Monday, April 23, 2007
Tourism: USA or China?
Which country is more tourist friendly with better tourist attractions ,cities to visit, and a better tourist industry?>
Manchester UK. What do you think?
What do you think of Manchester UK? What do you know of Manchester, and are you planning on visiting Manchester. I would like to hear from foreign people mostly.>
the "Disney Factor" and rebuilding New Orleans
I'll call it the "Disney factor". Disney developed it in its theme parks, the ability to bring back the past, albeit a sanitized past, by constructing buildings that look like those of a prior era.
Many of us bemoan the effect such thinking has had on architecture in US cities and how they have, in essence, removed the real and the genuine and have turned our major cities into amusement parks, often characteratures of themselves from bygone eras.
Our flight to fantasy and the technology to build in a way that mimics the era of true craftsmenship has produced tear-downs of houses across this country, replaced by huge, new ones, designed to look like they are hardly new at all.
Now how will all this play out in the reconstruction of New Orleans? Will the attempt be, particularly in historically important areas like the French Quarter, to replace destroyed structures in disneyesque style, allowing them to fit in? Will the Disney concept be used throughout the city to recreate the old Nawlins?
And, if so, in this case, is that necessarily a bad thing? If a destoryed community can use the existing technology to "patch" its destruction by building something compatable, intentinally designed to fit in, is this a wise idea?>
Many of us bemoan the effect such thinking has had on architecture in US cities and how they have, in essence, removed the real and the genuine and have turned our major cities into amusement parks, often characteratures of themselves from bygone eras.
Our flight to fantasy and the technology to build in a way that mimics the era of true craftsmenship has produced tear-downs of houses across this country, replaced by huge, new ones, designed to look like they are hardly new at all.
Now how will all this play out in the reconstruction of New Orleans? Will the attempt be, particularly in historically important areas like the French Quarter, to replace destroyed structures in disneyesque style, allowing them to fit in? Will the Disney concept be used throughout the city to recreate the old Nawlins?
And, if so, in this case, is that necessarily a bad thing? If a destoryed community can use the existing technology to "patch" its destruction by building something compatable, intentinally designed to fit in, is this a wise idea?>
Places to Get Lost In
I love exploring the narrow maze-like streets of old cities. What are some of your favorite neighborhoods to get lost in?
p.s. If you post pics, could you try and keep them down in size - it takes forever for those of us on dial-up to load some threads!>
p.s. If you post pics, could you try and keep them down in size - it takes forever for those of us on dial-up to load some threads!>
Privatised postal service?
Singapore has a privatised postal service.
Any other cities out there have privatised postal service?>
Any other cities out there have privatised postal service?>
Melbourne's Docklands Comes Back to Life
At last: Docklands slowly comes to life
Mathew Dunckley and Mark Phillips
23 February 2006
Australian Financial Review
Ten years ago, it was a wasteland of empty warehouses that even taxi drivers feared to go near. But today, following $3.7 billion of investment, Melbourne's Docklands is a bustling residential and commercial precinct with a daily population of 32,800.
Docklands is still a work in progress, and some scepticism remains about its prospects as dozens of high-rise apartments sit unsold.
But the more recent transformation has silenced most of the critics who a decade ago voiced doubts about the wisdom of proceeding with the largest urban revitalisation project in Australia.
From the sports stadium, which celebrated its 10 millionth patron in August, to the rows of apartment towers in New Quay and Yarra's Edge, to the acclaimed National Australia Bank HQ in Victoria Harbour, Docklands is taking shape as it moves towards eventually doubling the size of Melbourne's central business district.
"You couldn't stop Docklands today if you tried," says John Tabart, the outgoing chief of VicUrban, which manages the precinct on behalf of the state government.
"It has mixed use and is a high-quality venue. Much of Melbourne doesn't realise that yet."
The connection of Bourke and Collins streets could be just a few years away, altering Melbourne's grid street system in a way never envisaged by the city's original planners and symbolically linking Docklands to the CBD.
Located on partly reclaimed swampland at the west of the CBD, Docklands was Melbourne's original port, operating from the early 1900s until the mid-1990s, made obsolete by the requirements of container ships.
It begins at Spencer Street Station and Batman's Hill - the highest point of early Melbourne - extending to the Bolte Bridge.
Running parallel to each other through the CBD, Collins and Bourke streets have already been extended into Docklands and will eventually meet as the apex of a triangle deep in the Victoria Harbour precinct.
Mark Birrell, who was major projects minister in the first Kennett government when the Docklands vision was formalised, admits to an "ongoing parental interest" in the precinct. "This was a site that taxi drivers would not take you to for fear of the consequences," he says.
