criminal justice system have to do. How are you allowed to do that? Why is thats not the norm. I don’t believe it’s the norm in most newspapers throughout the country. I think what you do is unique.<\/p>\n
Robert Pierre: Well, it is in some ways, I mean, there are people who certainly do, like what Peter’s doing in Baltimore, a lot of this is driven by what the individual reporter is interested in, and having been there at the post long enough, since ’93, to be able to sort of carve out something that you’re interested in, because one of the things we’ve always done is we put on, we try to go in and explain, like someone will get killed, and we will still put this on and say someone was killed at a barbershop because they were fighting over 50\u00a2, you know, and it seemed like a very ridiculous crime, and we say, wow, you know, that’s pretty stupid. Here’s how, why would people do something like this? And then you go back, and when you talk to some of the kids, either at the front end, at the crime scene, or you go after the kid’s been in prison, you know, for a while, or whatever, when they’re getting out, and you start to learn what happened behind some of these stories. A lot of what I have learned, either going through hearings, through CSOSA, the organizations that you’re involved with, or the parole commissioner, people, a lot of people who commit crime come out of the abuse and neglect system. Now, and so we want to make it, this crime, this block, this whatever it was, and a lot of times, it’s just, you can’t separate it, because the values story, we want to write our separate values story about a church, we want to write a separate crime story about that neighborhood, but actually, they’re all intertwined, and what you have to do is crime reporters can’t just cover crime, they have to cover a community.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes: They’ve got to cover the reality of what happens to individuals throughout their lives, and I think that’s the sort of reporting you bring through the Washington Post, but again, go back, and this is the last time I’ll ask you, the perception I have is that newspapers and a lot of media sources: radio, television, I don’t want to leave the electronic media out of this, it’s almost, it’s almost as if we’ve said, okay, we just don’t care anymore, in terms of the overall crime problem, it’s like we don’t care anymore, how many times can you hear about Johnny Doe sticking up Billy over a perceived insult and killing somebody. I mean, I’ve heard that, they’re saying this to themselves, they’ve heard this for decades, you know, you don’t even have to tell me the story, I can write the story for myself, in my mind’s eye, I’m simply going to skip by it. I mean, have we gotten to that point?<\/p>\n
Robert Pierre: Yeah, I think there is certainly a level of disconnectedness with certain crimes, because we say we already know that story, and what I think that you have to do is say, do you need to ask the question, do you know the story, because really, it’s difficult work, as newspapers and as television stations, all the others have less people to go out into communities, what you end up, to do real crime reporting, you’ve actually got to do some work! It’s not just go and interview, you can’t show up the day the crime occurs, and so we end up with the same story because we make it the same story, because we report it exactly the same way. We don’t go inside the numbers, we wrote a story at the Post the other day that really, it was a poorly done story, because we talked about juvenile crime, and how it was increasing, but the numbers don’t say that. The numbers say exactly the opposite, that serious juvenile crime is in fact down. Now it doesn’t mean that the person wasn’t upset about it, because if it happens to you, then you’re very upset about that crime, but we wrote, oh, juvenile crime is rising, because that story gets a headline, but you know, but you’ve got to go deeper, and we actually sometimes do that, but not on a regular enough basis.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes: Peter Hermann, you know, this larger issue of digging in deep, this larger issue of providing context, this larger issue that there’s a story behind the story behind the story, and if you’re going to understand what’s happening with the police department, if you’re going to understand what’s happening with corrections, if you’re going to understand what’s happening with drugs, what’s happening with crime, if we find that important, then people need context. People need to understand what it is they’re reading, so it’s got to be more than 3-4 column inches, it has to be an examination of how the system really works.<\/p>\n
Peter Hermann: Well, crime is an extraordinarily complex subject. There isn’t just a crime, and then it happens. Once you start researching even, very casually through the criminal justice system on a suspect or on a witness or anyone that gets caught up in the daily story, it’s volumes, and it’s trips to the courthouse, and it’s interviews, and then it’s trying to figure out from there, you could go forever on any story, and any single, certainly any single homicide, every single shooting, there’s a very huge story behind, and probably a very interesting, compelling tale behind each one, and failures of lifestyle, of government, of just, you name it.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes: But isn’t the average citizen saying to themselves, “Am I safer? Am I better off? Am I safer? Is my neighborhood safer? Are my children safer?” Is that what they need to understand?<\/p>\n
Peter Hermann: Yes, and we do a tremendous disservice by doing very quick stories on crime stats in neighborhoods without delving into the impact of what’s actually happening there, because the answer that is more than just a crime statistic, it is a, it is –<\/p>\n
