Closing liquor stores reduces crime

Newly published research is once again highlighting the relationship between Baltimore’s current homicide epidemic and the city’s over-abundance of alcohol retailers. That this relationship affects the city’s poorest communities the most only underscores the need to address it.

Baltimore officials have tried to do something about this issue in the past. Years of community complaints and research that showed the link between the number and concentration of places that sell alcohol and violent crime prompted the city to include four provisions related to alcohol outlets in its overhaul of the city’s zoning code in 2016. Sadly, many of those provisions have been weakened.

The first provision mandated the removal of liquor stores from residential zones within two years. As of 2016, 95 of the city’s 264 liquor stores were located in residential neighborhoods, according to data from the Baltimore City Liquor Board and the city planning department. Since then, at least 19 have been rezoned, removing the requirement that they relocate.

While some stores have complied with this provision, more than 30 liquor store owners sued the city in 2019, arguing that two years to comply was not enough time to relocate or change the nature of their business. As the case works its way through the courts, these stores continue to operate and present dangers for their neighborhoods, which are disproportionately in under-resourced areas of the city.

Getting these liquor stores shut down is crucial to reducing crime in the city. A new study conducted by researchers from Johns Hopkins, the University of North Carolina and Boston University projected that closing about 80 liquor stores in residential zones would prevent 22 homicides and save the city $27.5 million in costs associated with crime in one year.

Another provision of the 2016 zoning changes required the city’s “taverns” (outlets whose license permits them to sell alcohol for consumption both on and off the premises) to show, by providing sales receipts, that they were actually operating at least partly as a bar and not as a sham liquor store. But in 2018, the General Assembly created a new A-7 liquor license type just for Baltimore City that let businesses that had not been compliant with their license type for years to simply switch to the new license and continue to operate. This license also created the first 7-day liquor license solely for off-site alcohol consumption in Baltimore, despite the fact that sales for off-site consumption have a stronger association with violent crime in Baltimore and more generally.

The third provision restricted alcohol advertising on the exterior walls or windows of alcohol outlets. Just last year, the City Council quietly revoked the city’s landmark alcohol billboard ban in residential zones after a campaign spearheaded by Diageo, the world’s largest liquor producer, called it into question. This undid years of efforts by communities to reduce youth exposure to alcohol advertising, which increases the risk that youth will start youth drinking (if they don’t currently drink) or progress toward problematic drinking (if they already drink).

This too could have bad implications on the city’s crime issue. Another new study, the first of its kind in a peer-reviewed journal, found that in Baltimore City, alcohol outlets that display alcohol ads visible from the street have higher levels of violent crime in the immediate vicinity. Publicly visible ads were associated with roughly three additional homicides, aggravated assaults and robberies within 1,000 feet of the outlets per year, after accounting for the concentration of alcohol outlets and neighborhood context.

Ironically, as new and Baltimore-specific research about the public health impact of the city’s alcohol outlets has proliferated, so has the city’s homicide epidemic. In the 2 years since the zoning rewrite passed into law, there have been 881 homicides in Baltimore, which cost the city, and society as a whole, $1.2 billion.

Baltimore has more than twice as many alcohol outlets per person as comparable big cities, according to statistics from local licensing authorities and the U.S. Census. Baltimore has one outlet for every 498 people; Philadelphia has one per 1,145 people, while Chicago has one per 1,129 people.

Elsewhere, cities are using their zoning powers to limit the location and practices of alcohol outlets within their borders. Baltimore is the only city in Maryland where the liquor board will not consider zoning violations as part of the license renewal process. A bill currently in the state legislature (H.B. 509), would give this power back to Baltimore City. Another current bill (H.B. 441), would give the city’s liquor board emergency powers to shut down problem outlets.

At a time when the city needs to be doing all it can to prevent more homicides, these are critical opportunities. For people living in Baltimore’s over-alcoholized neighborhoods, relief cannot come soon enough. As researchers, we have done our best to produce strong science to guide policy. Now it is up to the policy makers to take the next steps.

David H. Jernigan (dhjern@bu.edu) is a professor in the Department of Health Law, Policy and Management at the Boston University School of Public Health.