by Megan Kenny and Brandon Soderberg
Data analysis by Megan Kenny
Illustrations by Evangeline Gallagher

On the heels of 2023, a year when Baltimore’s annual homicide number significantly declined for the first time in nearly a decade, the Baltimore Police held a press conference to celebrate what public officials and the Department of Justice called “a significant milestone.”

That early 2024 “milestone”: two of the many reforms required by the federal consent decree—the result of a civil rights investigation following the 2015 police killing of Freddie Gray—were recently completed to the approval of the Department of Justice. These completed reforms are related to transporting people in police custody and “officer support and wellness practices.”

At the press conference, City Solicitor Ebony Thompson suggested that 2023’s violence reduction was the result of these reforms. “This milestone is occurring at a time when the city is achieving a recent and historic reduction in violent crime,” Thompson said, calling the reforms “a testament to the effectiveness of constitutional and community focused policing.”

Another way of looking at this “milestone”: over the previous seven years, only around 5% of the consent decree-mandated reforms have been completed. Following the 2015 death of Freddie Gray, a Department of Justice civil rights investigation revealed a staggering pattern and practice of civil rights violations and discriminatory policing. As a result of that investigation, the Baltimore Police Department entered into a federal consent decree in April 2017. Seven years later, the most significant elements of the consent decree, regarding police misconduct (including use of force), have barely even begun. WYPR reported that “about 15% of the decree hasn’t been touched yet.”

This means the claim being made, really, is that murders have declined because police are reducing the number of “rough rides” and also receiving more wellness support—a specious connection, and an example of how reform is regularly misrepresented to the public by political leaders and police. 

As the Baltimore Police Department goes through another year under the consent decree, with changes to the department slow going, TRNN found that Baltimore data transparency and retention has gotten worse and its numbers have become increasingly unreliable.

This is a story of how much we do not know. 

Deeply Flawed Data

The Baltimore City Police Department provides Open Baltimore, the city’s publicly accessible data hub, with data about crime and police activity. Baltimore’s political leaders and police pride themselves on data access and transparency. These datasets are often used as research tools for citizens, reporters, and those in policy development and law enforcement. Indeed, everyone is encouraged to consult Open Baltimore.

But we found these datasets to be deeply flawed in ways that would make any conclusions drawn from them unsound—especially for governance and policing. The arrest data in Open Baltimore demonstrates that, contrary to what would be expected, data gathering by police has become less comprehensive and more faulty since the implementation of the federal consent decree.

Specifically, there are significant differences between Open Baltimore arrest data and Uniform Crime Report data (UCR). UCR is provided to the FBI by law enforcement offices all over the country each year and was, for decades, the most referenced and most frequently cited dataset about crime. There are flaws with UCR, including the problem with all law enforcement data: it is self-reported by law enforcement. 

That said, UCR data for 1990-2020 was provided to TRNN by Baltimore Police via a public information request, making it the most comprehensive data set available for such a long period of time. 

The number of arrests recorded in Open Baltimore data varies significantly from the numbers in UCR, often by thousands. Baltimore Police provide data to both the FBI and Open Baltimore, making the cause of differences between the two datasets especially confounding. Additionally, there are a significant number of arrests not included in the Open Baltimore dataset, and the differences between the numbers recorded in UCR and Open Baltimore data have widened over time. Arrests seemingly disappear from Open Baltimore.

In February 2023, we pulled an arrest data file from Open Baltimore. In the arrest data between the years 2010-2020, a total of 335,805 arrests were shown. 

That same arrest file was pulled four months later in June 2023. There were 386 fewer arrests. 

An additional data analysis was completed in January 2024. The same trend continued, at a much greater rate. In the course of nearly a year, more than 4,300 arrests were removed from the total for 2010-2020.

When we spoke to Baltimore City employees, including representatives from Open Baltimore and Baltimore Police, their reason for removing previously-recorded arrests from Open Baltimore’s data was unclear. Arrests that are documented but do not result in a charge, or are accidentally duplicated or inaccurately entered are removed during reviews by police. Additionally, the police explained that expungements may have something to do with the lower numbers of arrests. They could not tell us how frequently arrests are removed for either of those reasons.

This arrest data is frequently cited. One recent example of Open Baltimore’s flawed year-to-year data being cited is the Baltimore Banner’s 2022 analysis of arrests. At the end of 2022, the Banner reported that arrests had increased for the first time in nearly a decade. While the broad conclusions are correct—based on the data, arrests did slightly increase in 2022—the year-to-year arrest numbers cited by the Banner are quite different from past UCR numbers and contemporaneous reporting because the number of arrests recorded in those years in Open Baltimore have declined.

Whatever the reason for the lowered arrest numbers, it means that Open Baltimore provides an increasingly incomplete picture of police activity from the past as each dataset gets older. It is not a record of those people who were handcuffed and arrested at a specific point in time—their lives put on hold for weeks, months, or years—but a record of how some of those arrests were processed long after that, based on an unknown and unnamed number of factors.

A recent review of Open Baltimore shows that, months after our year-long analysis, arrest data continues to decline.

