Midday

Tom's guest is City Council President Brandon Scott, Democratic candidate for Mayor. Mr. Scott was first elected to the Council in 2011 to represent the 2nd District. Prior to that, he worked in the office of then Council President Stephanie Rawlings Blake as her representative in Northeast Baltimore.

In 2018, Jim Shea picked Mr. Scott as his running mate in their unsuccessful bid in the Democratic Gubernatorial primary.

Brandon Scott is 36 years old, which is, BTW, about the same age that Martin O’Malley was when he was elected Mayor, Johnny Olszewski, Jr., the Baltimore County Executive, and Pete Buttigieg, the former Mayor of South Bend Indiana, who ran for President.

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On February 23rd, a young Black man named Ahmaud Arbery was jogging near his home outside of Brunswick, GA, when he was shot and killed by two white men. No arrests were made in the case until a video of the encounter came to light two months later. Arbery, 25, was unarmed. Was the killing of Ahmaud Arbery a modern day lynching? Guest: Dr. Terry Anne Scott, Associate Professor of History and Director of African American Studies at Hood College.

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Baltimore Ceasefire 365 is a community-based movement that soon will be marking the third anniversary of its campaign to reduce violence in Baltimore. Throughout the year, and annually on four designated weekends -- including this past Mother’s Day weekend -- the group holds activities across the city designed, it says, to “promote peacefulness and celebrate life,” as it asks people in Baltimore, in essence, to stop killing for 72 hours.

Tom is joined now by Erricka Bridgeford, one of the co-founders and leaders of Baltimore Ceasefire 365. She describes how the movement has carried on through the difficult days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

If you're interested in learning more about the Baltimore Ceasefire movement, visit its website.

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Since Governor Larry Hogan issued a stay at home order for Marylanders on March 30, public health officials and protective services workers have noted a precipitous decline in police reports of domestic and child abuse. And the state-run Child Protective Services agency in Maryland reports 70% fewer calls during the first week of April, compared to the same period last year.

But experts are concerned that vulnerable adults and children are actually more at risk during the Coronavirus pandemic than they were before it started. For vulnerable individuals living with an abuser, home isn’t a safe place.

Today on Midday, a conversation about how COVID-19 has exacerbated the crisis of domestic violence, and what resources are available to victims of abuse. Tom's guests are two of Maryland's leading advocates for domestic and sexual abuse victims and survivors...

He speaks first with Attorney Lisae C. Jordan. She is executive director and counsel of the Maryland Coalition Against Sexual Assault (MCASA), a federally recognized coalition of state organizations working to combat sexual assault. MCASA provides training, expert advice, and public policy advocacy throughout the state of Maryland. Ms. Jordan is also the founder and executive director of MCASA's Sexual Assault Legal Institute (SALI), a project that provides legal services to survivors of sexual assault, and legal training and technical assistance for professionals working with survivors.

Tom's next guest is Dr. Inga James. With decades of experience in the field of family violence, Dr. James currently serves as board president of the Maryland Network Against Domestic Violence, and excutive director of Heartly House, a 24/7 domestic-abuse hotline and survivor-support service based in Frederick, Maryland. The organization has been helping victims of abuse and sexual trafficking for more than 40 years…

If you are a victim of domestic violence or have experienced any form of sexual abuse, help is always available. In Maryland, you can dial 211 for a range of counseling and legal services, or you can call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233, or 1-800-787-3224 for TTY, or if you’re unable to speak safely, you can log onto thehotline.org or text LOVEIS to 22522.

At the MCASA website, you can find a comprehensive listing of resources for survivors, as well as for families and friends of survivors. Additional resources are available by calling MCASA at 301-565-2277 or emailing them at [email protected] for more information.

Crisis intervention is also available through the 24-Hour hotline at Heartly House. Non-crisis requests for services can be made from 8:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m., 7 days per week. They have language-line interpreting services for non-English speaking callers.
To contact the Heartly House 24-Hour hotline, call 301-662-8800.

Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.

Tom's guest is former Baltimore City Mayor Sheila Dixon, who is in a crowded field of Democrats running for the office she held from 2007 to 2010.