"It's [now] become a must-visit place for tourists, and people enjoy the restaurants and literally thousands of people are living there."
Docklands is one of the world's largest urban revival projects.
According to VicUrban's figures, investment at Docklands is running at an average of $500 million a year.
About $3.7 billion of development has been completed or is in construction. It hosts more than 6000 permanent residents, 6500 daily office commuters and averages 15,000 daily visitors, according to VicUrban.
When completed by about 2020, the Docklands development will have in effect doubled the size of Melbourne's city centre.
The doubters remain.
Ten years into what will be a 20- to 25-year project on a 200 hectare site on the western edge of Melbourne's CBD, the pace of development has slowed. Huge swaths of land are still barren, and the precinct has borne the brunt of criticism for the overheated residential property market of the early 2000s.
Little apartment building is planned for the near future as the market still absorbs the 2654 already built and 696 under construction.
At the beginning of October, the vacancy rate for Docklands apartments was 3.5 per cent and average weekly rent was $455, according to VicUrban.
VicUrban says there have been 144 resales of Docklands apartments for an average price of $517,000 and annual capital growth of 5.9 per cent, but 22 per cent have lost value. Forty per cent of sales have resulted in gains of between zero and 5 per cent a year, while 22 per cent lost value.
The area has received a boost in the past two days, with the state government awarding the contract for a $1 billion convention centre on Docklands' doorstep and also announcing in-principle support for a $60 million ice-skating centre at Waterfront City.
The precinct also received a lift last year when ANZ Bank announced it was looking for a new 80,000 square metre campus-style office space to house most of its Melbourne operations.
Victoria Harbour is regarded as a frontrunner for that deal and is "the jewel in the crown", according to Docklands general manager Michael Hynes.
Lend Lease has already taken a gamble on that status by beginning construction of its first residential tower, Dock 5, in the middle of last year at the height of negativity towards Docklands.
Lend Lease Victoria Harbour project director Maurice Cococcia acknowledges that the pace of sales at the project will not match those experienced by MAB and Mirvac who were selling at the height of the boom.
"Most of the developers have probably only been here for six or seven years and in that short period, [to have the current level of development] in a relatively untried and untested part of Melbourne is a great testament to that strategy," he says.
Despite fears in the early days about contamination, the biggest logistical issue has been coping with the Coode Island silt, which he says required more engineering work on building foundations.
Certainly not everything at Docklands has been a success. The $110 million Central City film studios, a private consortium chaired by movie distributor Sino Guzzardi, in the most north-western precinct, opened eight months late in February 2004, $7.4 million over budget and without electricity.
Since then, it has been the setting for the features Hating Alison Ashley, The Extra and the Nicolas Cage feature, Ghost Rider, but the jury is still out on whether the studios will attract enough top local and international productions to be viable. Nevertheless, a $7 million expansion began last year.
For the developers who moved into the early stages of the project, Docklands was a huge gamble.
"It was certainly pioneering territory," says Paul McDonald, chief executive officer of MAB Corporation, which will eventually invest more than $1 billion in its New Quay precinct at the northern end of Docklands.
Tabart says the well-publicised stoushes with unsuccessful developers were the low points of his 10-year reign but he stands by the authority's approach.
"Our agreements have to be hard-nosed business arrangements that require a developer to build at a time when there is no market. They win a bid with a design and a price and a time frame; [if they miss] they can lose their rights over the land."
Now, almost at the halfway stage of the Docklands experiment, all the precincts are ahead of their required development timetables, he says.
Demographer Bernard Salt of KPMG says Docklands' future is assured because of major social changes that are undermining the traditional nuclear family.
"Docklands does serve a niche in the sense that it offers something that has not been offered previously in Melbourne - water-based apartment accommodation adjacent to the CBD," he says.
Damian Trytell, principal of the Mecca restaurant group, says that in just three years, Docklands has become one of Melbourne's leading restaurant and entertainment precincts. His Livebait and Mecca Bah were among the first venues to open at New Quay in November 2002.
"We have generally run 27 per cent above what we budgeted in the early stages of our five-year business plan," he says.
Only one business at Docklands has been forced to close - a nightclub that Trytell says was inappropriate for the precinct.
The Docklands Authority and its successor were required to borrow to fund infrastructure under their establishing legislation - that debt stands at $150 million. Providing that infrastructure was a key to luring private investment, Tabart says.
The first project to use the model was the $400 million stadium. The then Docklands Authority assisted with $65 million worth of bridges and roads.
