Baltimore City law enforcement and the state and federal agencies that work with them deserve a big thank you from Marylanders. They have helped to make the city a safer place for everyone in the past year.
Murder is way down from last year ? 85 as of Tuesday compared with 134 at the same time last year, a 37 percent drop. That figure is nothing to be satisfied with. According to FBI statistics released Monday, the city is the third-most violent large city in the country. But it?s progress ? last year it ranked second. Beyond the 156,000 workers who commute in from the counties, every resident of this region has a direct interest in the future of Baltimore as the economic engine of our future.
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We all need to make sure these latest data become a trend.
In an interview with The Examiner on Tuesday, U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein called the decline in violent crime “tremendous” and said, “It doesn?t appear to be a fluke.”
He said it vindicates the strategy used by local law enforcement of targeting the most dangerous offenders and taking them off the streets because a small percentage of criminals commit an outsize proportion of violent crime. “A lot of those people … are not on the streets,” he said. “They are locked up.”
The success also shows the power of consistent leadership under Police Commissioner Frederick Bealefeld as officers have little incentive to do their job if they think their leader may be gone in a few months.
The collaboration among local, state and federal law enforcement on Project Exile also has helped make Baltimore safer. The program, launched in 2006, exists to put felons who carry guns in Baltimore in prison and uses the threat of federal prosecution, with its high conviction rates and often longer sentences compared with state cases, to deter criminal behavior.
While we recognize the achievements of Bealefeld and his colleagues in state and federal law enforcement agencies, making Baltimore safer can not only be about locking up violent offenders. We need to catch those who would turn violent before they do or before they are too old to change. That means, as Rosenstein said, intervening in their lives through after-school programs and tutoring before high school, which many offenders never attend.
Illiteracy makes it impossible to find a job, even for those who don?t want to choose the streets.
While knowledge and opportunity are the best long-term solutions to violent crime, they don?t stand a chance if immediate solutions fail to stop that social cancer from crippling communities.
Statistics show our local, state and federal law enforcement officials are finding solutions and applying them effectively. We should do more than just praise them. We must give them our support.