Len Sipes: It is context!<\/p>\n
Peter Hermann: – trying to figure out is context, it is a history of the neighborhood, is who lives there now and who doesn’t live there now. Are you, I once had a guy, I once did a story on crime stats, I interviewed someone who thought that things had gotten much better from one year to the next, because in 1990 he was mugged and shot, and in 1991, he just got mugged, but he didn’t get shot, and he thought that was such a tremendous improvement in the system, he was willing to say that government is doing better. And I was astounded by that! It’s perception is everything, and perception of crime is everything.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes: People want to know about their safety, people want to know that government is having an effect or not having an effect. That’s the interesting part of this whole dichotomy, people read the paper, or they listen to the evening news, and I don’t think they get that sense that, a) they’re safer; b) that government is doing what it should be doing, or c) what should government do to follow up?<\/p>\n
Peter Hermann: Well, I mean, the crime blog in Baltimore, as I mentioned, it would be in D.C., if we ran it all, it would be a blog of everything that happened, it would be a book, and we still get calls from readers who say a police car drove by my neighborhood, I saw the police helicopter, what was it doing there? I don’t know what it was doing there, and frankly, to find out would be almost impossible.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes: Yes, I agree.<\/p>\n
Peter Hermann: But people see or hear sirens in their neighborhood, they think it’s unsafe for that night. We rationalize crime in a way that’s unbelievable. Federal Hill, which is a very posh neighborhood in the city, near the inner harbor, had two murders on back to back nights.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes: And the Belvedere just had three shootings?<\/p>\n
Peter Hermann: No, but it just had three shootings –<\/p>\n
Len Sipes: The big hotel in Baltimore city, prestigious hotel.<\/p>\n
Peter Hermann: But when you listen to the people on Federal Hill, it was, well, it was after 3 in the morning, and I’m not out at 3 in the morning, so it’s okay. Well, the victims were not from my community, so I guess I’m not a target, so it’s okay. Well, one, he wasn’t shot here, the body was dumped there, so it’s okay. I’m thinking, are we that, we look, it’s not on our street, so it’s okay, well it’s not on our doorstep, it’s okay, and I’m thinking, it’s still –<\/p>\n
Len Sipes: Well, if you take a look at national research, people constantly rate other neighborhoods as dangerous, but give very high ratings to their own neighborhoods in terms of safety. It’s, I guess it’s a matter of what you know vs. what you don’t know over the hill.<\/p>\n
Peter Hermann: It’s everything from what people report to how they report it, to how the police report it, to how they react in different neighborhoods. To say one neighborhood is safer than another, you know, is a very difficult task.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes: We’ve just blown by 15 minutes, rapid-fire. I can’t believe how fast this program is going. I want to reintroduce my guests, Peter Hermann, 20 year reporter with the Baltimore Sun. peterhermann@baltsun.com, his blog is baltimoresun.com\/crime; and Robert Pierre, it is pierre – P-I-E-R-R-E – r@washpost.com, and I didn’t do our commercial. Ladies and gentlemen, this is D.C. Public Safety, we do listen and respond and read every comment that you provide, we are way above 1,200,000 hits for the program since the program’s inception about a year and a half ago, we appreciate your comments, we appreciate the input that you have, and please continue, and so we’re back to the program. Robert Pierre, what are your thoughts in terms of what Peter just said? Is it that confusing, is it almost impossible to take this immensely complex issue and explain it in such a way that the average citizen understands their role in this?<\/p>\n
Robert Pierre: Well, I think it’s, it just requires some investment of time and a lot of places, that investment simply isn’t there anymore, or as often as it should be to do in-depth work. I was at something, crime, a forum this morning sponsored by the Brookings Institute, it was about juvenile justice. And you know, a lot of people, no matter what neighborhood you go to, people say juvenile crime is up, it’s just up, you know, and people are afraid of it.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes: These kids are getting out of hand!<\/p>\n
Robert Pierre: These kids are getting out of hand, the kids are getting out of hand, now we’ve heard that forever. Now they gave a statistic, now one of the guys, one of the professors gave this statistic, he said, in 2007, there were 1.6 million youth involved in the criminal justice system, in the juvenile justice system, all around the country. And he asked the question, how many of them were murders? And how many would you guess?<\/p>\n
Len Sipes: Oh, the overwhelming majority are going to be minor crimes.<\/p>\n
Robert Pierre: Overwhelming majority, 1,000 out of 1.6 million were murders.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes: Right.<\/p>\n
Robert Pierre: Were homicides of any sort, but that would not be, the super predator idea is still very pervasive –<\/p>\n
Len Sipes: And hear this statistic, the vast majority of individuals who come into contact with the juvenile justice system, what happens to them?<\/p>\n
Robert Pierre: I don’t know.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes: They drop out.<\/p>\n