The roofed stadium - now known as Telstra Dome - is home to the AFL and has given Docklands a strong identity as the western fringe of the CBD through the exposure gained from the close to 10 million football supporters who have passed through its gates.
There is bipartisan political support for the project, although the Liberal opposition continues to criticise the merger of the Docklands Authority with the Urban Land Authority to form VicUrban. VicUrban believes that over 20 years Victoria will make a profit on Docklands.
The opposition's major projects spokeswoman, Louise Asher, says some delays and cost overruns have not affected the Liberal Party's backing of the development.
But there are those who do not share VicUrban's optimism. A professor of architecture at Melbourne University, Miles Lewis, a long-time sceptic of Docklands, says the precinct's shape is an opportunity lost.
The Bolte Bridge bridge was built too low to allow for cruise ships so, for example, unlike Sydney's Circular Quay, tourists cannot be dropped in the heart of Melbourne's new waterfront.
He also describes the building design as "low-rate".
Asked to nominate a positive, Lewis cites the extension of Collins and Bourke streets and the quality of the restaurants.
But Mark Birrell remains an enthusiastic believer in the Docklands and dismisses criticism of the project. "It's just the same thing every year, but they sell, they work and are in the high end of quality.">
Mathew Dunckley and Mark Phillips
23 February 2006
Australian Financial Review
Ten years ago, it was a wasteland of empty warehouses that even taxi drivers feared to go near. But today, following $3.7 billion of investment, Melbourne's Docklands is a bustling residential and commercial precinct with a daily population of 32,800.
Docklands is still a work in progress, and some scepticism remains about its prospects as dozens of high-rise apartments sit unsold.
But the more recent transformation has silenced most of the critics who a decade ago voiced doubts about the wisdom of proceeding with the largest urban revitalisation project in Australia.
From the sports stadium, which celebrated its 10 millionth patron in August, to the rows of apartment towers in New Quay and Yarra's Edge, to the acclaimed National Australia Bank HQ in Victoria Harbour, Docklands is taking shape as it moves towards eventually doubling the size of Melbourne's central business district.
"You couldn't stop Docklands today if you tried," says John Tabart, the outgoing chief of VicUrban, which manages the precinct on behalf of the state government.
"It has mixed use and is a high-quality venue. Much of Melbourne doesn't realise that yet."
The connection of Bourke and Collins streets could be just a few years away, altering Melbourne's grid street system in a way never envisaged by the city's original planners and symbolically linking Docklands to the CBD.
Located on partly reclaimed swampland at the west of the CBD, Docklands was Melbourne's original port, operating from the early 1900s until the mid-1990s, made obsolete by the requirements of container ships.
It begins at Spencer Street Station and Batman's Hill - the highest point of early Melbourne - extending to the Bolte Bridge.
Running parallel to each other through the CBD, Collins and Bourke streets have already been extended into Docklands and will eventually meet as the apex of a triangle deep in the Victoria Harbour precinct.
Mark Birrell, who was major projects minister in the first Kennett government when the Docklands vision was formalised, admits to an "ongoing parental interest" in the precinct. "This was a site that taxi drivers would not take you to for fear of the consequences," he says.
"It's [now] become a must-visit place for tourists, and people enjoy the restaurants and literally thousands of people are living there."
Docklands is one of the world's largest urban revival projects.
According to VicUrban's figures, investment at Docklands is running at an average of $500 million a year.
About $3.7 billion of development has been completed or is in construction. It hosts more than 6000 permanent residents, 6500 daily office commuters and averages 15,000 daily visitors, according to VicUrban.
When completed by about 2020, the Docklands development will have in effect doubled the size of Melbourne's city centre.
The doubters remain.
Ten years into what will be a 20- to 25-year project on a 200 hectare site on the western edge of Melbourne's CBD, the pace of development has slowed. Huge swaths of land are still barren, and the precinct has borne the brunt of criticism for the overheated residential property market of the early 2000s.
Little apartment building is planned for the near future as the market still absorbs the 2654 already built and 696 under construction.
At the beginning of October, the vacancy rate for Docklands apartments was 3.5 per cent and average weekly rent was $455, according to VicUrban.
VicUrban says there have been 144 resales of Docklands apartments for an average price of $517,000 and annual capital growth of 5.9 per cent, but 22 per cent have lost value. Forty per cent of sales have resulted in gains of between zero and 5 per cent a year, while 22 per cent lost value.
The area has received a boost in the past two days, with the state government awarding the contract for a $1 billion convention centre on Docklands' doorstep and also announcing in-principle support for a $60 million ice-skating centre at Waterfront City.
The precinct also received a lift last year when ANZ Bank announced it was looking for a new 80,000 square metre campus-style office space to house most of its Melbourne operations.