TRNN also looked at geographic location data within Open Baltimore’s arrest data. Over the past 13 years, Open Baltimore’s arrest data is missing locations in, on average, 37% of arrests. That percentage increased from 4% in 2010 to as high as 61% in 2022. 

The percentage of missing data has increased significantly since 2015 when the city police were put under increased scrutiny following Freddie Gray’s death (46% missing location data) and in 2017 (49% missing data) when the consent decree was implemented.

It is unclear whether this location-based data is missing from police records as well, or if police records maintain this data with locations and, for reasons unknown, it was not given to Open Baltimore. 

One more example of how poor data entry has been in Baltimore: throughout the ’90s, there are entries in Maryland Case Search in which the officer name is “Officer, Police” or “Police, Officer.” Over 500 of these results are for arrests in Baltimore City where the last name is “Officer.” There are over 300 where the first name is “Police” and nearly 300 where the first name is “Baltimore.”   That data entry in the ’90s was poor is hardly a surprise. That these “Officer, Police” permutations have stood for decades in the database shows that data cleansing and validation has never been prioritized.

Representatives from city government, including Open Baltimore, seemed entirely unaware of these problems with Open Baltimore’s data until we brought them to their attention. After months seeking comment or explanation, Open Baltimore was not able to provide a thorough explanation.

In a city where policing is scrutinized for bias and professionalized for data gathering, and police enforcement itself is informed by targeting “microzones,” the lack of comprehensive location data (nearly 40% is missing) available to the public is troubling.

A History of Dirty Data

While there are problems with the police records provided to Open Baltimore, the unreliability of Baltimore crime data has been a decades-long problem. Collection and reporting of crime data has been a hotly contested issue in Baltimore and the data provided has been frequently insufficient, unsound, and in some cases, manipulated.

In the ’90s—the decade leading up to “zero tolerance”—then-Councilperson Martin O’Malley and others accused Mayor Kurt Schmoke of adjusting statistics to make crime seem lower than it actually was. Police Commissioner Thomas Frazier’s report in the mid-’90s about nonfatal shooting reductions was also challenged. 

After O’Malley was elected mayor in 1999, he commissioned an audit which found violent crime was frequently downgraded. As a result of the audit, thousands of felonies were added to the official number for 1999. This also had the effect of making any decrease in crime during the first year of the O’Malley administration even more dramatic.

O’Malley would later be accused of the same sort of stats manipulation. In 2001, O’Malley said there were 78,000 arrests, but the official number was 86,000. Official arrest numbers for 2005 are around 100,000, while the ACLU claimed the number was 108,000. 

In 2006, WBAL Investigative Reporter Jayne Miller (a TRNN contributor) revealed that police were simply not counting all of the violent crimes reported. For example, Miller found that “police wrote no report of a shooting… despite locating and interviewing the intended target, who was not hurt. Instead, the officers combined the incident with armed robbery that occurred earlier that night in the same area—a practice known as duplicating.”

After 2006, the department shifted away from mass arrest towards what they framed as more “targeted” styles of policing, focused on violent offenders rather than low-level offenders. In Part Two of this series, we noted that the data from these years showed a decrease in low-level offenses but did not show an increase in the enforcement of violent crimes. A policy of greater focus on guns and gun possession during this period is also not reflected in the data. Gun seizures were much higher in the ’90s than in the period where gun policing was supposedly the focus.

Here We Go Again

The short history and long tail of Baltimore’s “zero tolerance” policing.

In our reporting, we also learned that gun seizure data—another metric often cited by the police to illustrate how hard police are working to get guns “off the street” and reduce violence—includes guns given to the police during gun buyback programs. For example, in 2017 there were 1,917 gun seizures. In 2018, there were 3,911. The reason for that jump was not the result of increased enforcement or a jump in the rate of illegal gun possession, it was because the city resurrected its gun buyback program. That 2018 buyback resulted in 1,089 guns handed over to police.

Willingly handing over a gun to police in exchange for cash is most likely not what the public imagines BPD is describing when they announce the total of gun “seizures” in a year.

Baltimore Police do not provide data about nonfatal shooting numbers before 1999 because, police told us, the department does not have the ability to easily extract this number from the broader aggravated assault category that shootings were once categorized under. This means that the police department, whose strategies are often informed by data on shootings and murders, does not have information about the number of nonfatal shootings that occurred before 1999. There is seemingly no way to easily look at how that crucial number has historically changed.

“We Have No Idea What Is Happening”

These problems with data and the lack of transparency are costly. Baltimore spends more per capita on its police department than any other major American city, but the city and department have consistently failed in their oversight of how that money is actually spent, especially on police overtime. Exorbitant overtime is a commonly used indicator when searching for problem police officers and police corruption. For example, members of the infamous Gun Trace Task Force were among the officers who were nearly doubling their salary with overtime. And, as Baltimore Brew reported, the same overtime offenders appeared year after year; the Maryland State Office of Legislative Audits recently found that Baltimore Police “failed to effectively monitor $66.5 million in overtime.”

