TheEconomistAugust 3rd 2019 171A
t seven inthe morning on July 15th,
David Caldwell, a 52-year-old phlebot-
omist, was shot and killed in the metha-
done clinic on Maryland Avenue where he
worked. A little more than halfway through
the year, he was the 181st person killed in
the city of Baltimore—and the 161st killed
by a gun. It was a grisly scene. The suspect-
ed shooter, a 49-year-old man demanding
methadone, was shot dead in the standoff
with police. One officer was also shot,
though he is expected to survive.
Based on historic patterns, Baltimore is
on track to have 358 murders by the end of
the year. It could exceed the tally in New
York—a city with 14 times as many people.
The number has passed 300 every year
since 2015. That spring Freddie Gray, a 25-
year-old black man, died in police custody,
and the city exploded in protest. Rioting
and looting tore up the city’s poorest neigh-
bourhoods; Victorian row houses were lit
by the glow of flames.
It does not appear to have recovered
since. “Unfortunately all the cameras have
gone, but the socioeconomic plight of the
community has remained,” says Nick Mos-
by, a Maryland state delegate who was the
city councilman for Sandtown-Winches-
ter, the west Baltimore neighbourhood
where Freddie Gray lived. It is 96% black;
median household income is merely
$25,000 and a third of the buildings are va-
cant or abandoned. It is a place where peo-
ple buy their groceries in liquor stores pro-tected by bulletproof glass. “Whether it’s
west Baltimore or north Philadelphia, ur-
ban blight looks like urban blight and it’s as
American as apple pie,” says Mr Mosby.
What beset Baltimore? Left-leaning ac-
tivists explain the city’s slump by pointing
to the legacy of historic segregation—the
city pioneered the use of restrictive cove-
nants to prevent blacks from moving to
good neighbourhoods—and generations of
concentrated poverty, racist policing,
crumbling infrastructure and failing
schools. All this is true. But none has wors-
ened enough recently to explain the dra-
matic rise in crime since Gray’s death.
“When I think of April 2015, I think about
the straw that broke the camel’s back,” says
Brandon Scott, the 35-year-old president of
the city council. Something else must have
happened.
The most prominent candidate-theo-
ries focus on the police. The Baltimore Po-
lice Department (bpd) had to change after
the unrest—its relationship with the com-
munity was in a shambles. Marilyn Mosby,
the state’s attorney for Baltimore (who is
also married to Mr Mosby, the delegate),
charged the six officers involved with
Gray’s death—but none was convicted. A
scathing report from the Department of
Justice (doj) extensively documented a
pattern of racial discrimination and exces-Baltimore
City on the brink
BALTIMORE
Four years after the death of Freddie Gray, Charm City cannot catch a break
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