Victoria Harbour is regarded as a frontrunner for that deal and is "the jewel in the crown", according to Docklands general manager Michael Hynes.
Lend Lease has already taken a gamble on that status by beginning construction of its first residential tower, Dock 5, in the middle of last year at the height of negativity towards Docklands.
Lend Lease Victoria Harbour project director Maurice Cococcia acknowledges that the pace of sales at the project will not match those experienced by MAB and Mirvac who were selling at the height of the boom.
"Most of the developers have probably only been here for six or seven years and in that short period, [to have the current level of development] in a relatively untried and untested part of Melbourne is a great testament to that strategy," he says.
Despite fears in the early days about contamination, the biggest logistical issue has been coping with the Coode Island silt, which he says required more engineering work on building foundations.
Certainly not everything at Docklands has been a success. The $110 million Central City film studios, a private consortium chaired by movie distributor Sino Guzzardi, in the most north-western precinct, opened eight months late in February 2004, $7.4 million over budget and without electricity.
Since then, it has been the setting for the features Hating Alison Ashley, The Extra and the Nicolas Cage feature, Ghost Rider, but the jury is still out on whether the studios will attract enough top local and international productions to be viable. Nevertheless, a $7 million expansion began last year.
For the developers who moved into the early stages of the project, Docklands was a huge gamble.
"It was certainly pioneering territory," says Paul McDonald, chief executive officer of MAB Corporation, which will eventually invest more than $1 billion in its New Quay precinct at the northern end of Docklands.
Tabart says the well-publicised stoushes with unsuccessful developers were the low points of his 10-year reign but he stands by the authority's approach.
"Our agreements have to be hard-nosed business arrangements that require a developer to build at a time when there is no market. They win a bid with a design and a price and a time frame; [if they miss] they can lose their rights over the land."
Now, almost at the halfway stage of the Docklands experiment, all the precincts are ahead of their required development timetables, he says.
Demographer Bernard Salt of KPMG says Docklands' future is assured because of major social changes that are undermining the traditional nuclear family.
"Docklands does serve a niche in the sense that it offers something that has not been offered previously in Melbourne - water-based apartment accommodation adjacent to the CBD," he says.
Damian Trytell, principal of the Mecca restaurant group, says that in just three years, Docklands has become one of Melbourne's leading restaurant and entertainment precincts. His Livebait and Mecca Bah were among the first venues to open at New Quay in November 2002.
"We have generally run 27 per cent above what we budgeted in the early stages of our five-year business plan," he says.
Only one business at Docklands has been forced to close - a nightclub that Trytell says was inappropriate for the precinct.
The Docklands Authority and its successor were required to borrow to fund infrastructure under their establishing legislation - that debt stands at $150 million. Providing that infrastructure was a key to luring private investment, Tabart says.
The first project to use the model was the $400 million stadium. The then Docklands Authority assisted with $65 million worth of bridges and roads.
The roofed stadium - now known as Telstra Dome - is home to the AFL and has given Docklands a strong identity as the western fringe of the CBD through the exposure gained from the close to 10 million football supporters who have passed through its gates.
There is bipartisan political support for the project, although the Liberal opposition continues to criticise the merger of the Docklands Authority with the Urban Land Authority to form VicUrban. VicUrban believes that over 20 years Victoria will make a profit on Docklands.
The opposition's major projects spokeswoman, Louise Asher, says some delays and cost overruns have not affected the Liberal Party's backing of the development.
But there are those who do not share VicUrban's optimism. A professor of architecture at Melbourne University, Miles Lewis, a long-time sceptic of Docklands, says the precinct's shape is an opportunity lost.
The Bolte Bridge bridge was built too low to allow for cruise ships so, for example, unlike Sydney's Circular Quay, tourists cannot be dropped in the heart of Melbourne's new waterfront.
He also describes the building design as "low-rate".
Asked to nominate a positive, Lewis cites the extension of Collins and Bourke streets and the quality of the restaurants.
But Mark Birrell remains an enthusiastic believer in the Docklands and dismisses criticism of the project. "It's just the same thing every year, but they sell, they work and are in the high end of quality.">
Inner City Crime - Battling the Code of Silence
Looking For A Few Good Snitches
America's inner cities are ruled by a brutal code of silence.
