Why Do We Kill? [Paperback]

"[He] was breathing when his body was doused with gasoline and set on fire. He was burned alive!" - Kelvin Sewell

How bad is the crime situation in Baltimore City? Leaving the grim statistics aside for the moment, it's so bad that I no longer watch the local TV newscast at 11 PM! (1) Who wants to go to bed with gory images of mindless violence dancing in their heads?

The mantra is always the same from the news reader--murder, mayhem, drugs, tears, blood and outrage! The only thing that changes are the names of the victims. Some are totally innocent, such as children and teenagers who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Enter Kelvin Sewell! He's a former homicide detective with 22 years of in-your-face experience with the Baltimore Police Department (BPD). Sewell, an African-American, has encountered it all--from the inside--like "in the box." That's "the room" at BPD headquarters, where suspects in a crime, and witnesses, too, are questioned by the cops. It's where Sewell would deflate the ego of a street-hardened thug by simply asking him: "Can you recite the alphabet?" He underscored, "not one" was able to do it!

In his compelling memoir, "Why Do We Kill?: The Pathology of Murder in Baltimore," Sewell teams up with award-winning investigative reporter, Stephen Janis, to tell his uncompromising story from a down-at-the-crime-scene perspective. (2) In Baltimore, Sewell relates: "People kill because they're angry over a slight. Frustrated over a hard look. Pissed off because somebody talked with their girl. They kill and will kill for nothing."

This jarring insight rang with relevance as Sewell's book was going to press. It involved a city court case and a BPD officer. He was convicted of manslaughter. The defendant, who was off-duty at the time, fired his revolver 12 times! He shot an unarmed ex-Marine to death. Why? The victim had "slapped" one of the female companions of the defendant on the backside, that's why!

You are going to need a strong stomach to get through this book, especially after what happened to an ill-fated victim, a "petty drug dealer," age 20, in case file one. Let me put it this way: he ends up stone dead in Leakin Park, which the authors label: "Baltimore's ad hoc cemetery." He had been stabbed 22 times in a hotel room, before being torched at the park. Three of the gang members who had roles in this ghastly crime were teenagers! The decision to kill was "routine"--no big deal.

What Sewell learned from his observations in this case and ten others that he details in cogent fashion, is this: There's an "inexplicable disconnect" between wrongdoers and their foul deeds. There's no "empathy" for the fate of the victims. None!

As of July 1st, there were 101 killings in Baltimore this year. June was a particularly deadly month, with 16 murders. In 2010, the City was ranked 5th in the nation by the FBI with 223 fatalities.

The narrative for so many of the murders in Baltimore reminds me of the recently captured notorious Irish Mob Boss, James "Whitey" Bulger, now age 81. He stands accused of killing 19 people, including one of his ex-girl friends. Like the people, Sewell and Janis are spotlighting, Bulger enjoyed torturing some of his victims and had "no feelings" whatsoever, for them. The experts called him a "cruel sociopath."] (3)

In his book, Sewell details eleven of the most infamous crimes among the many that he personally investigated. The murder of a young boy by a pedophile, age 50, will raise the hair on the back of your head. The victim's mother was a heroin addict, who allowed the sadistic pedophile "access to her son." The creeper got "jealous" because the boy showed an interest in a girl in his neighborhood. Sewell was struck by the fact that in the pedophile's twisted mind, the killing was "justified" because the child had "betrayed him!"

In his case files, Sewell cuts to the chase. He puts you at the murder sites and inside the heads of the demented killers. Think HBO's "The Wire!" You will truly be appalled and wonder: "What kind of lethal cancer seeps through the underbelly of our city?" Sewell's M.O. is to give you the unvarnished "truth" and to defuse the roaring crime debate with a powerful "dose of realism."

Sewell also takes a well-deserved dig at the failed "Zero Tolerance" policy of former Baltimore Mayor, Martin O'Malley. It resulted in the mass arrests of tens of thousands of innocent citizens, mostly African-Americans, for doing nothing more than "sitting on their front stoops." As a result of O'Malley's improvident actions, which misused the resources of the BPD, the city had to cough up $870,000 for a Civil Rights' lawsuit settlement brought by the ACLU on behalf of numerous plaintiffs. (4)

Query: `What is it really like to be a cop in Baltimore City over this last 25 years?" Well, Sewell spends a significant amount of his memoir giving you a no-holds-barred answer to that question.

Sewell's writing is so intimate, that you will feel that you are with him when he's riding in a patrol car through the drug-infested streets of the Eastern and Western Districts. You are there, too, when he's arresting at gun point two burglars who are trying to steal "copper pipes" from an abandoned house. You will feel Sewell's anticipation when Ed Norris, [a then-new-Police Commissioner], and his "New York City Boys," came roaring into town to revamp the BPD. You are also present when "dirty cops" are exposed; and, when "politics" in the BPD raises its ugly head. And, finally, you will witness the feud between the States Attorney's Office (under Patricia C. Jessamy), and the BPD, which puts the prosecution of some homicide cases in serious jeopardy.

