Solutions to the Tragedy of Baltimore’s Violence Problem
/Solutions to the Tragedy of Baltimore’s Violence Problem
By: Leonard Sipes
I grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Baltimore. It was clean with good schools and relatively low crime. As a child, I was able to travel miles through adjacent neighborhoods on my bike without incident. Beginning at age 9, I hopped on a streetcar on my own to visit my meat cutter father at Baltimore’s famous Lexington Market, a trip of 10 miles. Fear of crime was minimal.
It all ended when a next-door neighbor screamed for help while being robbed. My father ran to his assistance and had a gun pointed at his head. He stood on our front porch roof and pointed out the assailants as police arrived. Within a month, he told us that we were moving to a rural area of Baltimore County.
After a progression from being a cop to going to college to being the senior specialist for crime prevention for the U.S. Department of Justice’s National Criminal Justice Reference Service, and then becoming the director of informational services for the National Crime Prevention Council, I became the director of public information for the Maryland Department of Public Safety for 14 years and was inserted into the crime discussion in Baltimore hundreds of times.
Crime and Cops
With a population of around 600,000, Baltimore ranked second in the country for homicide per capita in 2021. The murder rate in Baltimore is 58.27 per 100,000.
Baltimore Police officials have reported the department is down 455 sworn officers. In 2022, the department hired 103 new officers; however, 277 sworn officers left the department. Baltimore residents are complaining of a lack of a police presence. I’m told that hundreds of additional cops are contemplating leaving over a lack of support from residents and officials.
Critics
It takes a certain amount of audacity to make observations and suggestions about urban crime and violence. Criminologists will correctly tell you that there is no consensus as to urban crime, why it increases, and what we can do. There is little from the researchers at the U.S. Department of Justice as to a specific game plan. What I suggest will create strong disagreements and criticism. Regardless, there needs to be a strategy and a list of considerations. There needs to be a starting point that the U.S. Department of Justice is unwilling to provide.
Progressive Pundits and Commentators Will Say That Baltimore:
· Must address its social problems and income inequities through good schools, meaningful jobs, drug treatment and social services.
· Should embrace common-sense gun control.
· Must emphasize moderation as to the justice system. The city cannot arrest itself out of its crime problems. Incarceration simply exasperates social inequity.
· Needs prosecutors more in line with alternatives than harsh prosecutions and incarceration.
· Must back off of “failed” aggressive crime policies. Arrests and enforcement fall on mostly low-income people, further punishing the powerless.
· Needs to make its police officers community-oriented protectors rather than warriors.
· Must make its police department responsible for improving police-community relations and lowering crime.
· Should use former offenders as violence interrupters as a primary focus of crime control.
The result of these strategies has left the city I love as being world-renowned for violence and dysfunction. I watched a BBC television program where an actor was complaining about U.K. crime. Another stated with vigor, “Well, at least we’re not Baltimore.” Residents claim to live in war zones. Businesses and jobs are fleeing. School scores are abysmal. Poverty is climbing. People are leaving. Children are traumatized.
Yet well-funded and numerous progressive groups will insist that the way out remains economic and social development and social workers or former offenders acting as violence interrupters and cops who are protectors rather than warriors.
From a data-driven, methodologically sound, replicated (multiple research projects leading to a conclusion) point of view, there’s little evidence offered by the U.S. Department of Justice or any well-known independent research organization confirming any of the progressive policies above as being effective. National advocacy groups will tell you otherwise.
Understand that citizens control crime. This is criminology 101. Without citizens taking the lead, there is little law enforcement can do to establish a safe city.
Every community has the right to the kind of policing it wants; it’s why elected sheriff departments control many of the nation’s law enforcement agencies. Citizens voting for sheriffs get the right to express their views on their crime control policies every four years. Why shouldn’t this philosophy be extended to urban residents?
There are demands from citizens to city halls to “fix” crime problems. That’s not how it works. Every community should decide for itself what kind of policing it wants and to do the heavy lifting as to crime policies.
