Mobtown, my Mobtown

[CountDeMoney]

Ah, all my old haunts.  I miss my old neighborhoods.

Four men shot early Saturday in latest Baltimore spree of violence

Four men were shot in locations across Baltimore early Saturday, including a double shooting in the Druid Heights neighborhood that follows an already violent start to September, police said.

Around 2:30 a.m., officers found two men suffering from gunshot wounds in the 300 block of Gold Street, Detective Jeremy Silbert said. The men were transported to area hospitals, where one died. The second victim is expected to survive, he said.

On Saturday, a man was shot multiple times in the 2500 block of Edgecombe Circle North in the Parklane neighborhood. Officers arrived at 1:56 a.m. and the victim was transported to an area hospital.

Another man walked into an area hospital for treatment at 5:24 a.m. with a gunshot wound to his shoulder. The victim told police he was shot in the 1800 block of Orleans Street in the Dunbar-Broadway neighborhood.

Over Labor Day Weekend 16 people were shot and six killed. One of the victims was 22-year-old Larelle Amos, a mother who was shot by a stray bullet while she cleaned up after a family party. In response, police said they increased their presence in East and Northeast Baltimore, where the shootings occurred.

Druid Heights, the site of Saturday's double-shooting, has been the site of multiple shootings this year, including one that involved a 9-year-old boy who was caught in a crossfire on Aug. 20. The child is recovering. Donte White, 23, was charged in the shooting.

Phillip Scott, 34, was killed in April after he was shot multiple times in front of a house in the 1900 block of Etting Street. The incident was near a fatal shooting outside McCulloh Homes on April 13, where Brandon Simms, 23, was shot in the head while he ate crabs.

[Syt]

Lead designer of XCOM tries to sell his game to the average Joe in a Baltimore suburb. Bit of a freakshow.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1pyJxcETmc&feature=player_embedded#!

[CountDeMoney]

Spring heat rises in Baltimore, and so does city violence
Link between heat and crime has been studied, debated for years

By Justin George and Alison Matas, The Baltimore Sun

7:53 PM EDT, April 11, 2013

As record heat baked Baltimore, a wave of violence unfurled across the city: six shootings and eight people wounded over a period of less than eight hours.

The first shots were fired around dinnertime Wednesday, and the violence continued until after 2 a.m. Thursday. Police have no suspects in any of the crimes — which included two double shootings — and believe the seven wounded men and one injured woman will survive.

Several academic studies of crime suggest that it's no coincidence that the outburst of violence came as the temperature at the Inner Harbor hit 96 degrees. Researchers have debated the subject for years, but those who see a link say warmer weather drives people from their homes and into potential conflicts.

"One of the things in Baltimore is there's not a lot of air conditioning, so people move outside," said Phil Leaf, associate director of the Johns Hopkins Urban Health Institute. "The more you have different people interacting, the more chance you have for beefs."

Baltimore police say they don't need statistics to tell them what they already know from patrolling the same city streets as winter turns to spring and summer.

"We can all look at seasons of the moon and we can look at the weather," police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said. "But if you ask a cop what their gut feelings are, yeah, things get crazy when it gets hot outside.

"What we do know is when the weather's warm, people go outside."

The National Weather Service reported a high temperature of 91 degrees at BWI-Marshall Airport on Wednesday, which broke a 91-year record. And a reading at the Inner Harbor hit 96 degrees, which tied Port Isabel, Texas, for the highest temperature in the United States on Wednesday.

It was one of the most violent nights recorded in the city so far this year.

Guglielmi said police are not overreacting to Wednesday night's shootings, Guglielmi said, but are working to "drill down" into each incident, looking for connections to gangs and drugs and developing sources that help police get in front of any retribution.

But the warm weather does mean police are shifting strategies. That includes shuffling schedules for patrol and plainclothes officers and even permitting officers to wear short-sleeve uniform shirts — an annual changeover that started Monday.

On the streets where the wounded were hauled away in ambulances overnight, people speculated Thursday on the causes of the violence.

"I don't know," said Meechie Thornton, 53, just half a block up from the intersection of West Fayette and North Stricker streets where a man was shot in the left side while sitting in a car. "They just go buck wild."

Thornton sat on the step of a brick rowhouse on Fayette Street talking to Kenyatta Player, 34, who wore a summer dress and sunglasses in the warm breeze.

