You Don't Need More Cops, Hon

Baltimore City has just shown that there are better ways to fight crime than to hire more cops.

Gee, hoocoodanode?  (Spoiler, everyone whose agenda was not an excuse to have armed men abuse people of color)

So many pro-police lawmakers and city officials have always insisted the only way to bring down crime rates is to add more cops to the mix. This may work if you’re mainly interested in racking up meaningless arrests or handing out “broken windows” citations, but it doesn’t address why certain areas have higher crime rates. (And it doesn’t even work then, as Baltimore itself has already demonstrated.)

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Baltimore has long held a top-level position on lists of annual homicides or per capita crime rates — aspects that have been converted to canon by series like “The Wire,” along with cops’ predilection for corruption and routine rights violations.

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But homicide isn’t a problem you can solve with irrational hate and being bigoted on main. The Baltimore PD has already tried that and it hasn’t worked, no matter how often it plants evidence, brutalizes residents, or otherwise ignores constitutional rights.

The murder rate continues to drop in Baltimore. And while that does track with post-pandemic trends around the nation, something different is going on in this city, which suggests the current downturn may well develop into an ongoing trend.

What’s different in Baltimore is that it’s addressing underlying causes of crime, rather than just reacting to crime’s often-violent outcomes with more cops and rights violations. Rebecca Crosby and Noel Sims have dug into the stats, as well as the circumstances behind them, to explain why Baltimore’s murder rate is more sustainable than just throwing more cops at the problem. 

This April, Baltimore saw five homicides. That is the fewest of any month since 1970, when the city began tracking monthly homicide numbers. In the first six months of the year, homicides were down 22% compared to 2024, and non-fatal shootings were down 19%. This is the latest in a string of historic declines in violent crime. In 2024, homicides dropped 23% from 2023 numbers, and non-fatal shootings dropped 34%. In 2023, the city also saw record-breaking decreases.

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Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott (D), who was first elected in 2020, has brought the city’s homicide rate down by treating violent crime as a public health crisis. That means treating violent crime as a symptom of multiple factors, including racism, poverty, and past violence.

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In January 2022, MONSE [Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement] launched the Group Violence Reduction Strategy (GVRS). The strategy, launched in partnership with the Baltimore Police Department and the State’s Attorney’s Office, utilizes a collaboration between law enforcement, community members, and social services to “engag[e] directly with those most intimately involved in and affected by violence.” The GVRS aims to target the root causes of gun violence, such as poverty, mental health, and housing issues, by matching participants with a life coach. Participants are also provided with financial support while they seek employment.

The GVRS has delivered results. As of February 2024, the program had a recidivism rate of only 4.3%. An evaluation by the University of Pennsylvania’s Crime and Justice Policy Lab found that the GVRS significantly reduced violence in the city’s Western District, where the program was initially implemented. “[D]uring the first 18 months of implementation,” there was “a 33% approximate gun violence reduction, 60 fewer victims, and a 33% approximate carjacking reduction,” according to the study.

The task force and its implementation program never decided the problem wasn’t enough cops flooding these areas. Instead, it addressed a lot of underlying causes of violence and worked towards fixing those, rather than assuming this was something that just could be forced into submission via the application of even more violence.

Mindlessly punitive policies do not work.  They make the problems worse and cost more money, but too many people want to play the "Hit the n****er" game.

BTW, that game is real, and used human beings as targets.