Robert Pierre: Oh, they just go away, yeah.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes: They just go away. So the overwhelming majority of kids, people under the age of 18 who come into contact with the criminal justice system, don’t stay in contact with the criminal justice system, so they’re interesting stats that the average person would not tend to believe.<\/p>\n
Robert Pierre: Now if you’ve gotten, but if you’re one of the people that got knocked over your head by a juvenile, then that doesn’t mean anything to you, because you’re still saying, hey, but that, on my block, what Peter was saying, it’s out of control, because –<\/p>\n
Len Sipes: I understand that, you know, I understand that if it happens to you, or if it happens to a loved one, if it happens to your community, if it happens to your larger community as defined by, oh, fill in the blank: East Baltimore, east of the river, black, white, Hispanic, there’s all different ways of defining crime, and there’s all different ways of defining the problem, but you know, it just, the basic line, the bottom line question I have throughout this entire program is that, because of the dwindling resources that most folks in the media seem to be giving to this issue, have we given up truly doing a good job of defining what the problem is and what government should be doing about it? Peter?<\/p>\n
Peter Hermann: Well, I think the problem shifts from year to year. When I was covering crime, you know, there was a lot of issues in terms of, we didn’t have gangs, we didn’t have, witness intimidation wasn’t a big issue. I came back to the city, and all of the sudden, witness intimidation is at the forefront, and I think we’ve covered it rather well. Have we done huge, big investigations on it? No, but through, it’s not just one story, and it’s very easy to show the crime scene, point a camera, talk to a bunch of cops, talk to some witnesses, and throw up a story. That’s easy. We can both do that in our sleep by now. The more complicated issue is always going to be coming back on it, and it’s more than just police, and it’s more than just a police reporter doing it, it involves the various social institutions, it involves parole and probation, it can involve, you know, the foster care.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes: Does the criminal justice system have the capacity to deal with this, or does it –<\/p>\n
Peter Hermann: No, it doesn’t! It doesn’t! The fallacy –<\/p>\n
Len Sipes: – or is it a larger societal issue?<\/p>\n
Peter Hermann: It’s a larger societal issue. The cops get a lot of the questions, but also a lot of things that go wrong start with the police story. They start with a dead child in a room, and a police reporter with a notebook and a cameraman and a TV crew outside, and then, what happens to that foster, what happened to that child, and then all of the sudden, it’s an issue of foster care, the two children who were killed and found in a freezer in southern Maryland, it’s a issue over adoption agency [overlapping voices] and that’s not a police story, but it starts as a police story.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes: It starts as a police story –<\/p>\n
Peter Hermann: It’s a larger societal issue, and it gets at a whole bunch of other, other things. A lot of these stories start that way.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes: We have significant reductions of crime in Baltimore city, we have significant reductions of crime in Washington D.C. Where, what does that mean to the average person when you report on the fact that homicides are down in Baltimore city, and homicides are down in Washington D.C.? When you say that, when you report on that, what is that person picking up a copy of the Washington Post and sitting there in Northeast Washington, what does that mean to that person? I’m safer?<\/p>\n
Robert Pierre: Well, it may not mean anything to that person, but we have two different audiences, because I live in Washington D.C. as well, and I live in Anacostia, a neighborhood that people think is a, and I know it’s a high crime area, because I can look at some of the statistics, and I know that a lot of the offenders that come to the parole\/probation system, they live in or around where I live, but one audience is the person who was directly impacted, but another, I’m also a taxpayer in Washington, and I’m also trying, you’re also talking to the people who made a decision about how to put money on the streets, and if homicides are down, then maybe we should spend the money somewhere, maybe we should spend the money somewhere else, maybe we should have what people are talking about, more people walking the beat or something like that, and what police will tell you anyway is that there’s no amount of police that can stop a homicide if someone is intent on killing someone.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes: Oh, that’s true! If you have two individuals, not in terms of somebody intent on killing someone, if you have two kids, and they’re sitting on the street corner, and one insults the other person’s girlfriend, and the other person takes out a gun and shoots them, you know, that’s a terribly, terribly difficult thing to intervene in, especially if they don’t have a violent history beforehand, but so many interpersonal squabbles end up in the homicides in both cities. I guess what I’m trying to do is, what do we say to citizens? What is the bottom line beyond, do we just simply objectively report the news and be done with it and go home and have our martinis? Or is there a larger issue in terms of what people should believe in the Baltimore Sun and Washington Post from the crime problem? I don’t think they necessarily should believe me, because I represent government, and I think I’m as honest as the next public affairs person, but I think the real story has to come from the media.<\/p>\n