"When it gets hot, people are crazy," Player said. As she spoke, a car screeched up the street.

"See? That made no sense whatsoever."

Researchers have tried to make some sense of the connection between heat and violence.

Psychologists at Florida International University looked at crime reports in Minneapolis for a 2000 study and found crime was more prevalent during the summer than in other seasons.

Similarly, a 2010 study conducted through Kent State University found that violent crime in Cleveland increased as temperatures rose.

Craig Anderson, who directs the Iowa State University's Center for the Study of Violence, has also studied the relationship between temperature and crime. He said heat tends to make people cranky, which can amplify minor provocations.

People also become more likely to retaliate. That can turn into a cycle, he said, and it doesn't take much to see a big effect on crime statistics.

He helped conduct a 2010 study that showed that as temperatures rise, so do people's tempers. The research examined the impact climate change could have on violent crime.

Using data from 1950 to 2008, the professors predicted that if the country's annual average temperature were to increase by 8 degrees, the number of murders and assaults would jump by 34 per 100,000 people.

Others have said the relationship between crime and temperature is complex.

James Alan Fox, a professor of criminology at Northeastern University, studied daily crime counts and temperatures in Columbus, Ohio, for a year. He discovered crime did increase with the temperature but only to a point. Once it got too hot, crime reports dropped again.

He wrote in 2010 that crime was highest when temperatures were hovering in the mid-80s, but petered out as temperatures climbed into the 90s.

He also found temperature had the greatest impact on crimes outside of the home.

Most of the overnight incidents in Baltimore took place outside, Guglielmi said.

But some research has raised questions about the link between heat and murder in the city.

A 1995 article published in the Journal of Quantitative Criminology looked at crime in Baltimore over a period of eight years to see whether temperature had a direct influence on the number of killings. The study found that "homicide in Baltimore is a surprisingly consistent — or constant — process, showing little or no variation on many temporal factors important at the national level."

On Thursday, in a home in the 800 block of Arnold Court in the Gay Street neighborhood, two women sat on a back porch speculating what may have prompted a shooting in their complex. They blamed the drug dealers who seem to proliferate in their alleys when it's warm.

"It's not even summertime and they're already outside, selling their damn weed and all that mess," said a woman who declined to give her name because the shooter has not been caught. "They stand out in front of your doors. You ask them to leave, they give you mouth."

The woman said she saw paramedics rolling the wounded man in Wednesday's shooting into an ambulance. All the while, she said, the man kept saying, "Please, just give me some cold water."

The woman looked at her friend and said, "Bullets are hot, I believe."

Bullet are hot indeed, sweetie.

[mongers]

Damn, in the 90s already and it's like little Beirut too.   

[Tonitrus]

Gang leader impregnated 4 prison guards while running contraband scheme, authorities say
Published April 25, 2013
| FoxNews.com
advertisement
A Maryland gang member is accused of running a scheme to smuggle contraband into prison by "corrupting" 13 female prison guards from behind bars, four of whom he impregnated.
A federal indictment says Tavon White has been charged in the plot to smuggle drugs, cell phones and other contraband into the Baltimore jail and other corrections facilities, along with the prison guards, six of his fellow inmates and five others with gang ties who allegedly operated outside the jails.
The indictment also says the ring involved sex between the inmates and guards, which led to four of the officers becoming pregnant by White, the leader of a jailhouse gang called the Black Guerrilla Family.
White is accused of "corrupting" the female officers through personal and sexual relationships and other bribes and convincing them to join his ring, Fox Baltimore reports.
MyFoxDC.com reports the ring became increasingly brazen and confident over time, with White quoted as saying: "You understand me? This is my jail. I am dead serious, I make every final call in this jail."
White was being held at the Baltimore City Detention Center awaiting trial on a charge of attempted murder at the time.
The gang members and the corrections officers have been charged with conspiracy, drug possession and distribution and money laundering.

