Frank James MacArthur, known online as The Baltimore Spectator, is scheduled to be in court Wednesday afternoon to face charges of possessing an unregistered firearm and resisting arrest. The charges are in relation to the standoff that took place in December outside of his Waverly home. During that standoff, which lasted for more than five hours, MacArthur was broadcasting through his website.
During the broadcast, MacArthur aired his grievances with Baltimore Police and city government. He also criticized media coverage of what was transpiring. The standoff ended peacefully – just before the 11 o’clock news – with MacArthur taken into custody. A subsequent search of his home found a sawed off shotgun.
The standoff sketched out new territory: a dangerous situation involving a blogger whose reports grabbed the attention of thousands of listeners around the world, including television commentator Roland Martin.
Baltimore Sun Media critic David Zurawik was also listening. He says that this is another example of how the internet and new media are changing the world, adding that its mind-blowing and scary at the same time. Zurawik says that MacArthur, who is known for chronicling crime scenes on his blog, became the face of the citizen journalist – people delivering information from a highly particularized and biased point-of-view.
A day after the standoff, Zurawik wrote, “And all of you mainstream media haters who fall on your schadenfreude knees each night praying for the demise of the Washington Post or the Baltimore Sun, this is the guy who is going to be bringing you information about your world if your prayers are ever answered. Good luck with that.”
He said later that mainstream media still holds a vital role in society. “When you lose [mainstream media], it’s going to be hard to find people exposing city hall; it’s going to be hard trying to find people doing stories like The Sun does about a kid being bullied and pushed out a window at school,” Zurawik said.
Former Baltimore Police Commissioner Fred Bealefeld had recently retired at the time of the standoff. Bealefeld, who now teaches criminal justice at Stevenson University, says that MacArthur broadcasting online could have put police and himself at greater risk. He emphasized that the primary goal of law enforcement is to take a suspect into custody with the least amount of force possible. “If the cops can do it safely, that’s a good dividend back to the person of interest," said Bealefeld.
MacArthur’s attorney, Mark Van Bavel, says he is expecting to go to trial. He contends that MacArthur was not violating any law. Van Bavel says that his client was exercising his first amendment rights and never confronted cops in a threatening manner. He also says that his client never resisted arrest because he never avoided officers.
Baltimore Police say that they take threats seriously and the fact that MacArthur was remanded shows that the judicial system believed that he was a threat to society. In regards to MacArthur’s allegations of corrupt officers, police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi says that Baltimore Police has rooted out a lot of corruption in the last four years, including “a whole shift” of officers that were arrested as part of a towing scheme.