BALTIMORE (AP) - After 25 homicides in as many days, Baltimore’s police commissioner pledged on Wednesday to work collaboratively with other city agencies, deploy more manpower and focus on specific geographic areas of the city to “reverse the trend” of violence.
“We absolutely acknowledge and condemn the violence that’s happening on the streets of Baltimore,” Kevin Davis said. “This is not the new normal.”
Davis said 100 new officer positions have been unfrozen and 100 more officers have been shifted back to street patrol from other areas of the department.
Meanwhile, the department spent the past few months of 2016 identifying high-crime areas of the city and deploying departmental resources to fight crime there, including task forces focused on gangs and gun crimes.
But recently officers are finding that young teenagers are committing crimes on behalf of older teens or young adults who prey on juveniles because they will face lighter sentences, if any. That’s where parents and community groups come in, he said.
“It’s a dangerous notion to think that police can solve societal ills,” he said. “We want our role to be limited and effective; we don’t want to show up to every problem with a pair of handcuffs.”
The homicide rate in Baltimore began to skyrocket after the April 19, 2015, death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man whose neck was broken in the back of a police transport van. His death sparked protests and rioting across the city, and after six officers were charged, the homicide rate began to climb. With 344 homicides, 2015 was the bloodiest year on record in Baltimore. The pace of killing so far this year is even more feverish.
Just hours after President Donald Trump threatened to “send in the Feds” unless the homicide rate in Chicago goes down, Davis said he would welcome the help in Baltimore. Although the department already has 96 task force officers, Davis said he’d like to see twice as many federal agents come to the city to join the crime fight.
The chief also said he hopes to reverse a “handshake agreement” made long ago between former prosecutors and police chiefs that requires police to seek permission before filing charges for crimes that include murder and shootings that aren’t fatal. Changing such a system, he said, would ensure that violent repeat offenders are arrested and prosecuted more swiftly.
“If we have probable cause to get those trigger-pullers off the street, we’ve got to act quickly,” he said, “a lot of times a good case continues to build after we make an arrest.”
Additionally, Davis said other city agencies, such as the housing department and mayor’s office, will attend weekly meetings in an effort to work more collaboratively to stop crime before it starts.
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