Police quarreled with the auditor’s conclusions and assured overtime practices would now be reformed and ready by the end of May 2024. They were not. Since 2016, the Baltimore Police has failed overtime audits each year—and each year, police explain that the department needs a little more time to fix overtime.

Melissa Schober, a community advocate, has been calling attention to the failed overtime audit by the Baltimore Police for years. She told TRNN that her concerns extend to the broader metrics used by police, not just overtime. Metrics remain oblique and undefined and, according to police, cannot improve because they are contingent upon a police budget they claim is inadequate. The Baltimore City police budget is nearly $600 million per year, Schober stressed.

“My fury isn’t just at the overtime overspending. It is that years after the Fiscal Year 2016—that’s July 1, 2015, so nearly a decade ago—we are still somehow ‘in progress’ on documenting metrics because carrying those things out are ‘budget dependent’ but they never manage to say how much they’re short and when they expect to complete the work,” Schober said. “Until and unless the BPD can say, ‘Here’s our outcome and here is the numerator and denominator and here’s how we validate those numbers (or counts), here’s our data dictionary and here’s how we train our folks to count things,’ we have no idea what is happening with money.” 

While the city celebrates the “progress” police are making with the federal consent decree, data remains incomplete. Some data-gathering related to the consent decree has not even begun.

The consent decree requires the police to record stop and search data, but, as the Baltimore Banner reported, that has not even started, even though it is perhaps the most crucial way, data-wise, to get a sense of discriminatory and unconstitutional policing. The Baltimore Sun recently reported that Baltimore Police do not keep track of how often their officers get in police chases. Soon after the Sun published their story, police released the data they previously said they did not track.

The refusal to properly share, let alone collect, this data also enables police misconduct. There is no way to determine how often questionable stops occur, because it is only when police stops result in arrests that they are recorded. For defense attorneys, this is not only a gap in data, it’s a convenient way for police not to account for constitutional violations.

The lack of stop and search data means constitutional violations are revealed only when they happen to someone arrested for a crime—at which point the constitutional violation is often ignored by prosecutors and judges because the arrestee was found to have broken the law. 

“Police are never discouraged from crossing the line when they stop and search someone without probable cause—and they are actually encouraged to cross the line any time they find a gun,” defense attorney and former public defender Natalie Finegar told TRNN. 

Since 2017, Baltimore Police have relied on an expansive—and controversial—plainclothes policing unit called DAT (District Action Team) whose primary job is gun and drug interdiction. They do this in part by searching people they deem “suspicious” or representing “characteristics of an armed person.” The Baltimore Police argue that this kind of “proactive policing” and these types of questionable stops are vital to violence reduction. The police lack data to back up this claim.

“While it can be difficult to correlate officer proactivity and visibility to what crimes have been prevented, we have seen that when these units are deployed, they have an impact on crime suppression and calming for the community,” Baltimore Police spokesperson Lindsey Eldridge told TRNN.

According to Schober, the problem is not only the inability of police to provide data, but to even explain why certain data points such as “proactive policing” were even analyzed. 

“When auditors looked at percent of time spent on proactive policing, the BPD was unable to produce documentation detailing how and why they selected that as a performance measure, and then how they monitored, controlled, and analyzed data,” Schober said.

Data’s Inconvenient Truths

Last year, Baltimore recorded 262 murders, a decline of 70 from 2022—a “historic” reduction. This drop in murders is notable and important. Far fewer people died in Baltimore from gun violence last year compared to previous years, and these declines have continued into 2024—as of June, murders had declined by another 36%. 

Our data analysis in Part Two noted that, due to population decline, the current drop in murders puts the city’s murder rate—people killed per 100,000—at almost the exact same place it was in 1990. The use of that 300 number as a benchmark, as we explained in Part One, dates back to the early ’90s when the city first surpassed 300 murders per year, and also had a significantly higher population. When accounting for population decline, 1990’s 300 murders-per-year number is around 240 murders.

In 2024, Baltimore will likely have far fewer than even 240 homicides. At the end of June, Baltimore had recorded 89 homicides, which makes the city on track to endure fewer than 200 murders for the first time since 2011.

The mayor and others have already credited the one-year reduction to its Group Violence Reduction Strategy (GVRS) and other interrelated initiatives. But there is simply no way to look at one or two years of data and make any serious determinations as to what caused that decline—especially when violent crime is “dropping fast” nationwide. In 2024, homicides have declined at rates that are even more impressive than last year’s reductions. 

As we saw in the ’90s, New York City’s violence reduction was prematurely credited to “zero tolerance” policies. Within a couple of years, the supposed success of “zero tolerance” meant it was exported to cities such as Baltimore and New Orleans. While many scholars have since questioned if “zero tolerance” had much to do with crime reduction, the policy itself, which led to Baltimore police arresting hundreds of thousands for low-level crimes, inarguably caused irreparable harm—especially to Black communities.

Baltimore’s crime numbers game

For decades, “common wisdom” regarding violence reduction has failed a city that regularly surpasses 300 murders a year and spends the most per capita on policing.