How one city is fighting to crack it
Nathan Thornburgh / Baltimore
27 February 2006
Time
Alvin Chalmers, handcuffed in the backseat of an undercover cop car, closes his eyes and lets out a small moan. "I'm being treated like a criminal for being a victim," he says. "What kind of system is this?" Chalmers, a former municipal worker with a full beard and sad eyes who admits having been a drug addict, has just been plucked off rough-and-tumble Whitelock Street in the Reservoir Hill neighborhood of Baltimore, Md. His crime? Being too scared to testify in court against a paroled murderer who robbed him at gunpoint last April. Chalmers began missing court dates three months before he was picked up. So the state of Maryland plans to incarcerate him until it's his time to testify. His biggest mistake, Chalmers says on the way to the same facility where his alleged attacker is being jailed, is ever having told the police the name of the man who robbed him. "That man is a killer," he says. "And now they're putting me in the same building as him. This is so wrong."
This is the treacherous moral ground of inner-city America, where communities from Boston to Milwaukee are looking for ways to combat a rising culture of witness intimidation. Despite a dip in 2004, national homicide rates have increased since 2000, and in some towns it is as difficult as ever to prosecute shootings and murders. Prosecutors say that the nationwide popularity of Stop Snitching T shirts is proof positive that thugs in some parts of the country continue to control the streets. Whether out of fear or a deep allegiance to the code of silence, witnesses simply aren't talking, and cities are increasingly exerting their own pressure on no-show witnesses.
Few cities have it quite as bad as Baltimore. The city's highest- crime areas tend to be close-knit, insular communities where everybody knows everybody else's business, including who's talking to the police. Mix in a high-stakes drug trade and a flood of handguns, and you have a recipe for a pitiless war on witnesses. Baltimore's problems first made national news in 2002 when a family of seven were killed in an arson attack after they helped police identify drug dealers in their neighborhood.
The climate of fear has only worsened since then. In 2004 it even got a slogan--Stop Snitching--with the appearance of an underground DVD with that title. The video, which gained attention around the country in part because of a cameo by homegrown NBA superstar Carmelo Anthony, is both a celebration of thug life and an orgy of threats and denunciations against crime witnesses who cooperate with police. Since the DVD appeared, Stop Snitching T shirts, visors and other apparel have become a fashion phenom in inner-city America. The apparel has been banned from Massachusetts courthouses as of January. Boston Mayor Thomas Menino has pressured store owners to stop selling the merchandise, at one point threatening to send city officials into shops to seize the shirts, provoking the American Civil Liberties Union to complain that he was stepping on the freedom of expression.
Patricia Jessamy, the state's attorney in Baltimore, saw an opportunity in the controversy over the Stop Snitching craze. For years, she says, she lobbied unsuccessfully for more tools to fight witness intimidation. She told lawmakers that 90% of the murder cases her office handles involve some form of witness coercion and that 25% of her shooting trials were dismissed because a witness didn't show. But the Stop Snitching DVD argued her case better than any statistics could. She immediately made more than 400 copies and gave one to each state legislator. "That DVD showed them what is really going on here," she says. "The blinders came off, and the lights went on." Last year Maryland passed one of the toughest laws of its kind in the country, making witness intimidation in certain cases a felony punishable by up to 20 years' imprisonment.
Arguments will begin next month in the first trial to test the new law. When a teenager told police he had seen two men shoot Paige Boyd last June, the accused men's friends and family stepped into action. Police say one defendant's girlfriend, with her toddler in tow, went to the teenager's house and told his father that the boy would "get it" for "snitching on my family." The next day, according to the police, a co-defendant's brother cornered the father at a store and said his teenager would "be dead before [the trial]". The girlfriend and the brother were both charged under the new law. Rather than face 20 years for witness intimidation, the brother struck a deal with prosecutors last week to testify against the girlfriend and plead guilty to a lesser charge.
Still, Jessamy is dissatisfied with the law. She wants it amended so that if witnesses are killed or intimidated into not showing up in court, their stories could still be introduced--even if they had never made a written or sworn statement--by having others testify about what the original witnesses had said about a case. "As it is now, a defendant knows that if he kills the witness, he kills the case," says Jessamy.
The Maryland legislature will consider the change this week but is unlikely to adopt it. The amendment may never emerge from the judiciary committee, given that the body is run by a former defense attorney. Many defense attorneys argue that the constitutional right to confront one's accuser in court is too important to discard. And, says city of Baltimore public defender Elizabeth Julian, "it's too hard to prove exactly why a witness didn't come to court."
Jessamy replies that the city is facing an epidemic of intimidation. She and her lieutenants in the state's attorney's office rattle off a list of examples: the hit that was nearly carried out on an 11-year-old witness; the two cut-rate attackers, paid just $50 each to rough up a witness before trial, who proved so inept that one of them collapsed and died after the witness gained the upper hand and started beating them up; the row of thugs who lined the marble steps of the courthouse so they could stare down witnesses and jurors entering a trial; the hoodlums who sent a sequestered witness text messages from their cell phone; the jurors in a case who, one by one, refused to read a guilty verdict aloud, convinced that they would become targets of retaliation.