[mongers]

Gang leader impregnated 4 prison guards while running contraband scheme, authorities say
Published April 25, 2013
| FoxNews.com
advertisement
A Maryland gang member is accused of running a scheme to smuggle contraband into prison by "corrupting" 13 female prison guards from behind bars, four of whom he impregnated.
A federal indictment says Tavon White has been charged in the plot to smuggle drugs, cell phones and other contraband into the Baltimore jail and other corrections facilities, along with the prison guards, six of his fellow inmates and five others with gang ties who allegedly operated outside the jails.
The indictment also says the ring involved sex between the inmates and guards, which led to four of the officers becoming pregnant by White, the leader of a jailhouse gang called the Black Guerrilla Family.
White is accused of "corrupting" the female officers through personal and sexual relationships and other bribes and convincing them to join his ring, Fox Baltimore reports.
MyFoxDC.com reports the ring became increasingly brazen and confident over time, with White quoted as saying: "You understand me? This is my jail. I am dead serious, I make every final call in this jail."
White was being held at the Baltimore City Detention Center awaiting trial on a charge of attempted murder at the time.
The gang members and the corrections officers have been charged with conspiracy, drug possession and distribution and money laundering.

So the jail became a more secure place for the criminal to conduct is business from ?

Plus he got to exercise his biological imperative rather successfully.

[CountDeMoney]

the corrections officers have been charged with conspiracy, drug possession and distribution and money laundering.

Nothing that hasn't been going on for 40 years.

[CountDeMoney]

Imagine that.

Baltimore police review board called irrelevant, ineffective
Board formed in 2000 to much fanfare has many vacant seats

By Justin Fenton, The Baltimore Sun
June 2, 2013

In a mostly empty ninth-floor conference room on a recent Thursday evening, the civilian panel charged with investigating police misconduct in Baltimore met for its monthly meeting.

There are supposed to be nine members, but four chairs were empty — those positions have been vacant for years. Of the five positions that are filled, four of the members said they want out, having long overstayed the limits of their terms.

When the board was created more than a decade ago, boosters promised it would prove a crucial check on brutality and abusive language by police officers. Opponents called it an intrusion into departmental discipline. It proved to be neither, and members say the panel has become irrelevant, ineffective and disengaged from the public it's supposed to represent.

As the recent meeting drew to a close — less than 15 minutes after it started — member William Brent, 88, questioned the panel's existence. Brent, who has served 14 years on the panel, eight years beyond his term limit, thinks the work is important, but goes unacknowledged.

"I don't think any of those people know what we're doing, or who we are," Brent said. Other members nodded in agreement.

Baltimore's board sometimes gets cases from police after they've already been closed, and its recommendations are very rarely followed. Its investigations and the complaints it reviews are not public, and only cryptically described at meetings. Police and union officials are supposed to hold three additional nonvoting positions on the board, but haven't been coming.

"I think they're a paper tiger," City Council President Bernard C. "Jack" Young said of the board.

Informed of the board's vacancies and complaints from its members, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake told The Baltimore Sun that her staff would move to fill the vacancies. "It's critically important that we get this fixed," she said.

Civilian review boards began to emerge in cities in the early 1990s, in the wake of the Rodney King beating in Los Angeles. The issue had been debated for several years before a string of police-involved shootings and a 1999 incident in which a state senator was handcuffed pushed it toward approval in the Maryland General Assembly.

It was a hard-won legislative battle, followed by months of political maneuvering over who would sit on the panel. But the fervor faded quickly, and the Baltimore board never developed the assertive role that civilian groups took on elsewhere.

In Washington, the police complaints board makes policy recommendations and has more than 20 staffers investigating misconduct. Chicago's independent police review authority analyzes police-involved shootings and posts investigative reports online.

Baltimore's new Deputy Commissioner Jerry Rodriguez, who oversees a reconstituted professional standards and accountability bureau, joined the Police Department after 27 years in Los Angeles, considered to have some of the strongest police oversight in the country. He said he is reviewing Baltimore's board with a goal of making it more relevant.

"I believe that in today's law enforcement, there is a very critical need in what we do to have civilian oversight," Rodriguez said. "I do not think the system [in Baltimore] is broken, but I think there's room for improvements."

But Sheldon Greenberg, director of the School of Public Safety Leadership at the Johns Hopkins University, is skeptical about the implementation and significance of civilian review. He said many cities jumped on the trend "without a real connection to a need or purpose locally."

"If you just do it because it's on the books, or because other cities are doing it, then you're just going through the process," Greenberg said. "Process without purpose is meaningless."

