Baltimore ranked among the most dangerous American cities for years, but officials say a new carrot-and-stick approach to law enforcement helped drive down homicides by 21% last year.
Baltimore’s 262 reported homicides in 2023 ended an eight-year streak of 300 or more a year.
The city turned the corner by reemphasizing programs to help at-risk residents (carrot) while cracking down on street crime (stick), said Baltimore’s top prosecutor and other law enforcement officials.
“At the end of the day, people want accountability that’s done in a thoughtful and compassionate manner,” said Baltimore State’s Attorney Ivan Bates. “[But] the system was forgetting the victims. And what we’ve done is we put the victims first in trying to get accountability, to have a better understanding of the things that they would like to see.”
The high homicide rate has been a problem for decades, but Baltimore’s numbers shot up in 2015, the year riots swept the city in response to the death of Freddie Gray in police custody. The city recorded 344 homicides by year’s end, the most since 1993.
Baltimore police officials said Gray’s death opened a fissure with Black residents that decreased officers’ ability and willingness to engage with the public.
In 2018, after three years of rising homicide rates, then-acting Police Commissioner Gary Tuggle said, “In all candor, officers are not as aggressive as they once were pre-2015. It’s just that fact.”
Baltimore averaged 333 homicides a year from 2015 through 2022, over 100 more than the annual average from 2007 through 2014.
A focus on getting illegal guns off the streets began to pay off, Mr. Bates said.
Mr. Bates, who took office last year, ran his campaign on a promise to lock up gun offenders and eliminate the policy established by predecessor Marilyn Mosby of offering probation to people who owned guns illegally.
The city’s top prosecutor has worked with the Department of Justice to send gang members and dangerous career criminals to federal prison, said Erek Barron, U.S. attorney for Maryland.
Those efforts resulted in 130 guilty verdicts on homicide-related offenses last year, up from 90 convictions for similar crimes in 2022, Mr. Bates said.
Baltimore’s return to more severe punishment bucks a national trend. The latest criminal justice research argues that longer sentences no longer dissuade crooks.
In the District of Columbia, criminal justice activists backed by city leaders have pushed successfully to roll back sentencing guidelines that turned courts and jails into a “revolving door,” said the top prosecutor in the nation’s capital.
Mr. Bates said penalizing armed criminals works.
In his 20 years as a defense attorney and Baltimore’s top prosecutor, he said, defendants have become more open to plea bargains rather than risk time in federal prison.
“When individuals know that they’re going to go to prison, that’s pretty much a deterrent to kind of stop that behavior,” Mr. Bates told The Washington Times.
Mr. Bates also returned to prosecuting low-level crimes, such as open container violations and petty theft offenses. Mosby eliminated that policy.
Though the monthly docket for such cases remains slim, Mr. Bates said the return to issuing citations will take time.
He said his office is pursuing low-level offenses to remind people that they can’t break the law without consequences.
Baltimore’s rank-and-file police officers welcome the approach.
Michael Mancuso, president of Baltimore City Fraternal Order of Police Lodge No. 3, said officers are “reenergized” after years of confrontation with Mosby.
Mosby, who was convicted of COVID-19-related financial fraud in November, moved quickly to charge the officers involved in the Freddie Gray case in 2015, but she was unable to secure any convictions.
In office from 2015 to 2023, she abandoned prosecutions for most low-level offenses, including drug possession, prostitution and minor traffic violations.
Mosby’s efforts to shorten or eliminate prison sentences, even for repeat offenders, exacerbated Baltimore’s homicide problems, according to an analysis by The Wall Street Journal.
The paper reported in July 2022 that truncated jail terms played a part in at least 90 homicides from 2019 through 2020. The killers would have been behind bars for previous convictions instead of committing street crimes.
“Mosby was a defund-the-police and a throw out the rule of law kind of prosecutor in Baltimore,” Mr. Mancuso said. “She decriminalized many crimes and gave the criminals a free pass to conduct themselves as they saw fit.”
John Dedie, a political commentator who teaches at the Community College of Baltimore County, said Mr. Bates’ tough-on-crime message is resonating with residents but Mayor Brandon Scott’s administration, emphasizing community service and outreach, provides the balance Baltimoreans want.
“He’s been doing things that have been lacking in the city for many years,” Mr. Dedie said of Mr. Scott, 39. “He’s the type that shows up at a lot of these events and has a very good people connection.”
The mayor has focused resources on Baltimore’s historically crime-plagued “Black Butterfly” — the predominantly Black neighborhoods in the city’s western and eastern wings.
Mr. Scott told CNN in December that his administration’s violence reduction plan created a “community violence intervention ecosystem.”
Although collaboration among the city’s government services has been crucial, he said, the support from residents is even more important.
“That’s how we’re doing it and doing it the right way,” Mr. Scott said.
Others say Baltimore’s reduction in homicides is the result of a combination of factors.
Erricka Bridgeford, the founder of Baltimore Peace Movement, previously known as Baltimore Ceasefire, said efforts to reduce housing and food insecurity and encourage people to pursue education are having an effect.
The Peace Movement’s free conflict resolution services are popular. Ms. Bridgeford said droves of people want mediators to join them for difficult conversations with friends, neighbors or loved ones so problems won’t turn violent.
Ms. Bridgeford said the root of her work is removing the zero-sum mentality that residents from crime-ridden areas adopt to survive. Once they realize that someone else’s gain isn’t their loss, they start to see how enriching themselves cures the despair that can lead to deadly outbursts.
“Humans can often be each other’s nightmare,” Ms. Bridgeford told The Times. “We are now seeing that, in Baltimore, we are an example that we can be each other’s hope as well.”
• Matt Delaney can be reached at mdelaney@washingtontimes.com.
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