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Coping With Baltimore’s Murder Rate
Tiffany Fair and Tevon Chapman are struggling to keep their families safe as violent crime rises in Baltimore. They say the absence of police officers has made their neighborhood much more dangerous.
By Axel Gerdau on June 12, 2015.Photo by Todd Heisler/The New York Times.
BALTIMORE — From the steps of her New Bethlehem Baptist Church, the Rev. Lisa Weah looked down the block to the open-air drug market outside the bodega on the corner a few hundred feet away.
The traffic there had been slowing until the chaos that followed the death of Freddie Gray on April 19, after he was injured in police custody. Now it is back full-bore, and the police are often nowhere to be seen.
A month and a half after six officers were charged in Mr. Gray’s death, policing has dwindled in some of Baltimore’s most dangerous neighborhoods, and murders have risen to levels not seen in four decades. The totals include a 29-year-old man fatally shot on this drug corner last month. Police union officials say that officers are still coming to work, but that some feel a newfound reluctance and are stepping back, questioning whether they will be prosecuted for actions they take on the job.
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Around the nation, communities and police departments are struggling to adapt to an era of heightened scrutiny, when every stop can be recorded on a cellphone. But residents, clergy members and neighborhood leaders say the past six weeks have made another reality clear: that as much as some officers regularly humiliated and infuriated many who live here, angering gang members and solid citizens alike, the solution has to be better policing, not a diminished police presence.
“Without law enforcement, there is no order,” Pastor Weah said. “In truth, residents want a strong police force, but they also want accountability.” She said that she sympathized with many officers who did their jobs well but were now just as hated as the abusive officers, and that she prayed the spate of killings would be the shock that finally caused change.
“This crisis was bound to happen because of the broken relationship between law enforcement and the people,” she said. “When something gets this infected, you have to break it down and start from new.”
At least 55 people, the highest pace since the early 1970s, have been killed in Baltimore since May 1, when the state’s attorney for the city, Marilyn J. Mosby, announced the criminal charges against the officers. Victims of shootings have included people involved in criminal activity and young children who were simply in the wrong place.
A 9-year-old boy was shot in the leg over the Memorial Day weekend. Another boy, Kester Browne, 7, a Chinese-language student at an international school, was fatally shot along with his mother, Jennifer Jeffrey-Browne, 31. They were two of the city’s 42 homicide victims in May.
At the time of her announcement, Ms. Mosby’s charges were seen as calming the city. But they enraged the police rank and file, who pulled back. The number of arrests plunged, and the murder rate doubled in a month. The reduced police presence gave criminals space to operate, according to community leaders and some law enforcement officials.
The soaring violence has made Baltimore a battleground for political arguments about whether a backlash against police tactics has led to more killings in big cities like New York, St. Louis and Chicago, and whether “de-policing,” as academics call it, can cause crime to rise.
Still, the speed and severity of the police pullback here appear unlike anything that has happened in other major cities. And rather than a clear test case, Baltimore is a reminder of how complicated policing issues are and how hard it can be to draw solid conclusions from a month or two of crime and police response.
For example, police commanders here attribute the spike in violence in large part to a unique factor: a flood of black-market opiates stolen from 27 pharmacies during looting in April, enough for 175,000 doses now illegally available for sale.
They say drug gangs are now oversupplied with inventory from the looting, resulting in a violent battle for market share from a finite base of potential customers. Gangs sell a single OxyContin dose for $30, twice what they get for a dose of heroin, said Gary Tuggle, a former Baltimore police officer who was the head of the city’s Drug Enforcement Administration office until this month.
Police leaders acknowledge, though, that they do not yet know how many of the recent murders were drug-related. Mr. Tuggle also said he took issue with “this idea that the only reason for the rise in violence” is drugs.
A Portrait of the Sandtown Neighborhood in Baltimore
Freddie Gray lived in Sandtown-Winchester, a crime-ridden Baltimore neighborhood that has been depressed for decades.
“It’s hard to police effectively if you are only concerned about self-preservation,” he said. “If you are not challenging them because of the need for self-preservation, then these folks are likely going to go out and commit these crimes.”