Julian and other public defenders say the intimidation threat is overhyped, that the real reason witnesses don't testify is that the citizens of Baltimore have lost faith in the city's justice system, particularly the scandal-racked police force. A special rapid- reaction unit called a flex squad in the southwestern district was disbanded in December after one of its officers was accused of raping a detained woman before setting her free. A search of the precinct building turned up stashed narcotics and counterfeit DVDs. The charges came after years of rumored misconduct, and critics in the media say police brass let the unit continue to function primarily because the department's code of silence is not that much different from the one on the streets. "How will the department look now when any of its spokesmen speak out against things like the Stop Snitching DVDs, T shirts and caps?" wrote Baltimore Sun columnist Gregory Kane.
Some prosecutors acknowledge that the deep suspicion of the city's criminal-justice system is a major stumbling block. "Building trust at the grass-roots level would go a long way toward solving these witness issues," says homicide prosecutor Lisa Goldberg. But, prosecutors say, they simply don't have the luxury of waiting for that bond with the community to develop before trying to convict criminals. In the absence of trust, sometimes the only solution is to put as much pressure on witnesses as the thugs do.
That's where Sam Bowden, 34, and Byron Conaway, 30, come in. The former undercover narcotics detectives were assigned to the state's attorney's office full time in September 2004. Since then they have been assigned to serve more than 300 summonses and body attachments (special incarceration warrants for witnesses who don't want to be found). It can be a maddening chase at times. Wearing baggy street clothes with Kevlar vests underneath, the two troll the city's grim row houses looking for witnesses who are, as often as not, "in the game" themselves, part of the same shadowy and dangerous criminal class as the defendants. Even thugs are often afraid of what will happen if they are forced to testify, so Bowden and Conaway try to handle all their witnesses as gently as possible. "You do feel bad sometimes," says Bowden. "But these are important witnesses. These trials need to happen."
Nearly all states have a statute that allows judges to jail material witnesses to major crimes. "Somewhere in the deep core of American law is the notion that judges have a right to aggressively enforce court orders," says Stanford University law professor Robert Weisberg. "Witnesses are, in that sense, like defendants. People may think that one is the good guy and the other is the bad guy, but they both need to be in court for the legal system to work." Even if the jailed witness changes testimony on the stand--and prosecutor Goldberg says she can't remember a murder trial in which someone hasn't backtracked on his or her story--the witness's mere presence in court allows the prosecutors to admit earlier statements pointing toward the defendant's guilt.
Still, John Glynn, the circuit-court judge who signs many of the city's body attachments, says the system works better when witnesses testify voluntarily instead of being coerced by the court. "It's a battle of who can control the witness--the state or the street," he says. "And justice suffers when that happens." Baltimore, like many state and local governments, lacks the resources to protect witnesses after they have testified. The Baltimore witness- assistance program used to be called witness protection, but with a shoestring budget and local motels doubling as witness safe houses, officials realized they couldn't always live up to the protection promise. Unlike the federal witness-protection program for turncoat mobsters and cocaine kingpins, there is no reconstructive surgery, no house with a pool in suburban Phoenix. Baltimore authorities had to stretch their $400,000 annual budget in 2005 to accommodate 184 families in hiding--a few with as many as 11 members. Although some are relocated near family as far away as California, most are loath to leave Maryland and wind up languishing in motels just outside the city limits. "I wish we could just make our witnesses more comfortable," says Goldberg. "We need a lot more money."
U.S. Senator Charles Schumer of New York reintroduced a bill this month that would help. It would provide nearly $100 million in federal funding to help local and state governments protect witnesses. Inspired by the murder of a crime witness in Brooklyn in 2002, the bill foundered when it was first submitted three years ago, but Schumer says the issue is too important to give up on. "Every day, witnesses who are willing to stand up in court and testify about a violent crime in their community put their lives on the line for the sake of justice," said Schumer. "The very least we can do is protect them."
That promise is too distant for the very present danger Alvin Chalmers faces. His pleading with detectives Conaway and Bowden in the car on the way to central booking has fallen on deaf ears, so Chalmers takes a new tack, rehearsing what he will probably say on the stand. "I was high when it happened," he says over and over. "I don't remember anything.">
America's inner cities are ruled by a brutal code of silence.
