Ken Berwitz
Blood was shed in Baltimore at an unprecedented pace in2015, with mostly young, black men shot to death in a near-daily crush ofviolence.
On a per-capitabasis, the year was the deadliest ever in the city. The year\’s tally of 344homicides was second only to the record 353 in 1993, when Baltimore had about100,000 more residents.
The killings were on pace with recent years in the earlymonths of 2015 but skyrocketed after the unrest and rioting of lateApril. In five of the next eight months, killings topped 30 or 40 a month.
Nearly 90 percent ofthe year\’s homicides were the result of shootings, renewing calls for new gunlaws. Counting nonfatal shootings, gun violence was up more than 75 percentcompared to last year, with more than 900 people shot.
Beyond the homicides and shootings, other crime also spiked.Robbery jumped 16 percent, burglary 11 percent, aggravated assault 6 percentand automobile theft 21 percent, according to year-over-year data throughmid-December.Arrests plummetedimmediately following the unrest, and some officers said they were afraid to dotheir jobs given the charges filed against their peers in Gray\’s death,according to the police union.
-Freddie Gray\’s death has been – correctly, in my view – cited as the catalyst for the surge in Baltimore\’s crime rate. Why? Because it was immediately dubbed a racial killing, police were immediately tagged as racist killers, and, therefore, aggressive police enforcement, instead of being a deterrent to crime, became a police officer\’s career decision.The fact that half the police officers accused in Freddie Gray\’s death are Black – as was the Police Commissioner and the Mayor? Irrelevant\’n\’immaterial. In today\’s climate, if a racial incident can be concocted, even in a situation like this, that\’s what is going to happen.-The renewed calls for new gun laws, while sounding good, has nothing to do with gun crime that is committed with illegally obtained guns. In this and many other articles, it is pointed out that the preponderance of gun crime is the result of drug and gang activity (very often one and the same). How many legal guns do you figure are in the hands of gang members and drug dealers? What new drug laws are being proposed that will cause gang members and drug dealers to mitigate their use of guns? While I am not at all against strict gun control laws, I – and, I hope, you – recognize that making it harder to get a gun legally has virtually no relevance to what is going on in the mean streets of Baltimore.-Elsewhere in the article, it is noted that “More than 90 percent of the homicide victims this year wereboys or men, more than 90 percent were black, and more than half were betweenthe ages of 18 and 30 – reflecting an urban reality that residents and civilrights activists say is devoid of legitimate job opportunities and caught up inthe often-violent drug trade”.I have no doubt that these are legitimate points. But what would any reasonable person expect? Baltimore has a disastrous education system with the vast majority of its students – the ones who didn\’t drop out altogether – even modestly proficient in reading or math, it has violent, crime-ridden streets, gangs running entire neighborhoods…and a one-party government, which happens to be the same party under which it devolved into its current situation.Would you be quick to open a business there?