Data informs policy creation, so the data should be vetted. During our conversation with city employees who handle and publish data, they described themselves as “like Uber,” which is to say, they are a neutral transporter of data from one place to another. The police send Open Baltimore data and they post it, no questions asked.

So, returning to our initial question, why are arrests being removed from Open Baltimore? If part of this gap between Open Baltimore and UCR data is actually due to expungements, as police claimed, that still creates a problem in the data. An expungement does not mean the arrest did not occur. It means the person who was arrested went through the lengthy process of removing an arrest or charge from their personal criminal record in order to gain employment, rent an apartment, or apply for a loan. 

If recorded arrests are leaving Open Baltimore because of expungements (or any other reason), police who provide data to Open Baltimore and Open Baltimore itself should account for the change by maintaining a record of removed arrests in the data provided to Open Baltimore. When someone consults Open Baltimore for arrest numbers, they reasonably assume they are getting a record of those arrests for that year, not how those numbers look currently, with arrests removed for reasons that Baltimore Police cannot adequately explain. 

With nearly 40% of arrests lacking location data and Open Baltimore’s removed arrests, the data contains too many unknowns. 

Past policies have been built upon incomplete and frequently flawed data. Data collection begins with fingers on a keyboard. Data-driven policies are only effective if the data collection and cleansing processes are logical, consistent, and thoroughly understood. Poor data collection, for example, can lead to sloppy data entry, which, in turn, leads to dirty data, which then, in turn, leads to potentially wildly inaccurate conclusions—and, therefore, faulty and ineffective policy decisions. 

Recent changes to data input methods and analysis—that is, changes in the system used to record and categorize this data—make comparisons between years much more difficult. This means residents, reporters, and other members of the public cannot easily fact check claims by city officials and law enforcement. 

Cities sometimes change the methods they use to measure crime. In 2021, the FBI retired UCR and began using the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) instead. NIBRS categorizes data quite differently than UCR. This means that certain crimes may appear to increase or decrease as an effect of recording them in the NIBRS system, not because of a difference in the number. “This does not mean that crime has increased; it just means the way crimes are reported has changed,” Baltimore Police explain on their website. 

Recent changes to Baltimore’s police districts mean even short-term comparisons between years or areas of the city are going to be much more difficult. The redistricting of Baltimore’s police department’s districts—for the first time in over 50 years—makes it “impossible” to easily compare police metrics going forward. Indeed, at a Public Safety Committee hearing in late 2023, the data on homicides and nonfatal shootings by district that was presented simply stopped in early July because of redistricting. 

Data does not lie, but it often reveals inconvenient truths. But data can only be as truthful as it is complete and accurate. Interrogating the city’s publicly available data reveals ongoing and historic systemic flaws in collection and reporting to such an extent that it’s likely not possible to derive reliable or even usable conclusions from the information shared in the name of transparency.

Epilogue: ‘Excessive Force’

It was May 23 around 1PM when members of Baltimore Police Department’s District Action Team, looking for a robbery suspect, ran up on 24-year-old Jaemaun Joyner. Tackled by police, Joyner lay on his back on the pavement gasping, arms and legs pinned. One of the cops announced that Joyner reached for something. “I ain’t reaching for nothing,” Joyner screamed. “I can’t breathe.” 

Police went through Joyner’s pockets. He asked what they were doing. That’s when Detective Connor Johnson grabbed Joyner by the throat and pressed his service weapon against Joyner’s temple. “He put something in my pocket! He put something in my pocket,” Joyner screamed over and over again with a gun to his head. 

Joyner was arrested on gun and drug charges.

Joyner’s lawyers said that a detective holding a gun to someone’s head was clearly an example of excessive force, and outside the bounds of anything acceptable by a police officer, especially one in a city under a consent decree. “I’ve read the consent decree and BPD policy, and nowhere does it say it’s reasonable for an officer to hold a gun to someone’s temple,” defense attorney Jessica Rubin told the Baltimore Banner. “Point blank, period. That’s the most egregious thing an officer can do.” 

Joyner’s lawyers stressed that the statement of probable cause—a police officer’s written and sworn description of an arrest—did not describe Johnson holding a gun to Joyner’s head at all.

Had the stop not resulted in an arrest, there likely would have been no documentation of the incident.

The police report also suggested Joyner remained a suspect in the robbery even though the victim confirmed he was not involved. After spending 54 days in jail, Joyner was released— his charges dropped only after his lawyers showed the shocking body-worn camera footage to the Baltimore City State’s Attorney’s Office.

Johnson has made the news before. He was involved in a fatal shooting last year. Residents have complained about his questionable traffic stops and searches. His Internal Affairs summary, obtained by TRNN, shows a complaint marked “sustained” for failing to properly seatbelt someone who was arrested. 

In a moment when officials celebrate consent decree “milestones” such as proper seatbelting, Baltimore’s criminal defense attorneys see a department reverting to the very tactics that got the department investigated by the Department of Justice nearly a decade ago.

