Bates hopes to stop bleeding in Baltimore

“An average of 333 residents have been murdered each year in Baltimore since Marilyn Mosby took office in 2015. During the four years prior, when Gregg Bernstein was the State’s Attorney, Baltimore averaged 215 homicides. This constitutes a 55% increase in homicides during Marilyn Mosby’s [two] terms.”

That’s how Ivan Bates, Mosby’s challenger in the June Democratic primary, opens his appeal to city voters in a “prosecution plan” he released the other day.

Though tempting — because gun violence has increased all over the country, and because Baltimore has had, shall we say, “lots of issues” since 2015 — it’s hard to dismiss his line of attack as unfairly simplistic. Besides, it’s the same line Mosby used on Bernstein when she challenged him in 2014, though the annual increases in homicides were far smaller during his time than during hers.

I’ve said this before: Blaming a prosecutor for the rate of murders in a city is like blaming the chief of surgery for the rate of heart disease. But I won’t make that comparison again because, on reflection, it’s not a good one. A prosecutor is, in fact, partly responsible for the rate of violence in any municipality. Unless violent people are held accountable — that is, not merely accused of crimes, but deftly prosecuted under the law and subject to punishment certain by the judiciary — where is the deterrent to more crime?

So Bates has a point, and numbers do not lie. The rate of homicides alone — with an even higher rate in the first two months of this year — should provide sufficient argument against another term for Mosby.

Still, in his second attempt to unseat her,

Bates knows the homicide numbers might not be enough to convince voters to make a change, thus his comprehensive prosecution plan. There are many facets to it, perhaps to the point of over-promise, but his primary focus is a hard line on gun crimes. “Gun crimes, no leniency,” Bates told me in a phone call a couple of weeks ago. “Illegal gun possession will mean jail time,” declares his campaign literature. “There are simply too many shootings and murders to take a different approach.”

A major problem, he says, is this: Too many gun charges don’t stick; they’re either tossed as part of a plea bargain or dismissed altogether. Bates’ source for that is the same one I cited in this column a couple of years ago — a report from the Center for Gun Policy and Research at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The report found that, out of 10,600 cases involving gun charges, between May 2015 through May 2019, only 40% resulted in convictions, guilty pleas or a defendant being placed on probation for having or using an illegal gun.

The Hopkins researchers couldn’t determine why the remainder of charges were dropped or defendants were found not guilty, and the report noted that such detailed information is

“not routinely shared with police or the public.”

The issue of felony charges being dropped is a sore point with Baltimore residents, who have the perception that too many accused offenders get off easily, or that cases just disappear in the grind of court dockets. It came up in focus groups during the Hopkins study: Nearly 80% of residents of highcrime areas said they were worried about the number of illegal guns in their neighborhoods while 90% said they wanted to know the outcomes from gun arrests. The report recommended that the Baltimore State’s Attorney Office share that information, and Bates says he intends to create an interactive map to allow citizens to follow cases neighborhood by neighborhood.

It’s not only gun cases that need more scrutiny. Page Croyder, a retired Baltimore prosecutor and Mosby critic, looked at 429 felony cases of all kinds from last August and September and found a conviction rate of 72%, with all but 11 cases ending with plea bargains. “Plea bargaining is a necessary practice to move a volume of cases through a crowded criminal justice system,” Croyder wrote in a summary of her analysis. “But what kinds of deals are being made, and which cases are worth going to trial for to get a better result?”

Based on what Croyder found in sentencing of defendants who struck deals with Mosby’s staff, she concluded that “Baltimore prosecutors, working in a city rife with violent crime, are extremely lenient.”

That’s Bates’ assessment when it comes to gun cases. So he’s advocating a special court and a team of prosecutors to handle them. “Swiftly addressing gun crimes with immediate and certain consequences is paramount to reducing gun violence,” Bates says, echoing the Hopkins report. “Gun carrying criminals … will not have to wait a long time for trial as a result of inexperienced and unprepared prosecutors.”

Bates says he’ll refer some gun cases to the

U.S. Attorney’s Office and work closely with federal prosecutors. (Not being under federal indictment, as Mosby is, will probably make that easier.) Bates also wants to see Baltimore gun offenders under more intense scrutiny, requiring those released from incarceration to report to a probation officer more often than currently required.

Another promise: Hiring of staff to track and explain why certain gun charges are dropped so that police and prosecutors can learn from mistakes and make better cases.

Bates is a determined candidate for an important office in our gun-infested city. Everyone should read his plan.