Peter Hermann: It depends – Robert’s exactly right. It depends on your audience. I have someone visiting from outside the city, they call me up to say I’m not coming, because I see homicides are up, and the city’s unsafe. Well, maybe, maybe not, they see homicides are down, they’re going to pay a visit. Well, not necessarily where I live or where I go. If you are intent on purchasing drugs in East or West Baltimore, your chances of being a victim, being robbed, being shot, being killed are much higher than if you visit the inner harbor. So if that’s what I’m going to be doing that day, I might want to look at those stats a little bit more closely.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes: If you play the game, the odds are much higher that you could be victimized.<\/p>\n
Peter Hermann: Well, we thought, we never have a postman killed in East or West Baltimore. People doing legitimate work, even in some of the worst areas of the city, don’t often get shot. Johns Hopkins Hospital, now it has a lot of security, but it’s in the heart of one of the most dangerous sections of the city.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes: If you have a legitimate reason for being there, you’re not bothered.<\/p>\n
Peter Hermann: No, I think we had an attack on a nurse back in the “\u02dc90s, and I think that’s the last thing that I can remember. But interesting what you say. When I was covering crime as a reporter, homicides and shootings were skyrocketing, were well above 300 every year, and I used to write stories, headlines would always say, the murder rate is always up, and every time I get a call from the police commissioner, everything else is down. Assaults are down, the burglaries are down, never write about that. I think driving the numbers up were the shootings and the homicides. I just looked at the last bit of stats that we had. Homicides were down 30%. Shootings were down 35%. What’s up? Burglaries, larceny from all those, car break-ins, and assaults. Crime is actually up in Baltimore 1%, but you wouldn’t know it, because now city government is all about the homicides are down, so everybody is safer. [overlapping voices] cars are getting broken into, more houses are getting burglarized [overlapping voices]<\/p>\n
Len Sipes: – but that’s the interesting thing. If you look at national statistics, 15% of crime across the board is violent. The overwhelming majority of what we call crime is property crime.<\/p>\n
Peter Hermann: Homicides are such a low number, low percentage of any crime in any city, it’s not a good, it’s just not –<\/p>\n
Len Sipes: Right, but I remember talking to a manager of a television station who moved in town, and moved into Charles Village in Baltimore city, and he was determined to be part of the city fabric, and after the third larceny from his garage in terms of a bicycle, he simply said, that’s it. So it is an individual –<\/p>\n
Peter Hermann: That’s the type of crime that gets, that I find in communities, no matter what community you’re in, it can be a community where 4 people were shot around the corner, the complaint is that my car was broken into.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes: My car was broken into, they’re too loud on the corner, there’s too much graffiti, there’s too much trash, there are too many signs of disorder, and that makes me uncomfortable.<\/p>\n
Peter Hermann: In every community meeting, every, whether it’s in West Baltimore, or in some other neighborhood, it’s, again, kids are out of control, they’re on the corners –<\/p>\n
Len Sipes: Go ahead, Robert.<\/p>\n
Robert Pierre: Yeah, and you know, and that’s absolutely right, and for that perspective, and one, and that is what residents, police will tell you this: “Ma’am, I can’t arrest the kid for standing on the corner,” and sometimes they can go shake “\u02dcem down and say I’m going to get them off the corner, but he says, I don’t have a reason to arrest them because they haven’t done anything, but that is the kind of, exactly the kind of thing that makes people nervous about being, about sitting on their own porch, so that, in their own mind, constitutes crime.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes: Right. That is their definition of crime! It is not the homicides, it’s not the rapes, it’s what’s happening on your stoop. It’s what’s happening on your street. It’s what’s happening within your immediate community. If you’ve got a bunch of guys who you perceive as thugs rolling that street, they may not be doing anything at all, but the perception of danger is enough to make you feel very uncomfortable. It’s not the homicides, it’s not the rapes, it’s what that person envisions, what that person lives with on a regular day-in\/day-out basis.<\/p>\n
Peter Hermann: And it’s not just crime. Sometimes it’s something even more subtle than that. Baltimore police have a lot of cameras, as I think D.C. does, and there are neighborhoods that want the cameras, they want surveillance cameras, they want to see the blinking blue light. Other neighborhoods don’t want it, and one fairly wealthy neighborhood where they were having problems with car break-ins [overlapping voices] blue light, it just said that we are now a crime neighborhood, and they didn’t want it, and they railed against it. When we had two people shot in Federal Hill, they got, they immediately flooded the area with police, which is a natural reaction anywhere, immediately the same district got calls from some of its poorer neighborhoods, support in Brookland and Cherry Hill, wondering, well now we have homicides all the time and shootings all the time, now you’ve got two dead people in the rich area, and we’re going to lose all our police!<\/p>\n