In Baltimore, the board has two investigators and subpoena power. Complaints have declined from 137 in 2010, to 97 in 2011, to 87 in 2012. The board's reports for the past three years show that the members voted to reverse the findings of internal affairs in 49 out of 812 — or 6 percent — of allegations reviewed by the board.

Some who have dealt with the panel say the process was confusing and got them nowhere.

In 2005, then-Johns Hopkins University student Blake Trettien said he was handcuffed by an officer who had just arrested his friend, and spent 33 hours in Central Booking before being released without charges.

Months after he filed a complaint, Trettien said the board informed him that the issue didn't fall within its jurisdiction. "I was arrested for no reason, which they said was something that they didn't deal with," said Trettien, who would write a paper about "zero tolerance" policing that helped him get into law school.

Richie Armstrong and two other men arrested in 2011 during a protest over the East Baltimore Development Inc. project said they filed complaints with the board and never heard back.

"We ended up on trial behind this, and I thought because of the magnitude there would be some steps taken, even just to get us some satisfaction that the city was concerned about the issues," Armstrong said.

"People have lost trust in the process," said Clarence Mitchell IV, the radio host who as a state senator helped spearhead the effort to create the board.

Doreen Rosenthal, a Bolton Hill activist, was the first chairwoman of the board and said the early days were exciting. Members came up with a structure and procedures, and attended training. They also hired investigators and developed a marketing plan to get the word out to citizens.

Rosenthal quickly became disillusioned. "I don't think we ever had a case that was [for something other than] abusive language," she said. "I felt like it was a waste of time."

Still, in 2009, there was still an impression that the board had power. Then-City Council President Rawlings-Blake recommended that important policy decisions, such as the Police Department's move at the time to stop releasing the names of officers who shoot citizens, be filtered through the civilian review board.

But under Mayor Rawlings-Blake, the board has languished with vacancies. Seats on the panel representing Southeast, Central, and Northern districts have been vacant for at least three years. The seat representing Northwest Baltimore is also vacant.

Rawlings-Blake said she made three appointments in 2011 — the first since the mayoral administration of Martin O'Malley — and City Council records show that they were confirmed. But they never were sworn-in. One of those appointees is expected to be re-nominated to the council at Monday's meeting.

Cherry Hill resident Cleoda Walker, the current chairwoman, says that while the board has enjoyed a good relationship with police commissioners, the department hasn't followed board recommendations when police and the board differ.

"I think two times at the most," said Walker, who has served on the board since 1999.

Walker said the board's subpoena power is used most often to obtain medical records to corroborate a citizen's claim of injuries. They also can hold "inquiry panels" and interview witnesses, though that has only happened two or three times, she said.

She believes in the work, even if it sometimes feels the board is ignored. The board makes sure that people who make complaints receive a letter letting them know how the board ruled on their cases. "At least it's something," she said.

Philip K. Eure, the executive director of Washington's Office of Police Complaints and a past president of a national organization of police civilian oversight groups, said it is key to bolster the resident members with professional staff and give them power.

His office has 22 staffers who report to a five-member board appointed by the mayor. It recently issued an 84-page annual report that criticized Police Chief Cathy Lanier for not following three of its recommendations since 2010. Citizens can file complaints with his office, with internal affairs, or with both, and he believes more complaints are filed with his office than with police.

Of Baltimore, he said: "There seems to be kind of a culture of both a lack of transparency and lack of seriousness and purpose insofar as independent police review goes."

Charlene Bourne, an East Baltimore neighborhood booster, is the only member seeking to stay on the board and hopes for changes in their role.

"I would like to see the Police Department take our board more seriously," Bourne said. "When we send something in and our finding is different than theirs, I would like to see it investigated more thoroughly."

[CountDeMoney]

Lulz, "Con" + "Insult" = "Consultant"

Council president unhappy with Baltimore police plan

City Council President Bernard C. "Jack" Young said Monday night he wished the city had not paid consultants $285,000 for a crime-fighting plan that he described as "something we could've done in-house."

Young was part of the city spending panel that approved the consultant contract in April, but he said the finished product delivered last week fell short of his expectations because in many areas it identified problems rather than specific solutions.

Young peppered Police Commissioner Anthony W. Batts with questions about staffing and overtime pay at a City Hall hearing, and said afterward that he felt police dodged his questions.

