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In Which I Complain About This City
Or: An Urbanite's Lament
So a few days ago I mentioned that I was going to get around to typing up some stories about my time living, studying, and working in an urban area you have heard of because of its crime rate. This was reasonably well received, and clearly there is an appetite for this sort of post here. So, here we go. I have spent the last several years of my life living and working in an American city with a very high rate of both property and violent crime. Our police force is largely useless, and spends no time enforcing laws against "quality of life" crimes. Litter is everywhere, and red lights are regarded by many of our drivers as suggestions. Urban blight is everywhere. I spent about a year working part-time at a local courthouse, across the street from which was a block of rowhouses which had clearly suffered more than one fire in the past several years, and through every single one's top floor windows you could clearly see the sky. Until this year our murder clearance rate hovered around 45%, and I'm sure that the recent boost is the result of some creative accounting with regards to cold cases. The police operate under a federal consent decree, imposed in 2017, which they are pleased to inform everyone they achieved 25% compliance with just this year!
Yes my friends, I lived and worked in Charm City. You know it from The Wire, and from the 7-o'clock news.
Baltimore.
Baltimore is a shithole. There's no two ways about it. The subreddit is full of yuppies who live in Mount Vernon or Fed Hill or one of the 5 other safe clean neighborhoods in the city, who will insist up down and sideways that they actually like the city. The food is great! There's so much to do! It's vibrant! There's an art scene! Bullshit. All of it. Utter crap. This city is a shithole. Not a diamond in the rough, not an up-and-comer, not a "if you just tried it" grungy but fun place to live. It's not New York in the 90s, where it's a little rough but if you just give it a chance you'll fall in love. It's a hive of scum and villainy.
I won't bore you with reciting those facts you can find out from a simple google search. How the Gun Trace Task Force was a case study in corruption. How a mayor was arrested and sentenced for various corruption charges. How in the last week alone there have been 84 aggravated assaults, 62 robberies, 17 carjackings, 6 shootings, and 3 homicides. Instead I'll just tell you some of my personal experiences. Things I have seen, or heard, or which were related to me by a friend or coworker.
It is my first week of living in Baltimore. I am tentatively optimistic about this city. After all, if it bleeds it leads. Things can't possibly be as bad as it's portrayed on the news. There's no reason to judge the city before I've had a chance to really experience it. I am talking about this with some of my fellow students. Most of us agree that things are probably exaggerated, and we should form our own opinions. One of my classmates pipes up. She heard gunfire outside her apartment last night. When she got up this morning to come to classes, she found a bullet hole in her car.
It is my first month of living in Baltimore. I am beginning to think that perhaps things are not being exaggerated. One of my friends is having a party. "Just don't use the main entrance to the building" he says in his invitation. "Junkies like to hang out around there. Use the garage." I go to the party. A fellow partygoer mentions he didn't like that the host used the word "junkies" because he feels it is dismissive of people who just need help. A few hours later the group-chat gets a text. Then another. Then another. Then another. Five in all, each more frantic than the last. One of the girls stepped out for a smoke and can't get back in. Some of the aforementioned junkies are harassing her. Three of us leave to get her. One stays by the door, two more go to where she is, and escort her back inside the building. She is crying. The party ends shortly after.
It is my second month of living in Baltimore. I am awoken at midnight by the sound of revving engines. I peek through the blinds. There is a horde of young men riding dirt bikes driving down the street. At least thirty of them, possibly as many as fifty. I do not know at this time that this is a regular occurrence, so I shrug it off and go back to sleep. This will continue to happen sporadically throughout the rest of my time in the city.
It is my third month of living in Baltimore. I am awoken at 2am by the sound of gunfire. I am nervous. I've never heard gunfire outside of a range before. Eventually I go back to sleep. It is not the last time this will happen.
It is my fourth month of living in Baltimore. I have walked to a nearby McDonalds because I'm tired and don't feel like cooking. Before heading in I smoke a cigarette. A local junkie asks for one. I hand him one, and the lighter. He lights the cigarette and begins to walk off. I ask for my lighter back. He begins screaming, pleading, begging me to keep the lighter. He is wailing like a child. Sickened, I wave him off and tell him to keep the damn thing. Like a switch was flipped he immediately stops, and walks away. I know I've been hustled, but for the life of me I can't bring myself to give a shit. I take my burger and fries to go.
It is my sixth month of living in Baltimore. I have yet to find a decent pizza place. This irritates me more than it should. My phone buzzes. I scan the email briefly. It's from the campus police. There was a shooting on school property. No students were involved, so I don't bother reading the whole email. I've gotten a similar email before. I will receive two more before my first year in this city is over.
