Baltimore City resident David Briggs has the tendency to come across as, well, bitter. But who can blame him? The 43-year-old has been shot at, assaulted, stabbed in the head, robbed, mugged and burglarized in the 25 years since he moved from New York to Charm City.
The owner of several small area businesses and properties estimates he?s the victim of violent or property crime about 35 times a year.
“My mother keeps calling me and saying, ?When are you going to get the hell out of there?? ” he said. “I?m a very stubborn man. I?m stupidly stubborn.”
But Briggs, a local blogger and community activist, said residents in certain areas of Baltimore shouldn?t have to live in fear. They just need more police officers.
“This should be a great place,” he said from his Greenmount Avenue store, where he sells flowers and other funeral items. “But there are certain things that need to be done. We have to have a reasonably adequate level of policing. That way, residents can feel unintimidated. When residents feel unintimidated, they feel more comfortable cooperating with police.”
Briggs, who holds public systems analysis degrees from Johns Hopkins University, points to statistics and studies that almost uniformly show a decrease in crime whenever more officers are added to a police department.
“If you take our numbers of murders and compare it to the country?s number of sworn police officers, we should have about 7,500 police officers in Baltimore,” Briggs said.
University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt estimates each 1 percent increase in the size of the police force reduces crime by about 1 percent.
“An increase in the number of police, regardless of new strategies, has been proven to reduce crime,” Levitt wrote in his best-selling book Freakonomics.
|
RELATED ARTICLES |
Last February, Baltimore Police Commissioner Leonard Hamm publicly told North Baltimore residents he wants to expand his approximately 3,200-member force to 4,000.
But the police department has continued to operate with about 3,000 sworn officers, leaving close to 200 budgeted positions unfilled.
Baltimore Police spokesman Matt Jablow said the department is doing its best to recruit officers.
“Of course, we?d like more officers,” he said. “But we have to make do with what we have. It?s a problem nationwide recruiting police officers. We?ve gone all over the area. We?ve gone to Puerto Rico. We are aggressively recruiting.”
Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon, along with Hamm, is now conducting a staffing review of the police department, her spokesman Anthony McCarthy said, adding there should be announcements regarding police staffing coming in the near future.
“The mayor?s office is doing a top to bottom review of our current status and projecting into the future where we need to be,” he said.