“This is what we’ve been trying to get away from since Freddie Gray,” defense attorney Hunter Pruette told TRNN. “And they’re trying to walk it back. I think these are the same tactics that led us to the problem we had before.”

Baltimore police appear unconcerned. Police said they had been aware of the incident and saw no reason to suspend Johnson while it was being investigated. When Commissioner Daryl Worley was asked about the incident at a press conference, the 25-plus-year veteran of the department defended Johnson’s behavior.

“He was out there doing his job, in an area where we want him to be, and going after individuals with guns,” Worley said.

Earlier this month, the Baltimore City State’s Attorney’s Office announced they would not criminally charge Johnson for holding his service weapon to a restrained man’s head.

This investigation was supported with funding from the Data-Driven Reporting Project. The Data-Driven Reporting Project is funded by the Google News Initiative in partnership with Northwestern University | Medill.

by Brandon Soderberg and Andrew Friedman
Data analysis by Andrew Friedman
Additional research and analysis by Megan Kenny and Vida Fye
Illustrations by Evangeline Gallagher

Content warning: This story contains descriptions of police violence and the use of a homophobic slur.

It was about to get dark. 

In the summer of 2003, Devin was 19 years old and living in West Baltimore with his mom and two brothers, just a few blocks away from the Western District Baltimore Police station. Every night around 9 or 10 p.m., Baltimore cops patrolled the area heavily. They drove in marked and unmarked cop cars searching for signs of disorder, ready to round up people for mass arrest. It was all part of a policing strategy introduced in the late ’90s called “zero tolerance.”

“It always happened around sundown,” Devin told The Real News. “The police see you out with even just one or two people and they just looked at you and you knew they were gonna wild out.”

One night, Devin and his older brother were on their stoop, arguing. “Brother argument type shit,” Devin explained. Then, an unmarked cop car drove the wrong way up their one-way street and pulled in front of them.

Officers jumped out. They grabbed Devin’s brother and slammed him against their car. They put Devin in a chokehold and threw him to the ground. A neighbor sitting on their stoop was rounded up just for being nearby. Devin and his older brother were in handcuffs and the whole block was outside, including Devin’s mom. “They’re not doing anything,” she told the officers from the stoop. “They were just talking.”

Police ordered everybody back inside. Devin’s mother called a family friend. Her sons were about to go to jail and she was going to need help getting them out. Officers who saw Devin’s mom on the phone inside broke down the door, terrifying his youngest brother. “My brother has autism and there’s cops in the house,” Devin said. “It was madness.”

Devin’s experience was not unusual in Baltimore under zero tolerance, a policy enacted by Martin O’Malley, who served as the city’s mayor from 1999 to 2007. The policy was based on the New York Police Department’s “broken windows” approach to crime, which encouraged police to make arrests for smaller infractions. Broken windows proponents argued that a police department that did not engage in drastically reducing low-level offense ceded cities to disorder leading to more, sometimes serious, crime. 

Devin’s mom wasn’t taken away in handcuffs that night but she was left with a front door off its hinges, her middle and oldest children in jail, and her youngest terrified.

Devin and his older brother sat in Central Booking for nearly a day. Then, without ever seeing any charging documents, they were released. “No papers—nothing. After 19 hours, they let us go,” Devin said. “And my mom paid for our broken door. We didn’t have the money to keep fighting that shit in court.”

In the early 2000s, the city’s political and law enforcement establishments credited slight declines in violence to increased arrest policies under zero tolerance. But zero tolerance did not substantively reduce crime. Especially when accounting for the city’s population decline, its reductions were even less significant than police and politicians claimed.

State Senator Jill Carter told The Real News that zero tolerance further frayed the relationship between police and communities. “Zero tolerance had a direct effect on the destabilization of the Black family in poor neighborhoods that is still present to this day,” Carter said.

Breaking Balls, Broken Windows

In a 1982 article in The Atlantic, “Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety,” political scientist James Wilson and criminologist George Kelling presented the “broken windows” theory of crime reduction: increasing arrests for low-level crimes, the theory argued, reduces the likelihood of more serious crimes occurring. “Many citizens, of course, are primarily frightened by crime, especially crime involving a sudden, violent attack by a stranger. This risk is very real, in Newark as in many large cities,” Wilson and Kelling wrote. “But we tend to overlook another source of fear—the fear of being bothered by disorderly people. Not violent people, nor, necessarily, criminals, but disreputable or obstreperous or unpredictable people: panhandlers, drunks, addicts, rowdy teenagers, prostitutes, loiterers, the mentally disturbed.”

Broken windows effectively gussied up a standard police tactic of stopping and harassing people like “rowdy teenagers” to make them feel unwelcome and get them off the street. Jack Maple, a lieutenant for the New York Transit Authority in the ’80s, later wrote in his memoir that broken windows was “merely an extension of what [cops] used to call the ‘breaking balls’ theory.” 

Maple had been breaking balls for years. As a subway cop, he mapped where crime occurred— he called the maps “charts of the future”—and sent officers to those areas in order to make the police presence known, and to intimidate and clear out those deemed undesirable. Maple and others claimed “breaking balls” in the subways had reduced crime, especially robberies.