"I'm waiting for the commissioner to earn his money," Young said in an interview. "It was a lot of fluff, a lot of fast-talking. I just felt that I wasted my time."

Chief among council members' concerns was why the department — one of the largest per capita in the country — doesn't seem to have enough officers to provide coverage of the city.

Police said fixes would not be quick but that they were working to make significant changes for the first time in decades. The plan released last week outlines continuing or future initiatives that touch nearly every corner of the agency.

On deployment, Batts said police first needed to study their emergency call trends and deployment patterns, then will have to revamp their dispatch system — a significant undertaking, officials have said.

They'll also have to work out any major changes in officers' work schedules through contract negotiations with the police union, Batts said.

To explain the work being done, police brought forward an Annapolis-based contractor named Peter Bellmio. But Bellmio did not work on the $285,000 contract. He was hired in January for $5,000 to obtain preliminary deployment data, and earlier this month was given a $16,300 contract to study the impacts of changes on deployment.

The consultant who worked on the strategic plan, Robert Wasserman, sat in the back of the council chambers and did not speak during the hearing.

Bellmio said his analysis showed that police in Baltimore receive a volume of 911 calls that is on par with larger cities. He said the agency's patrol deployment patterns also don't take into account that crime spikes at night and on the weekends.

Young and other council members said they couldn't understand why police aren't able to free up more resources for foot patrols. Batts said he had placed 75 to 100 officers on foot patrols in East and West Baltimore as well as downtown and around Lexington Market.

"We're doing exactly what you asked," Batts said. Police also said that though homicides and shootings are up, the rate of increase has slowed since the summer.

Batts has pointed to rising attrition as one reason for the spike in crime this year, and police said the shortages require increased overtime spending.

The meeting became tense when Young pressed police on how many officers they are short each night, and why. Police did not give a direct answer, and Young continued to press. Councilman Warren Branch then intervened, saying to police, "You don't know how many officers work a shift per night?"

Deputy Commissioner Dean Palmere eventually said patrol districts typically have 36 officers per shift, 18 of whom are responding to calls. A spokesman later said the shifts "do not go out short."

Young said he does not see a visible presence when he goes throughout the city.

"Where are they? We're paying all of this overtime, and I don't see your officers," he said. Referring to the city's population decline, he said: "We have fewer people, and the same amount of officers. I just don't understand. Maybe it's me."

[Ed Anger]

HEY NOW

[KRonn]

Baltimore needs to implement its own version of Stop, Question and Frisk!

[Tonitrus]

Hey look...Baltimore made it into the Economist... 

http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21724399-america-gets-safer-marylands-biggest-city-does-not-crime-and-despair-baltimore

An exceptionally murderous city
Crime and despair in Baltimore

As America gets safer, Maryland's biggest city does not


Print edition | United States
Jun 29th 2017 | BALTIMORE
BACK in the 1980s and early 1990s, when Dante Barksdale was playing the game in Baltimore—dealing drugs, toting guns, making some money—there was a process to killing people. "You couldn't shoot someone without asking permission from a certain somebody," muses the former gangster, on a tour of the abandoned row-houses and broken roads of West Baltimore, the most dangerous streets in America. "It's become like, "I'm going to kill whoever's got a fucking problem with it."

Mr Barksdale, who spent almost a decade in prison for selling drugs, speaks with authority. His uncle, Nathan "Bodie" Barksdale, was a big shot in the more hierarchical Baltimore gangland he recalls. Avon Barksdale, a fictional villain in "The Wire", a TV crime drama set in Baltimore, was partly inspired by him. The younger Mr Barksdale was himself fleetingly portrayed in it. ("'The Wire' was a bunch of bullshit," he sniffs. "I got shot in the fourth episode and I didn't get paid.") Now employed by the Baltimore health department, in a team of gangsters-turned-social workers known as Safe Streets, he uses his street smarts to try to pre-empt murders by mediating among the local hoodlums. This also gives him a rare vantage onto the city's latest upwelling of violence, which is concentrated in poor, overwhelmingly black West Baltimore—and is horrific.