Len Sipes: So what this says to me then, what this says to me is there’s no way that any newspaper, there’s no way that any media entity can summarize the total, the totality of what we refer to as crime. It’s just too big, too massive, but what they do need is more than 5 column inches 3 pages in on the local section, they do need somebody that places this in the context for them so they can have a better understanding so they can make their own decisions as to how to live their lives. Am I in the ballpark?<\/p>\n
Peter Hermann: Yeah, but keep in mind, newspapers aren’t books, and we don’t write PhD dissertations, all of which have been tried on this same subject, and none of them ever get to where we all want to be. We tend to write short stories, and I think you have to look at both over time, what they’ve done with some of the small stories, the small stories, tend to put something on the mark, Robert notices them, goes out, something bigger on them, it builds on itself, have to look at the coverage over time, and hopefully over time, we’ve come, we’re able to come to some conclusions.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes: But newspapers and media sources, Robert, do need to dedicate themselves to helping citizens understand the reality of what, for many cities in this country, is their driving concern.<\/p>\n
Robert Pierre: But you know, I would say this. As we talk about what newspapers should and shouldn’t do and what other newspapers, and I’m not sure we do it on a lot of things. Crime is one example. Newspapers aren’t going to forget crime, because it’s easy to cover, and it is something that’s immediate. Some people don’t want my analysis of it, they don’t want Peter’s analysis of it, they just want to know how many break-ins were there on my block, and so I think that you’re always going to get some of that from newspapers, and some people only want to know, what was the fire truck doing on my block last night?<\/p>\n
Len Sipes: Or what was the helicopter –<\/p>\n
Robert Pierre: Exactly, whatever it was, and so for them, it’s going to be enough, but I think that, if newspapers are going to fulfill some of these other duties that I think we have an obligation to, which is talking back a little bit to the public policy folks, then we have, that’s where I think we have to put a little bit of effort to getting inside the numbers.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes: Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Peter, you’ve got the final word?<\/p>\n
Peter Hermann: Oh, I think that’s exactly right. I think there are a ton of things we won’t cover and don’t cover very well or don’t cover at all, and it’s an immensely complex issue, it’s also, that and schools are one of the issues that people want to know most about, but again, the overwhelming, Robert’s exactly right. The overwhelming number of calls are, why is a police car in my neighborhood, how many houses were broken into last night on my street. That’s what they want –<\/p>\n
Len Sipes: How does all this affect me, is what you’re saying? Fascinating conversation, the 30 minutes went by like absolute wildfire, and I’d love to do this again with both of you. Peter Hermann, 20 year reporter with the Baltimore Sun, it’s peterhermann – H-E-R-M-A-N-N – @baltsun – B-A-L-T-S-U-N – .com, Peter’s blog, and he also puts up a video blog, I find that very interesting, at baltimoresun.com\/crime. 20 year reporter Robert Pierre for the Washington Post, pierre – P-I-E-R-R-E – r@washpost – W-A-S-H-P-O-S-T – .com, ladies and gentlemen, this is D.C. Public Safety, I’m your host, Len Sipes, thank you and have a great day.<\/p>\n
– Audio Ends –<\/p>\n
Meta terms: crime, criminals, criminal justice, parole, probation, prison, drug treatment, reentry, sex offenders, domestic violence, anger management, corrections, high-risk offenders, GPS, women offenders.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Welcome to DC Public Safety-radio and television shows on crime, criminal offenders and the criminal justice system. See http:\/\/media.csosa.gov for our television shows, blog and transcripts. Radio Program available at http:\/\/media.csosa.gov\/podcast\/audio\/?p=106 We welcome your comments or suggestions at leonard.sipes@csosa.gov or at Twitter at twitter.com\/lensipes. – Audio Begins – Len Sipes: Hi, and welcome to D.C. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-207","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-criminaljustice","category-media","entry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pBoKk-3l","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/media.csosa.gov\/podcast\/transcripts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/media.csosa.gov\/podcast\/transcripts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/media.csosa.gov\/podcast\/transcripts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.csosa.gov\/podcast\/transcripts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.csosa.gov\/podcast\/transcripts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=207"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/media.csosa.gov\/podcast\/transcripts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":418,"href":"https:\/\/media.csosa.gov\/podcast\/transcripts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207\/revisions\/418"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/media.csosa.gov\/podcast\/transcripts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.csosa.gov\/podcast\/transcripts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.csosa.gov\/podcast\/transcripts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}