Show caption Kim Hahn wants a nearby light rail stop closed after she and her husband, Chris, found an intruder in their home in Glen Burnie, Maryland, last year. Photograph: JM Giordano/The Guardian Cities ‘Addicts, crooks, thieves’: the campaign to kill Baltimore’s light rail Residents of a progressive and wealthy county claim public transport has brought city crimes to their area – and are fighting to have it closed Lucia Graves in Glen Burnie, Maryland @lucia_graves Wed 22 Aug 2018 11.30 BST Share on Facebook

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Chris and Kim Hahn knew something was wrong when their dog started growling at the back door after midnight in March 2017. Chris went to investigate and found a man crouching near the pool. He confronted the man, who Chris thought appeared to be on drugs, and a violent altercation ensued. The intruder was left bleeding.

“I don’t know what he was up to,” said Chris, recalling the event more than a year later with Kim in the kitchen of their neat Glen Burnie home.

The Hahns had moved to the working/middle-class suburb seeking a quiet, safe environment away from the crime and strife of Baltimore, 10 miles away. But, like many in the neighbourhood, they say the city’s woes have seeped into the area via public transport. Specifically, they believe criminals are coming into the suburbs by light rail.

Data does not bear that out, but that hasn’t stopped some residents from campaigning for the service, which started 25 years ago, to be reduced. The Hahns have just returned from a protest demanding the closure of a light rail stop around the corner from their home – a stop activists have linked to an increase in crime in the area.

“Looking at his rap sheet or whatever, he was from Baltimore city,” Kim said of the intruder. “He missed the light rail and had to find a place to stay, and he chose to climb our fence.”

Sandra German, president of the Greater FernGlen Community Association, at a gathering of locals who want the Cromwell light rail stop in Glen Burnie, Maryland, shut. Photograph: JM Giordano/The Guardian

The Anne Arundel county police confirmed the details of the Hahns’ report, but with two important discrepancies: there was nothing to link the suspect with the light rail and he wasn’t from Baltimore – he was local.

He hadn’t missed the light rail back to the city that night. He was from Anne Arundel county, just like the Hahns.

Railways and race



Maryland is one of the most liberal states in the US, but it remains among the most racially segregated, a divide underscored in 2015 by riots following the death in police custody of Freddie Gray.

As minority populations continue expanding into wealthier, predominantly white suburbs, the light rail service has emerged as a frontline in larger, racially tinged battles over government-subsidised housing and public transport.

Last Monday, the office of the Republican governor, Larry Hogan, said the Maryland Transit Administration would not shut down the light rail stops, a testament to just how loud the calls to close them from suburban residents had become. “The administration has provided additional law enforcement support to the county to help ensure that light rail stations are safe,” Hogan’s spokeswoman, Amelia Chasse, told the Baltimore Sun, “but we are not planning any service cuts.”

The Cromwell light rail stop, which locals claim is responsible for bringing criminals to the area. Photograph: JM Giordano/The Guardian

However, organisers from the recently founded Greater FernGlen Community Association, which rallies against the service to light rail stops in northern Anne Arundel county, were not deterred. “We knew fighting this unsafe light rail was going to be a battle and believe me the battle has just begun,” the group posted on Facebook, urging its few hundred followers to renew their efforts to document area crime. “Don’t give up … We can and will beat them on this one too.”

Anne Arundel, which neighbours Chesapeake Bay and is a short drive from Washington DC, ranks among the top 25 highest-income counties in the nation, though Glen Burnie is less wealthy than the mean. It is predominantly white and had been reliably Republican for decades when Hillary Clinton won it in 2016 – by a single point.

People like us go on the light rail and some of us are robbed, assaulted

Now the county is increasingly progressive and a far cry from the poor white parts of middle America that are stereotypically portrayed as having voted for Donald Trump. But sentiments similar to those that propelled him to the White House on a promise to “make America great again” could be felt in the parking lot of the Cromwell light rail stop, where around 60 residents had gathered to call for its closure in mid-July.

Among them were the Hahns and state senate candidate John Grasso, whose previous comments about the light rail’s “drug addicts, crooks, thieves” have led to comparisons from the Baltimore Sun with Trump’s inflammatory remarks about Mexican “rapists”.

“I am by no means saying … that everyone on that light rail is no good,” Grasso told the assembled crowd. “What I’m saying is there’s a few that aren’t any good.”

Anne Arundel county councilman Pete Smith at the rally. Photograph: JM Giordano/The Guardian

Growing drug problem



Sandra German, a retired security escort who is president of the Greater FernGlen Community Association, said the area’s transformation into “a cesspool of crime” in recent years had done significant damage to a once-prosperous mall nearby. “If this light rail continues at this stop we will no longer have a shopping centre,” German told an approving crowd.

“People like us go on there [the light rail] and some of us are robbed, assaulted. There’s no security,” said Wayne Rosenberger, the association’s vice-president, as he addressed the crowd, adding that the bus was safer because tickets were checked more routinely. “The indigents, whether they are drug addicts or people who just don’t have a life and who want to start trouble on the train, can’t get on the bus.”

