Baltimore Crime Camera Catches Shooting Suspects

BALTIMORE --

One of the city's blue light crime cameras played a major part in tracking down the suspects in a late night shooting on Wednesday.

The camera is set at the corner of Park Avenue and Mulberry Street in west Baltimore and captured two minutes of video around 3 a.m. Wednesday.

In the video, viewers can see a man in white apparently selling marijuana to a man in a black shirt. After the apparent drug transaction, a second man in black entered the scene with a handgun.

The video showed that the two men in black shirts appeared to try to rob the alleged marijuana dealer. It showed the alleged dealer running away, only to get shot in the back.

But since the whole incident was caught on tape, the suspect's license tags were radioed in and they were arrested just 10 blocks away.

"We knew the type of vehicle. We got the tag, we got the owner, we got the travel of direction from the suspects -- we got all of that. And patrolmen were pretty much instantaneously able to make an arrest," said Detective Donny Moses of the Baltimore City Police Department.

Police said the incident shows what cameras can do in a city where people often refuse to testify in court.

"In this case, we have a marijuana dealer who in every right of the word is a suspect himself, and then we have shooters. Because one might not want to implicate himself in a crime, a lot of time our victims don't want to cooperate. In a sense, (now) we don't need them to cooperate because we see if for ourselves on this DVD," Moses said.

Police said that in nine out of 10 shootings in Baltimore, both the shooter and victim have criminal records.

In this case, the victim is expected to make a full recovery, officials said.