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I also won't ever travel to Baltimore for any reason anymore. I used to go fairly frequently as a kid to see Orioles games with my family, my dad being a fan, and Cal Ripken being kind of a local hero. As a teenager and young adult in the late 90's and early 00's, we used to go often for Otakon. That was definitely when I began to notice weirdness.
One year the guy manning the desk at the hotel straight up stole some of the cash we used to pay for the room, and we didn't realize it until we went to check out and they said we still owed $100 that hadn't been paid up front. Being suburban teens, we were just confused, tired, in a hurry to leave, and dutifully paid again. We didn't realize we were stolen from until we had time on the drive home to talk about it.
Year after year the encounters we had with street people got weirder and worse. To this day, Baltimore had some of the scariest, most destitute hobos I've ever seen. One guy tried to lure us down an alleyway with the promise of prostitutes outside the convention center.
Many years later around 2019 we went to see Joe Rogan in Baltimore. The show was great, exiting the parking garage after was an experience. A car next to us, instead of waiting their turn, had the girlfriend just stand in the middle of the line of cars so he could back out. Cars kept going around her. Eventually he kirked out and just went for it, fuck the guy behind him he might back into. Then he spent the entire 30 minutes it took to slowly trickle out of the parking garage leaning out his windows, screaming at the guy in front of him who didn't let him in to get out and fight him. This being two cars behind us, my then pregnant wife was terrified he would eventually pull a gun and start shooting in our general direction, because Baltimore. And that was the last time. It's just not worth it.
On one of my trips to Baltimore, I took a cab somewhere. My buddy and I were in that same boat (a bit older I suppose), but obviously seemed like rubes to our cab driver. He drove the wrong way, I absolutely believe intentionally, running up the fare. I had enough geographic sense of the city that I realized what was happening and hopped out of the car at a stop. My buddy, being even a bit more of a rube than me, was attempting to pay the driver as I was informing the driver what my opinion of him was; I did eventually get him to just get out, but he didn't seem to really get it until I had explained to him that this asshole was stealing from us.
I've been to some low-trust places in the States, but Baltimore is pretty easily number one.
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