How one city is fighting to crack it
Nathan Thornburgh / Baltimore
27 February 2006
Time
Alvin Chalmers, handcuffed in the backseat of an undercover cop car, closes his eyes and lets out a small moan. "I'm being treated like a criminal for being a victim," he says. "What kind of system is this?" Chalmers, a former municipal worker with a full beard and sad eyes who admits having been a drug addict, has just been plucked off rough-and-tumble Whitelock Street in the Reservoir Hill neighborhood of Baltimore, Md. His crime? Being too scared to testify in court against a paroled murderer who robbed him at gunpoint last April. Chalmers began missing court dates three months before he was picked up. So the state of Maryland plans to incarcerate him until it's his time to testify. His biggest mistake, Chalmers says on the way to the same facility where his alleged attacker is being jailed, is ever having told the police the name of the man who robbed him. "That man is a killer," he says. "And now they're putting me in the same building as him. This is so wrong."
This is the treacherous moral ground of inner-city America, where communities from Boston to Milwaukee are looking for ways to combat a rising culture of witness intimidation. Despite a dip in 2004, national homicide rates have increased since 2000, and in some towns it is as difficult as ever to prosecute shootings and murders. Prosecutors say that the nationwide popularity of Stop Snitching T shirts is proof positive that thugs in some parts of the country continue to control the streets. Whether out of fear or a deep allegiance to the code of silence, witnesses simply aren't talking, and cities are increasingly exerting their own pressure on no-show witnesses.
Few cities have it quite as bad as Baltimore. The city's highest- crime areas tend to be close-knit, insular communities where everybody knows everybody else's business, including who's talking to the police. Mix in a high-stakes drug trade and a flood of handguns, and you have a recipe for a pitiless war on witnesses. Baltimore's problems first made national news in 2002 when a family of seven were killed in an arson attack after they helped police identify drug dealers in their neighborhood.
The climate of fear has only worsened since then. In 2004 it even got a slogan--Stop Snitching--with the appearance of an underground DVD with that title. The video, which gained attention around the country in part because of a cameo by homegrown NBA superstar Carmelo Anthony, is both a celebration of thug life and an orgy of threats and denunciations against crime witnesses who cooperate with police. Since the DVD appeared, Stop Snitching T shirts, visors and other apparel have become a fashion phenom in inner-city America. The apparel has been banned from Massachusetts courthouses as of January. Boston Mayor Thomas Menino has pressured store owners to stop selling the merchandise, at one point threatening to send city officials into shops to seize the shirts, provoking the American Civil Liberties Union to complain that he was stepping on the freedom of expression.
Patricia Jessamy, the state's attorney in Baltimore, saw an opportunity in the controversy over the Stop Snitching craze. For years, she says, she lobbied unsuccessfully for more tools to fight witness intimidation. She told lawmakers that 90% of the murder cases her office handles involve some form of witness coercion and that 25% of her shooting trials were dismissed because a witness didn't show. But the Stop Snitching DVD argued her case better than any statistics could. She immediately made more than 400 copies and gave one to each state legislator. "That DVD showed them what is really going on here," she says. "The blinders came off, and the lights went on." Last year Maryland passed one of the toughest laws of its kind in the country, making witness intimidation in certain cases a felony punishable by up to 20 years' imprisonment.
Arguments will begin next month in the first trial to test the new law. When a teenager told police he had seen two men shoot Paige Boyd last June, the accused men's friends and family stepped into action. Police say one defendant's girlfriend, with her toddler in tow, went to the teenager's house and told his father that the boy would "get it" for "snitching on my family." The next day, according to the police, a co-defendant's brother cornered the father at a store and said his teenager would "be dead before [the trial]". The girlfriend and the brother were both charged under the new law. Rather than face 20 years for witness intimidation, the brother struck a deal with prosecutors last week to testify against the girlfriend and plead guilty to a lesser charge.
Still, Jessamy is dissatisfied with the law. She wants it amended so that if witnesses are killed or intimidated into not showing up in court, their stories could still be introduced--even if they had never made a written or sworn statement--by having others testify about what the original witnesses had said about a case. "As it is now, a defendant knows that if he kills the witness, he kills the case," says Jessamy.
The Maryland legislature will consider the change this week but is unlikely to adopt it. The amendment may never emerge from the judiciary committee, given that the body is run by a former defense attorney. Many defense attorneys argue that the constitutional right to confront one's accuser in court is too important to discard. And, says city of Baltimore public defender Elizabeth Julian, "it's too hard to prove exactly why a witness didn't come to court."