In 1994, under newly-elected Mayor Rudy Giuliani, broken windows went above ground and citywide. Giuliani made Maple an NYPD deputy commissioner and William Bratton, the New York Transit Authority commander, the new police commissioner. “We are going to flush [homeless people] off the street in the same successful manner in which we flushed them out of the subway system,” Bratton said. More importantly, Maple’s “breaking balls” was given a technocratic sheen. They called their crime fighting program COMPSTAT (short for “computer statistics”). The computerization and quantification program made it much easier for crime statistics to be closely reviewed and calculated. Paired with broken windows, the focus on week-to-week statistics emboldened officers to make an increasing number of arrests.

“Broken windows” boosters argued that, after the policy was enacted, crime in New York City decreased. From 1993 to 1994 (Giuliani’s first year in office) the number of murders declined from 1,946 to 1,561. But homicides were already on the decline before broken windows—and before Giuliani’s tenure as mayor. New York City’s homicide rate peaked in 1990 at 2,245 murders, and after that began its drastic decline under Mayor David Dinkins, Giuliani’s predecessor and a broken windows skeptic. 

“The amazing facts of New York City’s crime decline have been condensed into a sound bite in which a heroic mayor and aggressive police created a zero tolerance law enforcement regime that drove crime rates down in the 1990s,” criminologist Franklin Zimring wrote in his book The City That Became Safe. “Close scrutiny of the data reveals this popular fable to be almost equal parts truth and fantasy.”

Nevertheless, Giuliani and his police department credited broken windows with the city’s historic drop in crime. Soon, Maple, along with Bratton aide John Linder, started a consulting firm where they took COMPSTAT and broken windows to other cities. In 1996, New Orleans hired Maple and Linder to show the New Orleans Police Department how to “go get the scumbags.”

At the same time, Baltimore City Councilperson Martin O’Malley and City Council President Lawrence Bell argued that Baltimore needed to study New York’s success in crime fighting. The duo criticized Mayor Kurt Schmoke and Baltimore Police Commissioner Thomas Frazier for the city’s high levels of violence. In 1990, Baltimore City surpassed 300 homicides for the first time and stayed above that number for years.

In August 1996, Baltimore City Council’s Legislative Investigations Committee took a trip to New York where they witnessed broken windows-style policing in action. Soon, the committee issued a report, “The Success of New York City’s Quality of Life/Zero Tolerance Policing Strategy,” which, as its title suggests, argued for broken windows-style policing in Baltimore.

Schmoke and Frazier opposed the idea. They argued that Baltimore courts couldn’t handle an increase in people coming through the system, and that the approach encouraged officers to make questionable arrests. But after O’Malley’s fact-finding mission, they began to reconsider.

In October 1996, three Baltimore police districts enacted a “limited citation experiment” in which several offenses (open container, littering, disorderly conduct) were prioritized by officers who began handing out citations that brought small fines and possible jail time. 

Arrests increased. In 1996, Baltimore Police made 55,662 arrests. In 1997, there were 71,709 arrests; in 1998, 82,377; and in 1999, 80,775.

In 1999, Schmoke announced he was not going to run for a third term as mayor. A dozen-plus Democratic candidates entered the mayor’s race, including Bell and O’Malley. O’Malley’s 1999 campaign literature argued that “the use of citations,which make fewer arrests necessary,” would make Baltimore less violent and its jails less full. He argued “fewer people may actually be locked up using quality-of-life policing strategies.” 

What actually transpired under O’Malley was an experiment in mass incarceration that, by the time Devin and his brother were stopped by police in front of their homes in 2003, resulted in over 100,000 arrests a year in a majority-Black city of only 630,000 people.

“O’Malley Is A Killer”

In November 1999, O’Malley was elected mayor. After winning the Democratic primary with 53% of the vote, he took 90% of the general election vote. In his inauguration speech, O’Malley  avoided tough-on-crime rhetoric and instead promised “a future where justice is not a dream deferred, but a goal achieved.” He declared Baltimore “the greatest city in America.” He then put the slogan on benches across the city. 

But as arrests increased under O’Malley, police violence escalated. In February 2000, Ralph Chambers was chased and then shot by police after he was spotted dealing drugs. Chambers, who was unarmed, died. His brother Paul connected zero tolerance policing to the killing. “O’Malley made it clear it was not going to happen like this,” Chambers told The Baltimore Sun. “They don’t have to kill them to get them off the corner.” 

At the scene of the shooting, protesters chanted, “O’Malley is a killer.” 

Broken windows policing in New York was yielding similar problems. While crime continued to decline, between 1993 and 1995 complaints of illegal search increased by 135%, excessive force complaints against police increased by 61%, and abuse of authority by 86%. NYPD brutality became national news. In 1997, NYPD officers arrested Abner Louima, punched him, beat him with a police radio, and then, at the precinct, stripped him and sodomized him with a plunger. Justin Volpe, the officer who assaulted Louima, was indicted in federal court and sentenced to 30 years in prison. Prosecutors called the attack “one of the most heinous crimes in New York City’s history” (Volpe was released from federal prison in June 2023 after serving 24 years of his sentence). 