It’s not just crimes allegedly committed by passengers on board the trains that campaigners are worried about; of even greater concern are those committed after alighting. Rising drug use is of particular concern, with Anne Arundel hard hit by the nationwide opioid epidemic – and Glen Burnie in particular suffering disproportionate heroin fatalities.

Joe Piazzola, a former US army reserve member with cancer, is a supporter of the light rail service as his nurse uses it to visit him. Photograph: JM Giordano/The Guardian

Addressing the rally, state attorney Wes Adams, whose brother-in-law died of an overdose, said “the bulk” of opioid overdoses in recent years had occurred on a corridor from Glen Burnie stretching roughly along the route of the light rail. The police department is sceptical of this, pointing Guardian Cities to a map showing overdoses all over the county, but activists are convinced. “They are coming down here and bringing, I don’t want to say the thugs – but it is the thugs,” local resident Vanessa Watson told Guardian Cities.

Drug addicts don’t need to take the light rail to the suburbs. They already live there

As well as the spreading opioid epidemic all manner of crimes and complaints were held up as reasons for the light rail service to be reduced. “I’m not against public transportation, but these light rail stops ... I have been aggressively panhandled,” Patty Ewing, a local delegate candidate, told the crowd.

Standing at the microphone, resident Joe Whitmer spoke of an attempted robbery last year at a bank near the light rail stop where his daughter worked at the time. And a neighbour of the Hahns said a stranger had wandered into his house when his young child was home alone. “My 12-year-old daughter calls me and I’m not there for her, and there’s a guy all looped out in my living room,” he told the crowd, choking up.

But media reports didn’t specify whether the suspect Whitmer mentioned rode in on light rail. Moreover, whether the suspect had come by light rail or not, police data shows “breaking or entering” to be on the decline countywide.

As the Baltimore Sun said in a recent editorial: “Drug addicts don’t need to take the light rail to the suburbs. They already live there.”

Chris Hahn, who confronted an intruder in his home near the Cromwell rail stop. Photograph: JM Giordano/The Guardian

But the activists aren’t fazed, countering official data with evidence they collate, neighbourhood watch-style, on social media. The police began patrolling the light rail in April in response to complaints and, after boarding more than a thousand trains, have issued just 14 tickets and made three arrests. But German disputed those figures in a recent op-ed for the Capital Gazette: “We have more than that on videos, pictures and social media posts – just like the one who robbed me on the light rail leaving me defenceless at a stop, with no security or phone to call for help!”

‘We didn’t have the crimes that are occurring now’

Brian Smith, 57, serves as the association’s “data guy”, collecting crime reports from local citizens. At the rally, he said he was a former federal government employee who had grown up in the area and that he had been moved to join the group about eight months ago by a perceived surge in crime. “I had neighbours whose vehicles were stolen or broken into all along the light rail. From the time I grew up as a teenager, we didn’t have any problems, we didn’t have the crimes that are occurring now.”

Smith said he had seen people arriving by the light rail “with empty backpacks, going through the neighbourhoods” and leaving with them full.

“The underlying assumption seems to be that Baltimore is full of criminals who want nothing more than to rob county residents but are prevented merely by the lack of transportation,” said an editorial in the Baltimore Sun. “In the context of the Baltimore region’s legacy of segregation, it’s impossible to avoid the racial implications of that thinking.”

Many Baltimore city residents were desperate to get to northern Anne Arundel, wrote the Sun, but not to commit crime: “They go because there are jobs there. In fact, the social problems at the root of the suburbanites’ anxiety are worsened, not ameliorated, by seeking to cut off the city from the suburbs.”

The light rail is at the heart of Glen Burnie residents’ fears around crime. Photograph: JM Giordano/The Guardian

Activist leaders have denied charges of xenophobia and racism, with German pointing to her biracial family in the letters pages of the Baltimore Sun. But at the rally, as people were making placards before speeches got under way, a young man suggested making a “white power” sign. He was quickly shot down by Kim Hahn, who said the trespasser at her house was white.

County councilman Pete Smith – the only Democrat and speaker of colour at the rally in favour of closing stops or curtailing the rail service to non-peak hours – began by telling the crowd to give themselves a round of applause. “Each and every one of you are out here not because you necessarily have an issue with the light rail, but because you really care about your community.”

It is true that the light rail is at the heart of residents’ fears – some benign or familiar, of change or a perceived downturn; others less so. Either way, they are not easily dismissed.

Joseph Piazzola, 35, was among the few present in opposition. He served in the US army reserve until 2015, when he was diagnosed with colorectal cancer. “I have cancer and my nurse comes on the light rail to take care of me,” Piazzola shouted at one point.

“Out of order,” responded Brian Smith at the microphone. The crowd cheered.

Later, speaking on the phone, Piazzola’s medical assistant, Diane Gatewood-Bey, 65, was so touched by his dissent, she began to cry. “I’m so afraid it’s going to close,” she said of the light rail. “[Not] everybody’s ... gifted to have a car or a ride to get to and from work.

“That’s why public transportation is here – not to drive crime into the counties, to get people to work.”