Jessamy replies that the city is facing an epidemic of intimidation. She and her lieutenants in the state's attorney's office rattle off a list of examples: the hit that was nearly carried out on an 11-year-old witness; the two cut-rate attackers, paid just $50 each to rough up a witness before trial, who proved so inept that one of them collapsed and died after the witness gained the upper hand and started beating them up; the row of thugs who lined the marble steps of the courthouse so they could stare down witnesses and jurors entering a trial; the hoodlums who sent a sequestered witness text messages from their cell phone; the jurors in a case who, one by one, refused to read a guilty verdict aloud, convinced that they would become targets of retaliation.
Julian and other public defenders say the intimidation threat is overhyped, that the real reason witnesses don't testify is that the citizens of Baltimore have lost faith in the city's justice system, particularly the scandal-racked police force. A special rapid- reaction unit called a flex squad in the southwestern district was disbanded in December after one of its officers was accused of raping a detained woman before setting her free. A search of the precinct building turned up stashed narcotics and counterfeit DVDs. The charges came after years of rumored misconduct, and critics in the media say police brass let the unit continue to function primarily because the department's code of silence is not that much different from the one on the streets. "How will the department look now when any of its spokesmen speak out against things like the Stop Snitching DVDs, T shirts and caps?" wrote Baltimore Sun columnist Gregory Kane.
Some prosecutors acknowledge that the deep suspicion of the city's criminal-justice system is a major stumbling block. "Building trust at the grass-roots level would go a long way toward solving these witness issues," says homicide prosecutor Lisa Goldberg. But, prosecutors say, they simply don't have the luxury of waiting for that bond with the community to develop before trying to convict criminals. In the absence of trust, sometimes the only solution is to put as much pressure on witnesses as the thugs do.
That's where Sam Bowden, 34, and Byron Conaway, 30, come in. The former undercover narcotics detectives were assigned to the state's attorney's office full time in September 2004. Since then they have been assigned to serve more than 300 summonses and body attachments (special incarceration warrants for witnesses who don't want to be found). It can be a maddening chase at times. Wearing baggy street clothes with Kevlar vests underneath, the two troll the city's grim row houses looking for witnesses who are, as often as not, "in the game" themselves, part of the same shadowy and dangerous criminal class as the defendants. Even thugs are often afraid of what will happen if they are forced to testify, so Bowden and Conaway try to handle all their witnesses as gently as possible. "You do feel bad sometimes," says Bowden. "But these are important witnesses. These trials need to happen."
Nearly all states have a statute that allows judges to jail material witnesses to major crimes. "Somewhere in the deep core of American law is the notion that judges have a right to aggressively enforce court orders," says Stanford University law professor Robert Weisberg. "Witnesses are, in that sense, like defendants. People may think that one is the good guy and the other is the bad guy, but they both need to be in court for the legal system to work." Even if the jailed witness changes testimony on the stand--and prosecutor Goldberg says she can't remember a murder trial in which someone hasn't backtracked on his or her story--the witness's mere presence in court allows the prosecutors to admit earlier statements pointing toward the defendant's guilt.
Still, John Glynn, the circuit-court judge who signs many of the city's body attachments, says the system works better when witnesses testify voluntarily instead of being coerced by the court. "It's a battle of who can control the witness--the state or the street," he says. "And justice suffers when that happens." Baltimore, like many state and local governments, lacks the resources to protect witnesses after they have testified. The Baltimore witness- assistance program used to be called witness protection, but with a shoestring budget and local motels doubling as witness safe houses, officials realized they couldn't always live up to the protection promise. Unlike the federal witness-protection program for turncoat mobsters and cocaine kingpins, there is no reconstructive surgery, no house with a pool in suburban Phoenix. Baltimore authorities had to stretch their $400,000 annual budget in 2005 to accommodate 184 families in hiding--a few with as many as 11 members. Although some are relocated near family as far away as California, most are loath to leave Maryland and wind up languishing in motels just outside the city limits. "I wish we could just make our witnesses more comfortable," says Goldberg. "We need a lot more money."
U.S. Senator Charles Schumer of New York reintroduced a bill this month that would help. It would provide nearly $100 million in federal funding to help local and state governments protect witnesses. Inspired by the murder of a crime witness in Brooklyn in 2002, the bill foundered when it was first submitted three years ago, but Schumer says the issue is too important to give up on. "Every day, witnesses who are willing to stand up in court and testify about a violent crime in their community put their lives on the line for the sake of justice," said Schumer. "The very least we can do is protect them."
That promise is too distant for the very present danger Alvin Chalmers faces. His pleading with detectives Conaway and Bowden in the car on the way to central booking has fallen on deaf ears, so Chalmers takes a new tack, rehearsing what he will probably say on the stand. "I was high when it happened," he says over and over. "I don't remember anything.">
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