Ms. Dixon represented the 4th District on the City Council for 12 years in the late '80s and '90s. She served as president of the City Council from 1999 until January 2007, when she became mayor after Martin O’Malley became governor. She was elected to continue later that year. In 2010, she resigned following a conviction for embezzlement and an Alford plea in a separate case in which she was charged with perjury. She ran for mayor again in 2016. She narrowly lost the Democratic primary to Catherine Pugh, and she garnered more than 51,000 votes in the general election as a write-in candidate.

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And now, a first-person account from a woman who was diagnosed with COVID-19 last month after experiencing symptoms in the middle of March.

Cara Ober is the founding editor and publisher of BmoreArt, an online magazine that covers art and culture in the Baltimore-Washington Corridor. The magazine has published two extended essays Ms. Ober wrote, over the course of a month, describing her harrowing experience with the disease. You can read them here, and here.

Cara Ober is now recovering from her illness, and she joins us via Skype Phone from her home in Baltimore.

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It's another edition of our series of Conversations with the Candidates, and Tom's guest today is the Mayor of Baltimore, Bernard C. "Jack" Young, a veteran city lawmaker and former City Council President who stepped into the mayor’s job about a year ago when Catherine Pugh resigned.

Mayor Young has spent years in City Government, and the year he has spent as the Mayor has been eventful, to say the least. It began with a crippling ransomware attack on the city’s computer system and now, of course, the city is dealing with an unprecedented global pandemic. More than 2,800 city residents have been infected with the Coronavirus. Nearly 150 Baltimoreans have died from COVID 19. And, the longstanding problem of violence on city streets remains. More than 92 people have been victims of homicide so far this year.

Now, even as he leads the City's battle against the COVID-19 pandemic, Mayor Young is campaigning to keep his job, as one of nearly two dozen mayoral candidates competing in the upcoming Democratic primary election. The primary will be held mostly by mail. Only four in-person voting centers will be open on June 2nd, for people who are not able to vote by mail. June 2nd is also your deadline to mail in your ballot. For more information on voting, click here.

Mayor Young joins us from his campaign office in Station North.

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On today’s ‘Midday Healthwatch’ with Dr. Leana Wen: When can the state and the country re-open safely? What have we learned about the virus so far, and are researchers getting closer to a treatment?

Dr. Leana Wen is a visiting professor of health policy and management at the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University, and a distinguished fellow at the Mullan Institute for Health Workforce Equity.

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Now, a conversation about how the COVID-19 pandemic is threatening not only our physical and financial well-being, but also our mental health.

Across the nation, tens of millions of people in all walks of life - from front-line hospital staff and shuttered small business owners to unemployed restaurant workers and parents staying home with their kids — are reporting increased levels of psychological stress about the COVID-19 illness and the threat it poses to them, their loved ones, and their livelihoods.

The impact of this heightened stress is indisputable. What kinds of services are available during the pandemic to help people cope with psychological trauma?

Tom's guest is Dr. Harsh Trivedi. He’s is the President and CEO of the Sheppard Pratt Health System in Baltimore, one of the nation’s largest private, non-profit providers of mental health, substance use and other special-needs services. He is also a professor of psychiatry at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

Dr. Trivedi joins Tom via Skype phone to describe the scope of the current mental health crisis, and the range of services available to those in need. Those services include Sheppard Pratt's new Virtual Walk-In Mental Health Clinic, and, to support Mental Health Awareness Month this May, its weekly online "Lunch and Learn" expert seminars on ways to manage our mental health.

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The Pulitzer Prize is journalism’s most prestigious award. Yesterday, the Pulitzer committee announced that our local paper, the Baltimore Sun, won the 2020 Pulitzer for Local Reporting. Its series of reports on the Healthy Holly scandal, which began in March of 2019, were described by the Pulitzer judges as “illuminating and insightful.” The Sun’s reporting led to the conviction and upcoming imprisonment of former Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh, and to some significant anti-corruption legislative reforms.


Tom's first guest today is one of the reporters on the Sun team. Luke Broadwater, who currently serves as the paper's State House reporter, broke the story about former Mayor Catherine Pugh’s financial relationship with the Board of Directors of the University of Maryland Medical System, and similar relationships the board had with other members.


Broadwater describes the Sun staff's reactions to the Pulitzer -- the paper's first in 17 years -- and how it reinforces the value of local investigative reporting at a time when newsrooms like the Sun's face uncertain futures.

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