There’s a 7-year-old girl now lying in critical condition in a local hospital room with gunshot wounds in her upper body, with her terrified mother nearby, and somebody needs to ask them about the brand new polling on the race for mayor of Baltimore.
The little girl was shot Saturday, Apr. 12, after she and her mother thought it would be nice to do a little shopping at Mondawmin Mall.
The day after the shooting came polling on the race for mayor. Never mind, for a moment, who’s winning that race and who’s not. The city itself isn’t winning, that’s for sure.
The city’s not a winner when little girls can’t walk through a shopping mall with their mothers without getting shot.
And the city’s not a winner when the current mayor thinks it’s worth taking bows because Baltimore’s homicide numbers fell below 300 last year, the first time that’s happened in about a decade. The city’s no winner when “only” 259 people were killed last year.
So now we’ve got this new polling, offered in Sunday’s Sun (sponsored by The Sun, the University of Baltimore and FOX 45), on who’s running well in the race for mayor. We’ll get to that in a moment. But let’s not forget that little girl in her hospital bed, and a question we should ask her and her mom.
It’s not about the race for mayor, per se. It’s about another number revealed in the polling. It’s about the number of local residents – 40 percent – who view the city as moving in the right direction.
Who are these people? Are they the ones who think 259 homicides is a reason for optimism? Do they see the alarming number of carjackings and the street corner drug traffic and think these are signs of a healthy community? Or the trash that lies in the streets and alleys and no one at City Hall seems to notice? Or the never-ending failures in the public schools?
If they think all of this is reason for optimism, then they’ve lost a sense of perspective. We’re not moving in the right direction when little girls with their mothers are getting shot in the middle of the day in the middle of a shopping mall.
But we’re so accustomed to such outrage in the city that The Sun ran the story of the little girl at the bottom of page 3. The story said two groups had “an altercation inside the mall, on the first floor, when an individual fired a gun into a crowd while running away and unintentionally hit” the little girl.
Oh, so it was just an accident. The city’s still “moving in the right direction.”
And we have this new polling on the Democratic primary race for mayor, which shows a close race at the top. Mayor Brandon Scott has 38 percent support. Former Mayor Sheila Dixon has 35 percent support. Several other candidates divide the remaining 27 percent.
If the city’s really “moving in the right direction,” maybe they’d all like to whisper their personal contributions into the ear of a little 7-year-old girl in a Baltimore hospital room – and ask her if she’d care to disagree.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books, including “Journeys to the Heart of Baltimore” (Johns Hopkins University Press) and “Michael Olesker’s Baltimore: If You Live Here, You’re Home” (Johns Hopkins University Press).
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