While Mayor whines, what is he hiding?

Try and follow this:

• WBAL-TV has been reporting for weeks now about the discrepancies in Baltimore City Crime reports.
  
  
• Politicians, of both political stripes, call for an independent audit of the books.
  
  
• Last night, the Baltimore City Council voted to create a commission to provide such an independent audit.

So in the Sun this morning, we were treated to this series of nuggets from Martin O'Malley, from the Mayor's testimony to the City Council:

"Every day that they get us to talk about how we go about proving independently that we haven't been doing something bad ... is one less day that Bob Ehrlich has to defend the fact that crime in Maryland as a whole, outside of our [city] borders, has been going up because of his miserable, pathetic management of juvenile services, which he promised to fix, and a parole and probation department that is still operating off of loose-leaf binders and notebooks."

What the gubernatorial campaign has to do with a City Council inquiry into potential mismanagement of crime records by the Mayor's many police chiefs is beyond me.

"This is like attacking John Kerry's rationale for his Purple Hearts in order not to have to talk about draft dodging and not going to war when you were called up,"

Get the feeling that O'Malley's opposition has little to do with good government? And why would anybody want to compare themselves to John Kerry and his campaign, especially given the accusations that Kerry exaggerated his own record in regards to his Purple Hearts and his service in Vietnam?

"So [Ehrlich] wants to have this debate - 'Oh, did it go down by nation-leading or were you first or third or sixth' - because he doesn't want people to see that crime is going up ... outside the city in the state of Maryland,"

Have any data for that? What's worse is the fact that I doubt that there is even much anecdotal evidence for such a claim, much less statistical evidence,

I get the feeling that everybody is getting tired of O'Malley's Act. The fact of the matter is that O'Malley promised to bring homicides down to 175, and the crime rate overall down. He failed on the first point; to be fair, it was an incredibly ambitious goal and more than likely nobody could succeed in that task. The problem is that the second goal we do not have an answer to yet, because of the questions regarding these statistics. You would think that they Mayor would welcome an independent audit to show the strides made in crime reduction during his seven years in office. I cannot see how anybody can take his shtick seriously when he wants to talk about his record on crime, and whines that calls for an independent assessment are politically motivated. I am waiting for him to bring up "Baltimore Bashing" again, since O'Malley and the Sun's editorial board have decreed that any criticism of O'Malley is a criticism of the City.

O'Malley should have called for the audit himself weeks ago. So the question gets boiled down to this: What does Martin O'Malley have to hide?