In conclusion, Sewell is convinced the city is suffering from "a communal virus, a social pathogen." He loves Baltimore, the place of his birth, but, nevertheless, he persists in calling it, "a town with a disease called `Murder?'" Read this gripping shocker of a memoir by a veteran BPD homicide detective and make up your own mind!
Author's Notes:

1. Conan O'Brien's talk show comes on at 11 PM, on Cable's TBS. I prefer his comedic antics to the nightly "Crime-Babble" on the TV.
2. "Why Do We Kill?: The Pathology of Murder in Baltimore," by Kelvin Sewell and Stephen Janis (Baltimore True Crime, $19.98, 200 pp. soft cover). [...]

©William Hughes, 2011, All Rights Reserved

Editor's Note:

William Hughes is an author and photojournalist. Email at: liamhughes@comcast.net

Reportage of Baltimore's crime, criminals, and underclass has been dominated by David Simon (`Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets', `The Corner', `The Wire'), who as a Jewish, urban, white, liberal may not be considered overly representative of the black population that constitutes the majority in the city.

In this slim book, Kelvin Sewell, a black resident who joined the Baltimore City Police Department (BCPD) in 1987 and spent 22 years in various assignments, provides a genuine `insiders' look at murder and mayhem on the streets of Charm City.

The first half of the book provides concise descriptions, or `case files', of 11 of the more noteworthy cases Sewell handled as an investigator in the Homicide Unit.

The second half is a quick overview of Sewell's career in the BCPD, focusing less on specific cases and more on the nature of police work, and a blunt appraisal of the role of race, politics, and bureaucracy on the operations of the BCPD.

The title's use of the pronoun `We', as opposed to the more typical `They', reflects Sewell's attitude that as a black man and a resident of the city, he saw its perps, and its victims, with a mindset different from that of many white officers and observers. It is this philosophy that gives Sewell's memoir a tenor and perspective that Simon's work is necessarily less apt to provide.

The case files in the first half of `Why Do We Kill ?' review genuinely cold-blooded acts of mayhem taking place from 2008 - 2010. With the exception of one case involving Paul Pardus, a white man who murdered his mother, shot a Hopkins hospital physician, and then killed himself, the case files describe acts of violence committed by low-income blacks upon other blacks of the low-income and working classes.

I finished the book with the feeling that Sewell, despite his years of experience, remains unsure, and even frustrated, as to how best to answer the question inherent in his book's title.

He does invoke the traditional root causes put forth by generations of liberal scholars and social analysts, i.e., poverty, racism, and neglect drive Baltimore's crime.

At the same time, however, it's clear that many of the murderers he has put behind bars are members of a unique and emerging breed of sociopath (if that's the right word), a breed whose actions have little, if anything, to do with the standard-issue explanations for violence in the underclass.

These New Sociopaths are genuinely surprised that their actions are considered evil; snuffing out the life of another member of society is seen as simply a more complicated, but no more immoral, iteration of stepping on a roach.

Indeed, 14 year-old Devon Richardson shot an elderly woman to death with a .22 shotgun because a friend dared him to do so. Richardson was not angry or enraged about being poor; a victim of racism; or a young black male and thus an `endangered species'.

He simply thought it would be entertaining to aim and shoot his rifle at a woman he had never met, who just happened to be crossing the entrance of the alley in which he had been plinking malt liquor bottles.

`Why Do We Kill ?' is an interesting read, although it does not fit comfortably into particular ideological camp, a factor that may lead white liberals, and some black activists, to discount its contents. It is a book that should be part of a the curriculum in criminal justice, public policy, and sociology courses in colleges and universities.

Having seen some of the previous reviews here I thought that this book might not answer the question posed by it's title but in fact it does. Murder plagues Baltimore because Baltimore is a city where industry, civility, education, empathy and responsibility are almost unknown or perverted beyond recognition. Children and teenagers kill for one very simple reason: they have been taught to do so. Human life is looked upon as having no value whatsoever. Nowhere is this clearer than the case where Detective Sergeant Sewell recounts the confession of a teenager who, after admitting to the premeditated murder of an elderly woman, asks when he will be allowed to go home. The death of the family unit and the loss of gainful employment have created a netherworld in Baltimore. In that netherworld only the strong survive while the weak are hunted.

All of the problems in Baltimore are exacerbated by its Police Department which Newell casts as being institutionally defective to the core. The saddest part of the book for me, oddly enough, was the description of Baltimore City's once vaunted Homicide Unit. When David Simon wrote his book "Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets," the BPD Homicide Unit was staffed almost entirely with competent veteran detectives, men and women who knew what needed to be done and took their duties seriously. Dark humor was expected but it never got in the way of the work itself. At one time an assignment to Homicide was rightly considered to be the capstone of an already long and distinguished career. Only the best were considered and those who didn't make the cut were washed out. The depths to which the unit has been allowed to sink as described by Newell, himself a Homicide supervisor, is absolutely disgusting. Among the highlights are: homicide detectives refusing to get out of their cars at crime scenes, refusing to write warrants for murderers because of upcoming vacation days, committing fraud and perjury, deliberately drawing out murder cases for months on end simply to rack up overtime while murderers walk free and last but not least, failing to solve cases because they feel "unmotivated." Reading the final chapter of this book is heartbreaking and it becomes immediately clear why the solve rate for murder in Baltimore City stands at an abysmally low 32%. Not only do criminals in Baltimore City commit murder because of their upbringing, they kill because they know they can get away with it. The policies of the BPD hierarchy have seen to that.

This book is not only about the collapse of a city but of a Police Department as well. A powerful and profoundly moving book.