Hours after Mr Barksdale conducted his tour of some of Baltimore's most troubled streets on June 12th, they witnessed another six murders. That raised the number of killings in the city to 159, the highest recorded so early in the year at least since 1990, even though the city's population was much bigger then than it is now. If weighted to reflect the fact that the murder rate always climbs in the hot, fractious summer months, this suggests Baltimore may see more than 400 murders this year. That would smash the existing record of 344 killings, which was set in 2015, fuelled by violent rioting over the death in police custody of a drug peddler called Freddie Gray.

This is catastrophic. A 50-minute drive from Washington, DC, black men aged 15 to 29 are as likely to die violently as American soldiers were in Iraq at the height of its Baathist insurgency. Yet there is no sign of Maryland or the federal government taking the sort of emergency action such a disaster would seem to justify. Instead of bolstering law enforcement in Baltimore and a few other violent cities, including chiefly Chicago, but also St Louis and Milwaukee, Jeff Sessions, the attorney-general, has tried unsuccessfully to row back a modest federal-government intervention devised by his Democratic predecessor. Meanwhile he has used the violence in those places to misrepresent the much more pacific state of America at large.

"The murder rate is up over 10%—the largest increase since 1968," Mr Sessions said last month in testimony to the Senate intelligence committee. He neglected to clarify that, notwithstanding that rise, the murder rate is at close to its lowest level in a quarter of a century. In most places, Americans have never been less likely to be murdered; the homicide rate in New York is below the national average. More than 55% of the increase last year was accounted for by Chicago, where 781 people were murdered—more than the total for New York and Los Angeles combined.

America is not experiencing a crime wave, in short, but rather historic progress marred by a few exceptionally bleak places. That does not justify Mr Sessions's campaign for harsher custodial sentences across the board, which would not cut violent crime much or at all in Baltimore or anywhere. The attorney-general would do better to fathom what is causing the bleak spots, starting with a few stark truths.

As American as cherry pie
Most murder victims in America are black people shot dead by other black people. Blacks represent 13% of America's population, yet in 2015 they represented 52% of the slain. The toll on black families and communities is appalling; between 1980 and 2013, 262,000 black men were murdered in America, more than four times America's total number of casualties in Vietnam. If black Americans were murdered at no more than the national rate, America would still be an unusually violent developed country; its murder rate would fall from the current level of 4.9 per 100,000 people, which is similar to that of some African countries, to 2.4 per 100,000. That would make America merely three times as dangerous as Germany.

Criminologists have for decades argued about what makes young black men so much likelier to commit murder than young men of other ethnicities. The answer lies in some combination of poverty, family instability, epidemics of drug use in the wretched inner-city districts into which many blacks were corralled by racist housing policies, and bad, or non-existent, policing. The last of these, which may be the most important, extends far beyond occasional instances of police brutality. In America's overtly racist past, the killers of black Americans were less likely to be caught than the killers of whites because black lives were valued less. These days, inadequate resources, recruitment and training of inner-city police officers are bigger problems. Yet the outcome is the same. In the 1930s, Mississippi solved 30% of black murders; in the early 1990s, Los Angeles County, then in the grip of a violent crack-cocaine epidemic, solved 36%; in 2015 the police in Baltimore solved 30.5% of murders, most of which involved blacks.

Where murderers operate with a sense of impunity, they are likely to commit more murders. "I probably know ten dudes right now who have shot people and never been arrested," says Mr Barksdale. Another grim indicator of impunity is that, while the number of fatal shootings has soared this year, the number of non-fatal ones has hardly increased. "Instead of taking a shot and running away, the gunmen are walking up and taking multiple shots to leave no witnesses alive," says Cassandra Crifasi, a researcher into gun violence at Baltimore's Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Health. In the absence of effective policing, friends and relatives of murder victims are also more likely to take the law into their own hands—and so the virus spreads.

The same pattern has been noted in other poorly policed societies, especially those experiencing upheaval or trauma. The homicide rate among black Americans, notes Jill Leovy, a writer on murder in America, is similar to that among Arabs in some parts of Israel's occupied territories and American frontiersmen in the 18th century. "Like the schoolyard bully," she writes in "Ghettoside", "our criminal-justice system harasses people on small pretexts but is exposed as a coward before murder. It hauls masses of black men through its machinery but fails to protect them from bodily injury and death."


