18 United States The EconomistAugust 3rd 2019
2 sive force. In 2017 the department entered a
consent decree with a federal court requir-
ing it to reform.
Some members of the Baltimore police,
both former and current, claim that the
falling out with city leaders left them feel-
ing without support. So they pulled back,
they say—less often getting out of their
cars to attempt forceful, proactive enforce-
ment. “The idea of clearing the corner was
central to Baltimore,” says Peter Moskos, a
former patrol officer in the city who is now
a professor of criminology. “But cops said,
‘ok, if you don’t want us to clear the cor-
ners, we won’t’.” The data bear this out. In
the year before Gray’s death, police were
making 3,000 arrests a month. Since then,
arrests have dropped 36%.
But another explanation contends that
the more important shock to behaviour
after the unrest was not among the police
but among Baltimore’s residents. Events
like Gray’s death shake community trust—
meaning that co-operation with police in-
vestigations and even reporting of crimi-
nal offences drops.
In the aftermath of a highly publicised
incident in Milwaukee in 2004, when an
unarmed biracial man was severely beaten
by off-duty white cops, three sociologists
found that residents in black neighbour-
hoods were much less likely to call to re-
port crimes for up to a year afterwards. This
coincided with a significant spike in homi-
cides. In Baltimore, there are good reasons
to distrust the police. Last year federal
prosecutors convicted members of an elite
police squad, the Gun Trace Task Force, of
widespread corruption. Instead of taking
illegal guns off the streets, the unit planted
evidence on innocent civilians and robbed
drug-dealers and then resold the goods.
In this account of things, a frequent tar-
get of ire is Martin O’Malley, who was
mayor of the city from 1999 to 2007 before
becoming governor of Maryland, for his
policy of aggressive policing to deter viol-
ent crime. Mr O’Malley, who still lives in
the city, defends his record. He notes that
crime declined while he was in office, andthat the damning dojreport only exam-
ined conduct after 2010.
Mr O’Malley gives two reasons why the
city is “having to take the same real estate
twice”. First, “Baltimore stopped policing
the police. Stopped supervising, stopped
following up on citizen complaints of dis-
courtesy, excessive force and other things,”
he says. Second, the number of cops fell
from a high of 3,278 in 2002 to 2,514 today.
“One of the most violent cities in America
decided to cut its police force by about 25%,
and there wasn’t even a whimper of objec-
tion from the city council or any of the edi-
torial powers in town,” he says.
The riots “exposed that sort of soft un-
derbelly in the police department”, says Ja-
son Johnson, a former deputy commis-
sioner for the bpdfrom 2016 to 2018. “The
homicide department has barely enough
detectives to solve homicides. It was a kind
of awakening to the criminal underground
in Baltimore.” Shootings and homicides in-
creased, but there was no increase in the
number of detectives, nor any improve-
ments to antiquated technology or dilapi-
dated training headquarters.Catch a killer
In 2018 only 43% of homicide cases were
cleared. “When cases start to pile on top of
one another, you have more acts of vio-
lence that people are inclined to avenge,”
says Daniel Webster, a professor at Johns
Hopkins University who led a homicide re-
view for the city. Mr Webster argues that al-
though most people want more cops on the
beat, the real need is more resources for se-
rious investigations.
Compounding the problem in Balti-
more was a nationwide surge in demand
for illicit opioids. For decades, Baltimore
has had a serious heroin problem concen-
trated among poor black people. Today Bal-
timore has morphed into a drug destina-
tion. Officers and residents describe
middle-class teenagers and housewives
driving in from the suburbs to score drugs.
Mr Scott, the city council president, says hefinds it ironic that after decades of ignoring
heroin epidemics in predominately black
cities such as Baltimore, the rest of Ameri-
ca is now suffering.
Nobody really knows how many drug
users there are in Baltimore. The most reli-
able data come from the city morgue. In
2007, opioid overdoses claimed the lives of
256 Baltimoreans—four-fifths from her-
oin. By 2018, that number had more than
tripled to 814 deaths as fentanyl, an ex-
tremely potent synthetic opioid, supplant-
ed heroin. Baltimore has the highest opioid
fatality rate of any city in the country, twice
that of West Virginia, which is the worst-af-
fected state.
“Business is booming from the drug
dealers’ perspective,” says Mr Johnson, the
former deputy police commissioner. “And
in black-market business, competition
usually means violence.” Violent crime in
Baltimore, as in every city, involves a small
network of people and a clutch of city
blocks. Much of it revolves around the drug
trade, and avenging past deeds, whether
slights or slaughters. Of those murdered in
2018, 84% had previous arrest records—as
did 86% of the suspects.
The problems of crime and addiction
are difficult, but they should not be insur-
mountable. Sadly, Baltimore has endured
so much turbulence at its highest echelons
of power in recent years that new plans
have scarcely had time to be drafted. Since
Gray’s death, there have been five police
commissioners—some fell foul of the
mayor while others fell foul of the law. In
May the mayor herself, Catherine Pugh,
was forced to resign from office after a
scandal involving bulk purchases of her in-
sipid children’s book by companies who
did business with the city. She is the second
mayor to have to resign in a decade.
The next mayor will face huge chal-
lenges. “We are a city that doesn’t have a
transit system, we don’t have fast broad-
band, we have an ageing water system,”
says Seema Iyer of the University of Balti-
more. Vacant buildings depress property
values, provide places for criminals to hide
and scare off prospective businesses. The
city’s schools are decrepit. Having stabil-
ised at the time of Freddie Gray’s death, Bal-
timore’s population is now falling again.
It is tempting for lawmakers in Annapo-
lis, the state capital, and nearby Washing-
ton, to blame the city for its troubles. Cor-
ruption and poor policing are certainly
unforced errors. People of all political
stripes have high hopes for Michael Harri-
son, the freshly appointed police commis-
sioner from New Orleans, though he will
need longer than the now-customary one-
year term to change much. Still, many of
the forces buffeting Baltimore and its poor-
est residents are outside its control: history
weighs heavily. To dig itself out of its rut,
the city will need help. 7Shooting upSources:BaltimoreCityHealth
Department;Maryland
Department of Health*Deathsinvolvingmultiple
opioidscountedineachcategory
†First six months at an annual rateBaltimore, number of opioid deaths
By selected drug*202004006008001,2007 09 11 13 15 17 19†Total deathsHeroinFentanylPrescriptionopioidsFewerstops,moreshotSources:BaltimorePoliceDepartment;FBIBaltimore
Arrests,’000 Murdersper100,000people101020304050600204060801001201990 95 2000 05 10 15 18Martin O’Malley ’s
mayoraltyFreddie
Gray dies