How to treat the insanity of city shootings
This is Baltimore, where idiots with guns shoot people mourning people shot with guns. Monday night in West Baltimore, someone opened fire on a group gathered on North Avenue for a candlelight vigil for Jermaine Scofield, one of the city’s weekend homicide victims. Five people were wounded.
We saw the same insanity last October in the Cedonia neighborhood of Northeast Baltimore. More than 100 people, including children, had gathered on Moores Run Drive to mourn 21-year-old Damien Best. At a candlelight vigil in front of Best’s home, shots rang out as people prayed. Only one person was wounded that time.
Tempting as it is to see shooting up a vigil as a new form of Baltimore depravity — because everyday street shootings are so common — we’ve seen this act before. It’s outrageous. It’s depressing. It’s not novel.
Where are we today? As of Tuesday, there had been 150 homicides across the city since Jan. 1. In 2015, a record year for violence in Baltimore, there were 344 homicides, the kind of number we had not seen since the crack-infested 1990s.
At the current pace, we again would come close to a 300-homicide year. While that would be an improvement over 2015, you’re still left shaking your head at all this loss of life, the pain inflicted on families, the scars left on the city’s psyche.
The scarring is real. There’s probably no measure for it, but it’s there — in the neighborhoods where people die from gunshots, in the minds of children who live closest to the shooting, in the hearts of parents who bury murdered sons and daughters.
The shooting deaths of strangers affect all of us. Baltimoreans live with greater fear and caution, with the depressing knowledge that, as good as life can be here, it is diminished by the endless violence within our borders.
People often say, “I’m just numb to it, can’t even think about it anymore.” And I know the feeling.
But the danger in complacency is that we all come to accept violence as part of life here, part of the culture, something in the city’s bones.
We can’t do that. If you live here and care about the city, whether your home is in Canton or Coppin Heights, Fells Point or Forest Park, you have to pay attention and ask questions.
Is every resource going into a wise strategy of targeted law enforcement?
More specifically, are police and prosecutors doing what police and prosecutors did in the years leading up to 2011, when the number of homicides dropped below 200 for the first time in decades?
Starting in 2006, police, city and federal prosecutors and probation agents identified a relatively small number of repeat offenders on parole who resided in historically crimeplagued neighborhoods, summoned them to face-to-face meetings and warned them about the harsh penalties they faced if they violated the conditions of their parole.
Between 2006 and 2012, murders dropped 30 percent, shootings fell 40 percent and adult arrests went down 43 percent. There were 197 homicides in 2011.
This approach was similar to the foundational model of Operation Ceasefire, which got off to a rocky start after Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake brought it to the city in 2014. According to the mayor’s spokesman, Anthony McCarthy, the project is finally achieving some success in reducing homicides and nonfatal shootings in the Western and Eastern police districts. These are the most effective strategies. Murder convictions are a worthy goal, but they are not always possible. And they might be overrated as a means of reducing overall crime.
“The challenge for law enforcement agencies is that it is not possible to convict most killers on murder charges,” Rod Rosenstein, the U.S. attorney for Maryland, wrote in The Baltimore Sun last year. “Almost 2,500 people were murdered in Baltimore City during the past decade, and nearly 5,000 victims suffered nonfatal gunshots. Most of the perpetrators will never be convicted of those crimes.”
Rosenstein argues that prosecuting violent criminals on lesser charges is a time-tested strategy for reducing violence across the city. Getting bad guys for carrying guns illegally — and the Baltimore police have ramped up that effort significantly this year — gets them off the street. Off the street, they no longer contribute to violence; we have a safer city, one felon at a time.
But this only works if it is sustained — not dropped with a change in command in City Hall or the state’s attorney’s office — and only with targeted enforcement, a clear message of severe consequences for repeated offenses, and cooperation between police and prosecutors.
That last bit — cooperation between police and prosecutors — should be of concern to every Baltimorean who wants to see this city emerge from its current tailspin.