It is my eighth month of living in Baltimore. One of my professors kindly informs us that it is a matter of when, not if, we are mugged. He suggests all the things he is allowed to suggest. Keep your head on a swivel. Don't wear earbuds in both ears. Don't walk alone at night. Don't go out at all after midnight. Comforted by the knowledge that the only place in the city I go without a gun is the school, I mostly tune this litany of advice out. I've heard it all before, from more than one source.
It is my twelfth month of living in Baltimore. I have accepted a part time position. Every Monday, I go down to the courthouse, arriving before 8:30am. I begin to recognize some of the
junkies and crackheadsindigent citizens along my morning commute. One of them regularly masturbates himself in full view of traffic. I have rather unimaginatively nicknamed him "jack-off" in my head.It is my thirteenth month of living in Baltimore. Every day on my drive home I pass a large banner advertising temp tags from Virginia. This is an illegal service, intended to circumvent the costs of registering a car and getting insurance in Maryland, or at least getting around having a suspended license, or no license. The banner is at least four feet high, and ten feet across.
It is my fifteenth month of living in Baltimore. I am cut off on the freeway coming back from grocery shopping, and honk my horn. The driver swerves out of traffic, and begins driving along next to me, matching my speed. I slow down, he slows down. I speed up, he speeds up. I look over, and he is screaming at me from the driver's seat of his car. I unholster my gun and hold it in my lap. He gets off at my exit, I don't. As he takes the exit, he forms a finger gun and points it at me. I file a police report. I am told to avoid that stretch of highway if possible. I do my grocery shopping at different stores for the next few months.
It is my eighteenth month of living in Baltimore. I still have not found a good pizza place. This has gone from annoying, to infuriating, to depressing. I have tried every recommendation on the subreddit, and half a dozen others besides. This city seems to thrive on pizzas that consist of doughy crust, no sauce, and plastic-y cheese. The best slice I have had in this city so far came from Costco. I joke about this with my friends.
It is my twentieth month of living in Baltimore. I have started working at a different courthouse. This one seems like it's in a slightly better neighborhood. At the very least, there are no obviously deserted and collapsing houses near it. When I tell my supervisor this he laughs, and tells me to make sure I leave before dark.
It is still my twentieth month of living in Baltimore. There has been a shooting near my workplace. I am unaware of this until I try to drive home, and have to detour around police tape cordoning off an intersection. I check the news when I get home. A one paragraph blurb informs me that one man was killed, and another wounded. The dead man appears to have been an innocent bystander. I realize I am more annoyed by the detour than the loss of life, and I am revolted by my own callousness.
It is my twenty-first month of living in Baltimore. It has rained all day, and when it's time for me to leave from work, the road home is flooded out. This road has flooded every time it rains heavily for at least the last ten years, according to my coworkers. No effort has been made to solve the issue. I detour to the next road. This detour takes half an hour. It too is flooded out. My twenty minute drive home takes two hours.
It is my twenty-second month of living in Baltimore. There has been an accident blocking the road on my drive home from work. A driver in a sedan ran a red light, and slammed into an SUV. The SUV has flipped onto its roof. The rear doors are open, and I can see an infant's car seat in the back. The intersection is clear enough for me to drive past. I take a look at the tags on the sedan, already knowing what I'm going to see. Sure enough, temp tags. I'm sure they're fake. For a moment I wonder about the fate of the SUV's occupants. I don't look it up when I get home. I don't want to know.
It is my twenty-fourth month of living in Baltimore. It is my last day working at the courthouse before classes begin again. There was a shooting at the same intersection as before. This time it took place early enough in the day that the police tape is down by the time I drive home, and I am grateful for the fact I won't have to take a detour getting home.
It is my twenty-fifth month of living in Baltimore. Disgusted with this city, the banality of its corruption, the constant grind of low-level crimes that the police just don't seem to give a fuck about, the seemingly monthly shooting close enough for me to hear it, the roving gangs of dirt bike youths who will occasionally smash the mirrors of cars they pass, the need to constantly wave off "squeegee kids" (ten to eighteen year olds who skip school to make a buck washing windshields at intersections throughout the city), the constant pervasive odor of weed, the open air drug deals I see every day, the crackheads and junkies I see every time I step outside my building asking for a dollar or a cigarette, the chicken bones that litter every sidewalk, I begin to write up this post.
When I first began to write I thought I would include anecdotes from other people I knew, if I felt myself running low on stories. I did not. Everything I wrote about in this thread, is something I experienced personally.
