Baltimore hopes weekend ‘cease-fire’ curbs violence
BALTIMORE — After the deaths of nearly 20 friends and relatives, Erricka Bridgeford said she wanted to take a stand against Baltimore’s worst wave of deadly violence in a generation.
It was with that sense of urgency that the community mediation trainer and other activists decided to organize a grass-roots “cease-fire” to stop the killings, at least for 72 hours, starting early Friday morning.
“We want to purposefully just have a pause and a sacred space where everybody’s intention is that nobody gets killed,” Bridgeford said.
The cease-fire has the support of gang leaders, drug dealers and others linked to the violence, she said.
The slogan selected by organizers gets straight to the point: “Nobody kill anybody.”
That immediate goal is ambitious, given the spotty response to the last Baltimore cease-fire, when two people died in May on Mother’s Day weekend.
As a consequence, there is plenty of skepticism in the city, where rioting broke out in 2015 over the death of a black man in police custody.
Even so, the organizers hope Maryland’s largest city can take a first, tentative step in changing a culture that has fueled one of the highest homicide rates in the United States.
So far this year, there have been 206 homicides in Baltimore, putting it on a pace to break the record of 353 in 1993.
T.J. Smith, a Baltimore police spokesman whose own brother was shot to death last month, said the department backed the cease-fire as a grassroots effort to curb violence.
He blamed the trend on repeat offenders caught up in the drug trade, gang rivalries and other disputes.
But retiree Todd Douglas sounded a note of skepticism.
“They’ll just wait and make up for lost time,” Douglas said.