Whether hostility from residents or police slowdowns lead to increases in crime is hotly debated among academics. David A. Harris, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh who studies police accountability, said increases were usually attributable to local circumstances, including the drug trade and gang rivalries.
Baltimore commanders say that their officers are engaged — making major arrests, conducting raids and taking weapons off the streets — but that basic police work is now more labor intensive. For instance, an officer interviewing witnesses may be surrounded by scores of onlookers with cellphone cameras.
Officials from the western Baltimore neighborhoods hardest hit by the spate of murders — including City Councilman Nick J. Mosby, who is married to Ms. Mosby, the state’s attorney — say commanders have also doubled the number of officers per cruiser for safety reasons.
“The visibility has significantly decreased,” Mr. Mosby said. While many people in his district want a larger police presence, he added, “you talk to others and they don’t even want to see a police officer.”
The crisis has also set the police commissioner — Anthony W. Batts, who took command three years ago after serving as police chief in Oakland and Long Beach, Calif. — between a city angry at the department’s posture toward many residents, and police union officials who suggest he does not fully support rank-and-file officers.
Tensions with the police union broke out into the open late last month, when Mr. Batts apologized emotionally to members for not preparing for unrest on the scale of April’s riot, which wounded more than 100 officers.
“I got my guys hurt, and I got to own that, and I stand tall behind that,” he told the union members. “That won’t happen again in this organization.
Healing the chasm between the police and western Baltimore is the job of a new commander, Capt. Sheree Briscoe, now acting major in charge of the three-square-mile district that sees much of the worst violence. After her appointment late last month, she moved quickly to bring community leaders into the fold, a new approach that has encouraged Pastor Weah and others.
Captain Briscoe promised that this was only the beginning of changes. “You cannot just attack the drug trade” alone, she said, citing deep-rooted social and economic challenges, and problems with things like trash, lighting and vacant homes, that needed to be “holistically” addressed.
Just as many community leaders say they need the police back, Captain Briscoe says residents need to be more involved with police planning. She said she intended to share more information and to include residents of the district in deciding police priorities.
“The direction that we’re going in now, the community is more a part of it,” she said. “They are going to be more a part of the process, as opposed to affected by the process.”
For now, the clergy members who fill much of the leadership vacuum in the city’s toughest neighborhoods have been the police’s main avenue to try to reconnect with angry and alienated residents.
But the problems in western Baltimore existed long before Mr. Gray’s death, and many of them go well beyond policing.
In Sandtown-Winchester, the nearly all-black district where Mr. Gray took his last steps a few blocks from Pastor Weah’s church, one in four children age 10 to 17 were arrested from 2005 to 2009, according to a report by the city’s Health Department. The neighborhood had twice as much poverty and unemployment as the rest of Baltimore, which is itself one of the nation’s poorest major cities.
Longtime residents say the recreation centers they remember going to after class have closed, creating more risk that young people will come under the sway of drug dealers.
“We emulated the guys who were best in pool, best in Ping-Pong, best in basketball,” said George Butler, 40, sitting in his barbershop near the scene of the worst rioting and looting in April. “And that counteracted the other guys we looked up to” — drug dealers.
Mr. Butler went to prison a decade ago for distributing heroin with a feared drug organization. But he wants the police back on the job.
With the force diminished, he said, criminals think, “I don’t have to worry about the police coming, so why not?”
Police assertiveness “is a gift and a curse,” Mr. Butler added. “To some extent, it keeps the violence down. But when they become overaggressive or abusive or combative to the citizens, then it causes them to be in an uproar.”
Just how much the Police Department changes may depend on the outcome of a Justice Department investigation into whether the force has used abusive patterns and practices against residents.
That inquiry may take a year or more, two Justice Department officials told about 20 residents who gathered last week at Sharon Baptist Church in Sandtown. At the meeting, residents described frustrations that ranged from the difficulty of finding affordable housing to humiliating police practices like strip- and cavity-searching men in full view of bystanders.
The police say there were 13 homicides in the first 11 days of June. One teenager outside the booming open-air drug market down the block from Pastor Weah’s church was not optimistic that the pace would slow.
“Summertime,” he said. “That’s when they do all the killing.”
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