Better policing contributed to the drop in violent crime seen in most American cities from the mid-1990s. The size of its contribution is unclear, however: the complexity of local circumstances and the patchiness of America's crime data makes accounting for changes in crime rates hard. Even with decades of data to mull over, and a list of likely factors including better policing, strong income growth, demographic changes and reduced alcohol consumption, researchers at the Brennan Centre for Justice, at New York University, could account for only half of the national reduction in violent crime. Accounting for the recent surge in killing in Baltimore and Chicago is even harder. Yet it is striking that both places have recently suffered a dramatic collapse in public trust in the police, sparked by acts of brutality.

Just as the killing of Freddie Gray, who suffered a fatal spine injury in the back of a police van, lit up Baltimore, so the killing of Laquan McDonald, another young black man, who was shot dead in possession of a pocket-knife, led to protests in Chicago. In both cases the police, undermanned and unsure how to comport themselves in a world of mobile-phone cameras in every pocket, retreated. Between November 2015 and January 2016, the number of suspects briefly detained in Chicago dropped by 80%. In Baltimore, arrest numbers have fallen in the past three years, even as the murder rate soared.


Baltimore's police department was thrown into additional disarray last year by a damning report from the Department of Justice, which concluded that many of its officers were poorly trained, racist and incompetent, especially in their bungled efforts to police poor black neighbourhoods. This finding led the feds to demand the overwatch role that Mr Sessions has tried unsuccessfully to give up. Another scandal, in March, has made matters worse; seven members of an elite Baltimore police unit were charged with robbing drug dealers and law-abiding Baltimoreans, among other crimes. "I sell drugs," one allegedly boasted.

Baltimore's police bridle at the suggestion that they are to blame for the city's violence. They are at least trying harder. The case-closure rate for murders is currently around 50%. In response to the six murders on the day of your correspondent's visit to West Baltimore, the city's police commissioner, Kevin Davis, also announced what amounted to a weeklong state of emergency. He dispatched most of the city's 2,850 police officers—including many previously dedicated to office-work—on 12-hour patrols. If such efforts could be sustained, they would probably be popular, even though the police are not. "No one trusts the police, no one wants to tell them anything," said Yolanda Stewart, a resident of the troubled Sandtown-Winchester neighbourhood, whose 21-year-old nephew was recently shot and maimed outside her house. "But we need strong police around here to protect us."

A tour of Baltimore's trouble spots also evinces some sympathy for the cops. Better policing alone cannot curb a major crime wave; though New York's crime-fighting success is often attributed to an imaginative crackdown on petty crime in the 1990s, the city's long economic boom probably played a bigger part. By contrast, the state of Baltimore's poorest neighbourhoods, huddled on either side of the Patapsco river, is unrelentingly dire.

Whole streets have been boarded up against the junkies who hunker miserably on the weedy verges. Where an occasional inhabited house interrupts the monotony of abandonment, a glimpse of curtains or a pot-plant appears both valiant and acutely pathetic. ("The people in these communities are doing the best they can," says Ericka Alston, a former addict who runs a much-praised after-school club in West Baltimore.) The city has an estimated 16,000 abandoned houses, some of which have lain empty since its previous big riot, in 1968, following the death of Martin Luther King. Most of the damage is more recent, however. A former steel and manufacturing hub, the city has lost 75,000 factory jobs since 1990; as a result, around a quarter of Baltimoreans are stuck in poverty, with few obvious exits. A 25-year-long study of 790 children in Baltimore by the sociologist Karl Alexander and colleagues, from 1982 to 2007, found only 4% of poor children made it through college. In Sandtown-Winchester, shortly before the riots, 52% of adults were unemployed, 49% of teenagers were "chronically absent" from school and a third of houses were empty or abandoned. Whatever caused the drop in crime that Baltimore experienced with the rest of America, such indicators suggest it was fragile progress.

That is especially true given the attendant horrors of Baltimore's other big scourge, drug addiction, which also has a long history in the city. "If you think dope is for kicks and for thrills, you're out of your mind," said Billie Holiday, a jazz singer and heroin addict, who grew up in Sandtown-Winchester in the 1920s. Mr Barksdale and many of his ex-gangster colleagues cut their teeth during the crack-cocaine binge of the late 1980s and 1990s. Many, including Mr Barksdale, are the sons of addicts. Underpinning the latest crime surge is a third epidemic, of opioid prescription drugs, which is in some ways the deadliest yet.

