Maybe you noticed the headline in Sunday’s Examiner: “City ends 2008 with 234 killings, lowest in 20 years.” Is it just me, or does such a headline leave a jarring effect beyond the obvious?
The first part sounds almost like a boast, like one of those old McDonald’s billboards: “Over 6 Billion Burgers Sold.” But, just when you’re shaking your head in disbelief comes the second part: Oh, yeah, we’re actually talking about a low number. We’re murdering each other at a slower pace than we have in years.
Swell.
You live here long enough, you get accustomed to reading about the mayhem. But Sunday’s story, by the Examiner’s Luke Broadwater, and the accompanying killing-by-killing breakdown of the year’s first six months, leaves you with a choice: Turn the page, or wonder what in the world can be changed to end the slaughter?
In those first six months of 2008, there were 105 homicides – and 21 of the victims were teenagers, and a lot more were barely out of their teens. Who’s shooting all these young people? Well, it isn’t a bunch of octogenarians sitting on their rocking chairs.
So you go to some old law enforcement contacts, and you ask the familiar question: What can be done? And you get the familiar answer:
Nothing.
Not as long as there are parents who have abdicated all responsibility for raising their kids, and giving them no moral values. Not as long as there’s poverty so deep, and so ingrained, that people – especially young people – realize they’ve been locked out of the economic game, and so create an economy of their own, which is based on the trafficking of drugs.
“Remember the war on drugs?” one law enforcement guy was saying Monday afternoon. “That war’s been lost long ago.”
But I’ll tell you when we lost a big part of it, because I was there when it happened. Kurt Schmoke was the new mayor of Baltimore, and he was perceived as the future. He was young, he was smart, and he had a bold new approach to drugs: Stop locking up users. Open up treatment centers, handle their addictions medically. Here was the future, and here in Baltimore we had the guy who was going to enlighten the whole country.
The big moment came on national television, on Ted Koppel’s old “Nightline” show on ABC-TV. Schmoke arrived at WJZ, where I was working at the time. WJZ was then an ABC affiliate. They sat Schmoke down in the newsroom, and they wired him to Koppel in New York, and Schmoke laid out his plan.
Or, part of it, anyway.
Then Koppel brought in Charles Rangel, the New York congressman with the voice like brass bands. Rangel did a few things. He talked louder than Schmoke, and faster and incessantly. And he ridiculed the idea, right there on national TV, and made it sound as if Schmoke were trying to empty the nation’s prisons, give a pass to drug dealers, and open the floodgates to universal, decriminalized drug trafficking.
That night seemed to take the wind out of Schmoke’s passion. He was in office for more than another decade, but he never sounded the trumpet call with the same bravado as he had before that night.
And the debate went away, and this futile war goes on as before, and it fuels not just the homicides but the great majority of all street crime across the country.
In Sunday’s Examiner, Mayor Sheila Dixon told Broadwater, “You could have police officers on every corner, and people would still go after other people. We really need to get to the root of it. What causes someone to go after someone else out in public and care so little about the loss of life?”
The mayor’s right. The homicides are beyond the power of police – and so is a lot of the narcotics traffic behind it. We delude ourselves to think otherwise. As long as there’s profit in drugs – and little profit elsewhere in so many impoverished neighborhoods – this is where our thin veneer of civility gets stripped away.
Societies change. We all know what happened during Prohibition: Much of the nation laughed at the laws outlawing alcohol – and this helped create entire crime syndicates that hadn’t previously existed.
And we also remember a time when certain kinds of gambling were outlawed – such as the three-digit number. This, too, created a so-called criminal class. And then entire states realized the money to be made on the number, and created legalized lotteries.
The time has come for another look at changing the drug laws. The alternative is more headlines like Sunday’s, where we count up 234 killings and tell ourselves this is an improvement instead of an ongoing insanity.