In 1999, the NYPD killed Amadou Diallo, shooting at him 41 times, hitting him 19 times. The four officers charged in the Diallo shooting were acquitted in federal court in 2000. “Sure, crime is down. There wasn’t much crime in the Soviet Union, either,” one protester said. “Unfortunately, our mayor has reinforced the attitude that police can do whatever they want to young Black males as long as the crime rate goes down.” Even after Diallo and Louima, the police remained so emboldened under Giuliani—and unaccustomed to any criticism of their broken windows tactics—that they staged angry protests over the release of Bruce Springsteen’s song about Diallo, “American Skin (41 Shots).” At Springsteen concerts, they heckled him, pulled a police escort for one of his major shows, and a Fraternal Order of Police official called Springsteen “a floating fag.”

Nevertheless, O’Malley courted the NYPD brains behind broken windows. Maple and Linder’s consulting firm came to Baltimore to review the police department. They found that it was “dysfunctional” and “to no small degree corrupt.” Maple and Linder said the department and the city’s crime problem could be fixed by instituting COMPSTAT and zero tolerance policing. O’Malley agreed. 

In 2000, O’Malley imported more New York City cops. Ed Norris, who helped implement COMPSTAT and broken windows in New York, became the next police commissioner of Baltimore City. Norris replaced Ron Daniel, whom O’Malley and others perceived as insufficiently supportive of zero tolerance. Daniel had replaced Thomas Frazier, who was also critical of zero tolerance.

In 2001, both the number of arrests and murders in Baltimore were high: there were 256 murders, 684 nonfatal shootings, and 93,778 arrests. The homicide clearance rate, meanwhile, began to decrease. In 2000, it was 77.8%, and in 2001, 66%—a sign that the single-minded focus on low-level arrests was a distraction from addressing much more serious crime.

In 2002, former NYPD commander Kevin Clark replaced Norris, who went to work for the Maryland State Police (in 2003, Norris was federally indicted for using police money for personal matters and was sentenced the next year to six months in federal prison). In 2001, three years and four police commissioners into the O’Malley administration, the murder rate had slightly declined from 46.9 murders per 100,000 people in 1999 to 38.7 murders per 100,000.

That decline put the murder rate back to where it was in the early ’90s, when O’Malley criticized Schmoke. In 1991, there were 304 murders and a murder rate of 40.4 per 100,000.

O’Malley and his NYPD consultants promised that the homicide number would drop to 175 by 2002. O’Malley believed that getting there required increases in arrests—and some good PR. 

NYPD consultant Linder created Baltimore’s “BELIEVE” campaign, funded with $2 million from the Baltimore Police Foundation. Those words in white on a black background showed up on billboards all over the city. O’Malley called the campaign “spiritual warfare.” The slogan promised positivity and a sense of a better future at a moment when the promises of zero tolerance had failed to materialize—and police were increasingly out of control. 

The peak of zero tolerance was 2003. That year, there were 110,164 recorded arrests in Baltimore, along with 20,000 more people who, like Devin and his brother, were released without charges—but not before spending time in jail. Those who weren’t part of this “catch and release” form of enforcement went through a criminal legal system clogged by the high numbers of arrests, waiting for weeks or even months to see a judge. “They actually had police supervisors stationed with printed forms at the city jail—forms that said, essentially, you can go home now if you sign away any liability the city has for false arrest, or you can not sign the form and spend the weekend in jail until you see a court commissioner,” Baltimore reporter and The Wire showrunner David Simon said in a 2015 interview. “And tens of thousands of people signed that form.” 

Carter, now a state senator, was then a ṡtate delegate, and criticized O’Malley’s zero tolerance strategy. “There were hundreds of thousands of arrests throughout O’Malley’s term as mayor. And one third to one half of those were illegal,” Carter said. “Either they were arrests without charges—because there was no probable cause—or they were  ‘abated by arrest’ because after they took the person to jail, they were held in Central Booking for months before the court date.”

“Stop the Illegal Arrests”

In 2004, O’Malley was reelected, in part due to the city’s modest reductions to violence. That year there were 276 murders with a murder rate of 43.5 people per 100,000. Arrests were soaring: there were 100,388 arrests in 2004. One person out of every five  arrested were released without being charged. 

Concerns from Carter and others about zero tolerance and mass arrests grew too large for the city’s leadership to ignore. Defense attorney Warren Brown was often spotted in West Baltimore by commuters holding a sign that said, “Mr. Mayor, Stop the Illegal Arrests.” In 2005, there were 99,980 arrests, and in 2006, there were 90,823.

In 2006, the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland and the Baltimore chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People sued the city and the police over unconstitutional arrests. “The Baltimore City Police Department rewards police officers with more arrests and punishes officers with fewer arrests, regardless of the number or success of resulting prosecutions,” the ACLU said in June 2006. “As a consequence, Baltimore prosecutors decided to drop the charges against approximately 30 percent of those arrested without a warrant in 2005 prior to any involvement by a defense attorney.”