According to an estimate by the health department, around 50,000 Baltimoreans are addicted to opioids. Some consider that an exaggeration; a visit to the streets around Baltimore's Lexington Market suggests it might not be. "See him on the bike! He's so high he can't ride straight," says Mr Barksdale, from behind the wheel, picking out the stoners with an expert eye. There appear to be dozens of them; two dealers are plainly visible, dishing out the content of orange pillboxes. It is probably Percocet, an opioid pain-reliever, with a street value of $30 for a 30mg hit. One of the dealers is operating within a few feet of a police van—perhaps, Mr Barksdale speculates, because he too is stoned. "Everyone's high!" he exclaims. "You used to be ostracised if you was on drugs. Now it's so common it's accepted."

In the view of Mr Barksdale and his co-workers, these and other changes in Baltimore's illegal drugs market help drive the killing. The more hierarchical gangs, and regulated murders, depicted in "The Wire" were based on the relative scarcity of heroin and cocaine; a gangster with a good supply of the drugs occupied a commanding position. By contrast, the easier availability of prescription drugs—especially in the aftermath of the riots, during which many pharmacies were looted—has led to a profusion of petty dealers, many of whom are also addicts. The result is constant turf battles which, unchecked by sobriety, are especially liable to turn bloody.


Barksdale, gangster-turned-helper
In turn, the bloodshed has led to a general downgrading of the value of a life. "The normal has changed, violence and retaliation and pain are expected," says Ms Alston, who estimates that 98% of the 50-100 children who attend her after-school club have heard or seen someone being shot. "This is about six-year-olds walking in and saying, 'Did you hear so and so got shot?'" That suggests a third way in which violence, which public-health experts increasingly view as analogous to infectious disease, spreads. The community starts taking it for granted.

Safe Streets is one of the more imaginative efforts to stop the contagion. It was launched in Baltimore a decade ago after a model pioneered in Chicago by an epidemiologist, Gary Slutkin. His idea was to erect barriers around the violence in the form of interventions by community leaders and streetwise locals. Of 31 such "violence-interrupters" employed by Safe Streets, all but two have done prison time. "We all did shit, got shot, got hit the fuck up, that's why we're credible messengers," explains Mr Barksdale. "Ain't none of us were snitches." Patrolling their areas in orange T-shirts, the violence-interrupters soak up news of the latest disagreements with obvious relish. ("So there are these two marching bands got this beef going on," recounts one with delight, through an open window of Mr Barksdale's car, "and they got knives and pit-bulls...")

Uncertainty about where the violence-interrupters stand in relation to the law has made them controversial. Because they are devoted to forestalling violence, they tend to take no view on the drugs deals they observe. A few have also sought to augment their meagre salaries unwisely. Mr Barksdale concedes that one of the problems is keeping people engaged without dipping back into their old lifestyles. His gangster uncle, who briefly worked for Safe Streets, was one who succumbed to temptation. Nathan Barksdale died in prison in North Carolina in February, aged 54, having been jailed for four years for trafficking heroin. Such controversies have left Safe Streets short of friends in high places; it almost lost its annual funding, of $1.6m, last year. Yet the ex-crims appear to be effective. A study by researchers at Johns Hopkins University published in 2012 found a statistically significant reduction in non-fatal violence in the four neighbourhoods they patrol, and a significant reduction in killings in two of them. Given the high cost of violence, financially and otherwise, that suggests Safe Streets is good value. It is estimated that $80m has been spent on treating gunshot wounds in Baltimore over the past five years.

It will take more than a few more ex-gangsters to pacify Baltimore, however. A straw-poll of Safe Streets workers suggests the city's troubled parts need four things above all. They need better schools, to mitigate the damaging effects on teenagers of their chaotic families, and to equip them for the jobs being created in Baltimore's plusher areas. They need fewer prescription drugs. And they need more and better policing. For the last of these, there is at least some hope in the form of the promised reforms and federal oversight. Of better schools and fewer drugs in Baltimore's violent districts there is no sign and, in the absence of serious attention to this calamity, little prospect.

[CountDeMoney]

From the article



Some of those neighborhoods have been landlocked since the 60s.  No way out, nowhere to go.  Born to lose, and for many decades, kept there on purpose.

[11B4V]

Poors what can you do.

[The Brain]

No homicides on boats? SHOCKER