Despite six years of determined effort by the Baltimore police, the city's murder rate has remained high and drug dealing is rampant. Recently an underground video called "Stop Snitching" circulated through the city; it threatened those who cooperated with authorities. Now the police department is using psychological warfare to fight back. In three high-crime neighborhoods, the police hand out printed cards warning that they're not going away. "The Baltimore police department will not reduce its enforcement until the violence stops," the card reads. "Spread the word." They're also handing out DVDs to counter the "Stop Snitching" video. This one is called "Keep Talking" and features pictures of thugs from the earlier video who've since been arrested. More may be coming: street-corner surveillance cameras and, possibly, cops with binoculars perched on beach chairs, spying on the drug dealers. "We want [the criminals] to look over their shoulder," the police commissioner said. Some who study criminal behavior think this is unlikely to work, but others think it's worth trying. "It's a long-term process of developing credibility," one professor said. "It's not going to change people's thinking in a couple weeks or a couple months."
AQUARIUM DREAMS
In the 1990s, downtown aquariums were seen as relatively compact, moderately priced, tourist-friendly ways of revving up downtowns. Just fill them with water, stock with fish, and voila, instant revival. Well, it hasn't always worked out that way. A few aquariums built in the 1990s have since foundered. What these aquariums had in common, the Tampa Tribune reported recently, were shaky financial plans, wildly optimistic attendance projections and the naïve belief that a single attraction could turn around a sleepy downtown. Take Tampa's Florida Aquarium. It required $84 million in bonds, but first-year attendance figures were only 60 percent of projections and there is nothing of interest nearby. The city ended up stepping in to make the debt payments and subsidize operations. Similar things happened in Long Beach, California, and Denver. Denver was ready to say goodbye to its aquarium when a restaurant chain bought it for a fraction of its cost to turn it into a giant restaurant. "The mentality that an aquarium could serve as an economic engine on its own doesn't work," said an official at one successful aquarium, the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago.
COUNTIES AT THE TIPPING POINT
A number of county governments around the country are wondering: At what point do they have too few unincorporated residents too widely spread out to provide services economically? Call it the county tipping point, but at some point a government can't afford to be a real government anymore. The Miami suburb of Broward County has come to that realization. Now it's trying to entice its remaining unincorporated areas to join nearby cities. Seattle's home, King County, has thought about creating municipal service districts and then cutting them loose. Now it's Atlanta's home of Fulton County that's considering how to fade away. The Georgia state legislature recently allowed a referendum to create a large new city north of Atlanta, Sandy Springs, and the voters there are almost certain to approve it. To make things worse, a state legislator slipped in a provision requiring that the county create taxing districts, so it can't use the affluent northern part of the county (what remains once Sandy Springs departs) to subsidize the poorer southern part. If Sandy Springs leaves and the taxing districts go into effect, Fulton might follow Broward's lead and try to shed its remaining unincorporated areas.
