To stop the killings, Baltimore needs more police data

As Baltimoreans seek to address the city’s out of control murder rate, they need more information as to what works and what does not. For example, there is considerable pressure for the Baltimore Police Department to put more police on the street in high crime areas, but the public has no information on the impact of X number of additional police on Y area for Z length of time on gun-related crime. Furthermore, it is unclear what these officers would otherwise be doing. For instance, are they homicide detectives? Do they investigate robberies, shootings or other violent crimes? Do they serve warrants?

What we do know is that the clearance rate for nonfatal shootings in Baltimore is less than 20 percent, and for murders, it hovers around 30 percent. Baltimore is well below the national clearance rate for murders, which is 60 percent, and even farther from where we were almost 20 years ago, when BPD reported a clearance rate for murder of 77 percent. We also know that the workload for detectives is one of the most critical factors that perpetuates the cycle of unsolved murders and that workloads are dramatically higher in Baltimore than in most other cities. Given current staffing at BPD, it is likely that the ratio of homicide cases to detectives is close to 10 to 1, rather than the recommended 5 to 1. In her book, “Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America,” Jill Leovy reported that because the clearance rate for shootings is so low in high poverty Los Angeles neighborhoods, residents resort to vigilante justice: “If the police won’t punish a shooter, then I will.”

In 2016, the BPD received an outside evaluation of its homicide division. That report was never made public, and, therefore, we do not know what was found or recommended. We also do not know what, if anything, was done to implement the recommendations.