Why change mayors when crime declining?
The two high-profile issues Brandon Scott faced as he became mayor in late 2020 were violent crime (shootings and homicides) and the squeegee guys. There were other issues — many related to bringing Baltimore, especially downtown business, out of the pandemic — but crime and squeegee hysteria made the most noise.
Four years later, as Scott seeks a second term in City Hall, he’s made undeniable progress on both those fronts.
He called for a community collaboration on the squeegee problem: Too many kids at busy intersections, some of them intimidating commuters, creating an angry swirl of complaints that squeegee workers were scaring away visitors as businesses tried to recover from the pandemic.
Where are we now? Some of the squeegee guys are still around; there have been spikes in 911 calls about them as we come into spring. But the hysteria has died down along with the volume of complaints. Weekly reports from the mayor’s office show careful tracking of squeegee workers and the city’s continuing efforts to get them off the streets and into jobs. The Scott administration deserves credit for trying to holistically solve a problem that critics held up as evidence of municipal dysfunction.
As for crime, here are
numbers on the mostwatched categories: Homicides and non-fatal shootings.
Starting in 2015, the year Marilyn Mosby became Baltimore State’s Attorney and Freddie Gray’s death in police custody sparked an uprising and calls for police reforms, the annual count of deaths soared above 300 and stayed there for eight dreary years.
Last year, the numbers finally fell.
Midway through 2023, there were 25 fewer homicides than at the same point in 2022. The trend held over the next six months, and Baltimore finished 2023 with 262 homicides, 72 fewer than the year before. There were still too many non-fatal shootings, 640 of them, but that was
47 fewer than 2022’s total.
So far this year, the downward trend in violence continues. As of Wednesday, Baltimore police had reported 52 homicides, 20 fewer than at this point in 2023. There have been 27 fewer shootings, too.
Scott should get most of the credit for this. Baltimoreans have historically assigned credit (or blame) for the downward (or upward) trends in crime to the sitting mayor and his chosen police commissioner.
But, while Scott put a heavy focus on building what he calls an anti-violence ecosystem that includes intervening in the lives of people most likely to shoot or be shot, there are a lot of players involved
in that effort: Roca, Safe Streets, the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the federal law enforcement agencies, the Maryland Attorney General’s staff and the State’s Attorney’s Office.
Regarding the latter, I noted late last year that local prosecutors, under the leadership of Ivan
Bates in his first 11 months as state’s attorney, had secured 125 guilty verdicts or pleas in homicide cases. They finished the year with 136 convictions. That was significantly ahead of the total for 2022, Mosby’s last year in office, when there were 93 guilty verdicts or pleas.
“In Baltimore, [125] is a big number of people who are going to get 30 years to life,” Bates said in a November interview. “Those are
the individuals that were doing some sort of violence to someone and now are taken off the street.”
So Bates also deserves some credit for the downward trend in violence. Baltimoreans who voted for him should be pleased. Fewer people are being shot and killed within the city limits.
And yet, Bates apparently thinks that, in the midst of these positive trends, we need to switch mayors.
He endorsed Sheila Dixon, one of Scott’s opponents in next month’s Democratic primary.
In political terms, he’s just returning a favor; Dixon endorsed Bates for state’s attorney in 2022.
But, instead of leaving it at that — a personal obligation — he took a shot at
Scott, suggesting that the mayor wasn’t much of a “partner” in the crime fight even as he and the mayor appear to be gaining significant ground in that fight.
A couple of thoughts about that: Prosecutors should stay clear of endorsing political candidates. It’s just not a good look; it could potentially create conflicts. In this case, it seems particularly weird: The city’s chief prosecutor endorses for mayor a person who resigned that same office in disgrace in 2010.
Plus, there’s the continuity thing. Unless corrupt or breathtakingly incompetent, a Baltimore mayor, having taken on the toughest job in Maryland, should get at least two terms to achieve a big goal — reducing crime, cutting property taxes or attracting more businesses and residents. If Dixon is successful in her fourth run for mayor, she would be Baltimore’s seventh in 18 years, not an enviable record for any city.
As for the mayor and the city’s chief prosecutor being “partners,” pardon my circumspection. Certainly we want the police, under the heavy influence of the mayor, to work closely with prosecutors to get criminals off the streets, and that appears to be what’s happening, so what’s the problem? Bates and Scott do not have to form a “partnership.” They have separate responsibilities and answer to voters separately.
And that’s as it should be. You never know: One day down the road, the Baltimore State’s Attorney might have reason to investigate the mayor of Baltimore. I mean, it’s not like it never happened.