What Baltimore Needs to Realize:
· The city needs to dramatically increase police salaries and hire hundreds of additional police officers. Baltimore’s reputation for protest, progressive values and unsupportive citizens will be a challenge.
· The city needs to bring in paid, off-duty officers from other jurisdictions to supplement police numbers (if they are willing to come).
· The city needs to hire police officers based on a limited five-year time commitment like the military, with benefits after service.
· Every citizen needs to be supportive of the police officers who patrol their communities. There is nothing beyond the public’s support holding police officers in place. They don’t have to be in your community when they can easily transfer to jurisdictions wanting and embracing them and probably paying them more.
· The city needs to invest in innovative technologies (i.e., drones responding to all sounds of gunfire, putting all released from prison on GPS monitoring, shot spotters, facial recognition, DNA and rape kit analysis).
· There should be publicly available lists of current violent offenders (i.e., those on parole and probation) in communities.
· Hire prosecutors who will hold criminals accountable for most charges. It doesn’t mean jail or prison or parole and probation or even guilty verdicts for all, but accountability is a must to send the proper message. Note that traditionally, urban prosecutors dismiss charges for approximately 20-30 percent of arrests for a wide variety of reasons. The federal government can dismiss up to 50 percent depending on the category. Prosecutors have the power to dismiss charges and expunge records for minor crimes and for those without an extensive criminal history in exchange for community service.
· Hire retired cops to review unsolved crimes.
· Do podcasts and create blogs on unsolved crimes.
· Enlist the assistance of the true crime community to help solve unsolved crimes. Publicize their findings.
· The state should offer Baltimore drug and mental health treatment on demand. Citizens need to realize, however, that treatment strategies rarely work or work quickly and must be repeated multiple times, thus becoming very expensive.
· Parole and probation agents are underutilized resources. They know who the criminals are and what they are doing. They should be embedded with law enforcement daily. City police officers should have a computerized system where they can poll parole and probation agents daily as to possible suspects.
· There needs to be weekly or monthly polling of Baltimore communities as to their perceptions of policing and crime and suggestions as to what the city could do. Results should be published immediately and analyzed over time.
· There should be numerous apps or text messages or anonymous crime reporting opportunities.
· Child abuse and neglect is the primary root cause of crime and violence. Baltimore through the state needs to create social workers and nurses to intervene early for family and child welfare.
· Bail reform should have provisions as to the level of violence involved and the offender’s criminal history. If you beat your wife with a frying pan and have physically assaulted her several times, you have lost your right to presumed release without bail.
· The state should fund a victim and witness protection program to make sure that people can safely report what they know.
In conclusion, the citizens of the city of Baltimore need to understand that they control crime, not the police department or any other aspect of the justice system. Without personal involvement in keeping communities clean and orderly and without setting community standards for what’s acceptable behavior, crime control will not happen.
People may suggest that I ignored the root causes of crime beyond child abuse. There are correlates of crime like poverty or drug use that cannot be easily remediated. But I am unaware of any jurisdiction in the country that was able to eliminate social and economic inequities.
But regardless, what I suggest remains valid. The city needs to hold offenders accountable. Citizens need to take control of their communities. Proactive policing needs to return. Citizens need to openly support law enforcement officers and make them feel welcome in their communities. Citizens need to decide for themselves the kind of law enforcement they want or are willing to tolerate.
Without citizens and communities taking the lead, and without sufficient funding, the unbelievably high rates of violence in Baltimore and elsewhere will continue for decades to come.
Leonard Adam Sipes, Jr.is a retired federal senior spokesperson. A former Adjunct Associate Professor of Criminology and Public Affairs - University of Maryland. Former advisor to the “McGruff-Take a Bite Out of Crime” national media campaign. Past police officer. Aspiring drummer. Operator of CrimeinAmerica.net. His book based on thirty-five years of criminal justice public relations,” Success with the Media: Everything You Need to Survive Reporters and Your Organization” is available at Amazon and additional booksellers. He can also be found @ leonardsipes.com