There's nothing new about what I've written here. Nothing you haven't heard of before. I'm not even completely sure this belongs in the culture war thread. I just hate this city. I hate what it does to people. I hate the callousness it has successfully infected me with. I hate the fact that I still have not found a decent fucking pizza place. I have received a job offer in a republican-run city in a blood-red state, and while I don't know if I'll be moving there, I will certainly be moving away from here.
Is this also happening because car insurance is cheaper or more loosely regulated in Virginia? Or is there something else also at play here?
Virginia is a little weird for, until literally last month, allowing either car insurance or paying a one-time fee. Unlike most states, where you're often required to show proof of insurance or can have your license suspended without it, even legitimate dealers wouldn't and often couldn't check insurance status.
((A lot of the temp tags are just entirely fake, produced in Photoshop or MSPaint. Others are from 'licensed dealers' that sprout up, print a ton of tags, and close immediately after.))
Virginia also has much laxer vehicle safety inspections, mostly just an eyeball inspection on tires/brakes/mirrors/exhaust (though, to their credit, they're done annually); Maryland requires them only on transfer of a vehicle but can involve upwards of an hour on a vehicle lift, and no small number of marginal cars will flunk MD inspections consistently.
Both states have smog and emissions testing, though I don't think VA temp tags require it.
As an aside, it will never cease to amaze me that some states require vehicle safety inspections. Coming from a state that never requires any inspections ever, it’s completely jarring to me that people find such an intrusive policy not only normal, but actually a positive good.
It's not hard to come up with support for a minimal version -- every mechanic worth their salt has had some customer come in with a car where the brake pads have dissolved, the tires are bald, and the frame is about to fold in half, and the customer decides that they'll just drive it home. There's a libertarian argument that these problems solve themselves, and it's not wrong, but no few of these people end up taking out innocents with them. There's a pragmatic argument that the costs are huge and the benefits small, and it's probably right, but it's an ugly one to make.
The trouble's that even accepting that minimal version, it quickly turns from a 'is this car remotely safe' into a 'does someone who only buys new cars like how this one looks', or even a 'how do we get a guaranteed easy job for a handful of schmucks who can't be trusted with a wrench'? And even people who do recognize how bad the ugly versions of these programs get don't care that much about them, so it's a hard political problem.
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Bold of you to think those of us stuck with such thing actually view it as a positive or good.
At least, that's my take on it. I view them as less than worthless and more an annoying road-tax that I have to pay so often(on top of getting my windshield replaced, again) and a punishment for being a good little citizen that criminals just skirt on by without a care.
Assuming that a critical mass of residents in an inspection state hated inspections, they'd get rid of it. There's at least some people who support inspections or it wouldn't exist.
Have any states gone from an inspection regime to a non-inspection regime?
Oklahoma axed them some time back: https://oksenate.gov/press-releases/mandatory-vehicle-inspections-abolished-repeal-will-save-oklahomans-12-million
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Texas voted to phase them out, but hasn't abolished them yet.
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https://www.nashville.gov/departments/health/environmental-health/vehicle-inspection
Metro Nashville (TN) abolished emissions inspections in 2022.
I lived there and suffered through those for many years. There was MUCH rejoicing when it went away.
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The steelman: cars are dangerous heavy machinery and neglect of maintenance causes a significant amount of death and destruction. Public safety is substantially served by requiring cars be kept in good order. Just like how it's reasonable that cars be required to have working head and tail lights, its reasonable to require they have working brakes and suspension, and checking those requires a mechanical inspection.
Oh, I get the argument for it, but I have a similar instinctual response as I would toward a law requiring annual housing inspections or mandating preemptive parenting classes before couples are allowed to have children. It just seems weirdly invasive.
Driving already requires a license, although I’m not sure if inspections specifically do anything.
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I mean, at the end of the day, operating a motor vehicle on public roads paid for via taxation is a privilege, not a right. You can drive a car in any condition on your own private property.
I’m not arguing; I’m just conveying my impression from a state with fewer restrictions and more freedom.
It’s starting to feel like talking about freedom of speech with Europeans. You make the merest mention that you appreciate America’s freedom of speech, and they start tripping over themselves to tell you why their much more restrictive version is actually better and more socially responsible. I get that the states that require vehicle inspections have their reasons. I just find the requirements bizarre, intrusive, and off-putting. No amount of argument is going to change my mind, as mine is an instinctive and emotional response, not a carefully-thought through rational one.
In other words, it's an argument from dignity (liberal) against an argument for safety (traditionalist-progressive).
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