Baltimore Police Commissioner Anthony W. Batts asked Roland Park residents to avoid thinking about how they can improve just their neighborhood, and to consider how they can boost the city has a whole.
Batts made his pitch for the community’s help during the Roland Park Civic League’s annual meeting on Wednesday night, at the Roland Park Elementary and Middle School.
"In some of our communities, maybe in the Eastern and the Western [districts] those people that have the sophistication and the knowledge of how to build the infrastructure are no longer there," Batts said. "So when you go into that community and say ‘Pick yourself up by the bootstraps. Get yourself together. Get this community together. Build neighborhood watch’ they don’t have the capacity."
Batts told residents that Roland Park does have that knowledge and that its expertise on how to improve a community where residents don’t to "speak,""dress" or "smell" like them.
"This is a very sophisticated neighborhood. This is a very sophisticated audience here. And it’s really easy for us to say 'I want to focus on my community, and where I live, and in my neighborhood,'" Batts said. "But this is Baltimore. This is a city, this is a whole, there’s people who do not have the sophistication that we have in this community, but those two sides of this city are imploding on themselves. What I would ask is to get involved in other parts of Baltimore."