Death all in day's work for cops on Baltimore streets

Stepping out of the police car, the flash of the blue and red lights illuminating the street, I walked towards the yellow crime-scene tape. Metres away was a black car with the passenger door open.

The beige seat was blood-red, the windscreen and door peppered with bullet-holes. Scattered across the ground were bullet casings, each circled with red chalk and marked with a yellow number.

This was Baltimore exactly as I have seen it countless times on the television police series The Wire, but this time it was real life. It was a night like any other, and it was the evening's first shooting. There would be four more before the end of the shift. Two, including this one, were fatal.

The victim was Joseph Leegreen Taylor, 28. From detectives at the scene, I got the feeling perhaps Taylor was not the intended victim.

All but one of the bullet holes were in the driver's door. The other was in the windscreen, on the driver's side. But somehow he escaped injury. Taylor, the passenger, was not so lucky. He took a bullet to the head and became the city's 188th homicide of the year. By the end of the night, there would be 189.

That carnage was the first call on the eventful evening I spent on a ride-along with the Baltimore Police Department and officers Bob Cherry and Gene Ryan.

Over the next five hours, I watched as they intervened in a domestic dispute, chased drug dealers through a housing project and hunted for a gunman.

Every one of the department's 3000 officers carries a handgun. One officer I spoke to told me how, after being injured during an altercation with a prisoner who escaped his handcuffs, he regretted not shooting the man. Shooting a fleeing prisoner could mean the officer facing criminal charges himself.

Yet there is a saying among some Baltimore cops that it is "better to be judged by 12 than carried by six" - to be in front of a jury instead of in a coffin.

After the homicide scene, we headed for the Western District headquarters.

The west and east sides of the city are particularly crime-ridden, and the streets are lined with CCTV cameras that have flashing blue lights to remind criminals that the police are watching.

In the Western office, an officer sits at a screen, viewing scenes captured by any of the 36 cameras in his district. He zooms in on one camera and explains that he is looking for a boy in a white T-shirt who, he thinks, is selling drugs.

We watch and wait, but never see the boy make a hand-to-hand drug deal. "When it's quiet, there is a lot of waiting," the officer says. "Other times you switch on the camera and it's easy pickings."

We leave the Western and drive to a domestic assault. On the way, we pass two corners where balloons adorn the lamp posts, memorials to people murdered in the past few weeks.

Vacant rowhouses are common, with boarded-up windows and doors. Those homes that are occupied often have residents sitting outside on the stoop.

As we walk through a playground in the middle of the project, empty drugs vials cracking beneath our feet, the two young patrolmen tell me their experience of policing the streets of Baltimore.

The first, who is 21, says he followed his father, a policeman in a small town, into the force.

"Baltimore is a great department to be with," he said. "You get to experience something new every day. Sometimes it is a domestic assault, the next day a homicide, the day after a carjacking.

"Within the first two weeks of my service in this city, I made more arrests than my father made in 10 years."

The man's partner is much more disillusioned with life in the force. He wants, eventually, to work in a narcotics team, but he has been frustrated by the target-driven culture.

"It is not what I expected," he said. "I tell them [my bosses] that if I'm going out to get the stash then don't bust my balls if I don't get a lock-up. They the bosses want us to chase the needle [the users], I want to get the package [the dealers].

"I knew it would be bad, but I didn't expect it to be this bad."

The ride-along was nearing its end when a "Signal 13" - officer in distress - came over the police radio. We switched on the lights and sirens and blazed through the streets. An officer making a car-stop had requested the back-up when men in the car had fled.

At the scene, Cherry and Ryan jumped out of the car and ran, joining dozens of other officers. It was dark, and everyone apart from me was waving a gun - including the fleeing suspect.

At this point, I decided that while I was keen to see crime in Baltimore, I didn't want to become a victim of it.

I was armed with nothing more than a notepad and pen, and I was unwittingly involved in the search for a gunman.

In any city, that is a dangerous situation. But in Baltimore, where people have been known to shoot each other over the theft of a pen, it was particularly hazardous. I decided it was a situation best observed from a safe distance, such as the back seat of a police patrol car.

- INDEPENDENT