A Baltimore restaurant owner blasted city leaders on “Fox & Friends” on Tuesday, noting that criminals have faced a lack of consequences as violence worsens in the city’s business districts.
Mike Beckner, owner of Brick Oven Pizza in Baltimore, is one of the more than three dozen business owners in Baltimore’s Fells Point neighborhood calling on city officials to address the chaos and crime and threatening to withhold tax and permit payments until they do so.
The coalition of 37 businesses sent a letter Tuesday to officials, including the mayor, council president, police commissioner and state’s attorney, complaining about illegal alcohol and drug sales, public drinking, poor trash pickup and parking enforcement, and other problems, according to several local reports.
They are calling for Baltimore officials to restore “basic and essential municipal services.”
“[W]e are fed up and frustrated, and we now realize that nothing will change unless we demand action,” the letter states, according to local affiliate FOX Baltimore.
Speaking on “Fox & Friends” on Tuesday, Beckner noted that “the crowds have started coming back” to the area over the past month.
“Our problem is that after 10:00 at night, people from outside the neighborhood are coming down and looking at doing nothing but cause havoc,” he told host Ainsley Earhardt.
“There are no consequences for pretty much anything they do so they’re taking advantage of it at the moment.”
The demands from business owners come days after three people were shot June 6 in the historic waterfront neighborhood known for its vibrant nightlife.
“What is happening in our front yard — the chaos and lawlessness that escalated this weekend into another night of tragic, unspeakable gun violence — has been going on for far too long,” the letter states.
If the city doesn’t respond, business owners say they’ll withhold tax and permit payments, placing those funds into an escrow account.
Beckner explained that during the day Fells Point is “a tourist area as well as a hub for a lot of the office buildings,” which he noted are still mostly closed due to the coronavirus pandemic.
“At nighttime, we get a good dinner crowd, but then as the sun starts going down, things start to change,” he continued. “We’ve had a lot of incidents with the dirt bikes, motorcycles and gangs [as well as] fighting on the square.”
He then stressed that there have been “no consequences from the city about doing anything” about the situation.
Former Baltimore congressional candidate Kimberly Klacik joined Beckner on “Fox & Friends” on Tuesday to explain what conditions have been like in the city.
She agreed with Beckner noting that “after 10:00 p.m. in Fells Point its basically lawlessness and our state’s attorney Marilyn Mosby unfortunately has said that she is not going to prosecute these crimes such as selling alcohol on the streets or dealing drugs or those that are just loitering.”
She stressed that “these things need to be enforced.”
In April, Mosby, Baltimore’s top prosecutor, defended her policy not to prosecute minor crimes, including open container violations as well as drug and drug paraphernalia possession, unless police find evidence of intent to distribute, WBAL-TV reported.
“The focus for my office and the focus for the police has been to focus on violent crime in the past year,” Mosby reportedly said. “Clearly, based on the fact violent crime did not increase, these low-level offenders did not re-offend, it suggests that there is no public safety value in what we thought, in theory, is actually true and that there is no public safety value and there never really was any public safety value in prosecuting these low-level offenses.”
Klacik said she commends “all the Fells Point business owners that are threatening to put their money into escrow accounts until the city does their job.”
“They pay taxes to have the trash picked up [and for] the police to enforce the law,” she stressed.
In a statement, a spokesperson for Mayor Brandon Scott said the mayor “shares the business owners’ frustrations over the violence across the city and has ordered the Baltimore Police Department, Department of Public Works, and Department of Transportation to work collaboratively to address it.”
Reacting to the statement, Beckner said that “the mayor failed” to show up at a virtual town hall meeting last week, which “doesn’t show a lot of concern to us.”
*story by Fox News