Zero tolerance effectively ended in 2007, not long after the ACLU/NAACP lawsuit against the BPD (the plaintiffs in the ACLU lawsuit were later awarded $870,000). 

Meanwhile, O’Malley ran for governor of Maryland and won. New Mayor Sheila Dixon and her Police Commissioner Frederick Bealefeld sought to reduce violence—and arrests. Between 2007 and 2011, murders and nonfatal shootings steadily declined. Murders and nonfatal shootings declined from 282 murders and 636 nonfatal shootings in 2007 to 223 murders and 419 nonfatal shootings in 2010. Arrests also declined. In 2007, there were 82,529 total arrests, and by 2010, 64,524 total arrests. Dixon and Bealefield attributed the success to a focus on people who committed violent crime.

This was more than a continuation of the slight decline under zero tolerance: it was the most significant decrease the city had seen in decades. It was a rare moment of stability in the police department. Bealefeld was the first commissioner to last more than three years since Frazier, four commissioners earlier. But City Hall was in turmoil. Mayor Sheila Dixon was federally charged with corruption and served a year under indictment before pleading guilty and stepping down in early 2010. She was replaced by then-City Council President Stephanie Rawlings-Blake. 

Despite the chaos in City Hall, Baltimore chipped away at the staggering arrest numbers from O’Malley’s time in office, and at the same time decreased violence. 

In 2011, Baltimore City recorded only 196 murders with 60,008 arrests, removing Baltimore, at last, from the list of top five deadliest cities in the United States. It was also the first time the homicide number dropped below 200 since 1978. The murder rate declined to 31.3 per 100,000 people, putting the city back where it was in the late ’80s (in 1989, there were 259 homicides, with a murder rate of 33.9). 

“Widespread Community Disillusionment”

For Governor O’Malley, 196 murders in Baltimore in 2011 during a period of decreased arrests was evidence that zero tolerance worked. Its effects just took a little longer, O’Malley suggested. 

“To see that 175 mark on the horizon, to think of all the moms and all the dads that aren’t going to be standing by graves of their kids, I don’t think there’s anything about which I will ever be more grateful in public service, and I’m not going to quibble with God over the timing,” O’Malley said.

O’Malley’s celebration of Baltimore’s 2011 murder rate did not acknowledge the many more moms and dads whose kids were locked up. The amount of jobs and housing lost as a result of an arrest, or lost because that arrest precluded housing and employment opportunities in perpetuity, seemed to not matter to the city’s leadership—and has never been quantified. 

“People were arrested. They were held in Central Booking for months before the court date. That was why it was so devastating,” Carter said. “You’re in there for two months, and then you get released—because it’s either without charges, or abated by arrest because the charge was something like trespass. You were working, you had an apartment. Now you lost both your house and your job.”

“The city made about a hundred thousand arrests. Now, some of them were the same people over and over again, but think about that: 100,000 adult arrests in a city of [600,000] people,” former Police Commissioner Bealefeld said. “It’s incredible. And it didn’t move the needle.”

For Bealefeld, strategic, targeted policing was how murders and shootings were reduced. Under Bealefeld, the police department’s targeting of violent offenders relied on aggressive, specialized units in plainclothes—called “knockers” on the street. The since-disgraced Gun Trace Task Force was formed in 2007. The killings of Anthony Anderson in 2011 and Tyrone West in 2013 were by Baltimore’s “knockers.”

O’Malley spent his final years as governor telling Rawlings-Blake to increase arrests because the homicide numbers for 2012 (218), 2013 (233), and 2014 (211) were higher than the 2011 low point. 

In 2015, O’Malley ran for president. He announced in late May of 2015, amid the headiest days of the Black Lives Matter movement; Mike Brown was fatally shot by police in Ferguson in 2014, and Freddie Gray was killed by police in Baltimore in April 2015. 

During O’Malley’s speech announcing his presidential run, he called the Baltimore Uprising a “scourge of hopelessness that happened to ignite” when it did. He stressed that hopelessness “transcends race.” Activists protested O’Malley’s announcement, complete with a “die-in” to represent the harms of the zero tolerance era. In a moment of widespread insurrectionary rage at cops and calls for police reform from elected officials, O’Malley struggled to defend zero tolerance and was swamped with negative press about the policy. 

In a widely read April 2015 interview, Simon blasted O’Malley and the zero tolerance era. “The department began sweeping the streets of the inner city, taking bodies on ridiculous [misdemeanor charges], mass arrests, sending thousands of people to city jail, hundreds every night, thousands in a month,” Simon said. Support from centrist pundits like Matthew Yglesias did little to boost O’Malley’s flagging campaign: In February 2016, he suspended his campaign after receiving just 0.54% of the vote in the Iowa caucus. 

That same year, the US Department Of Justice’s Civil Rights Division issued a report on the Baltimore Police that blamed zero tolerance for the divisions between residents and the police. “The Department’s current relationship with certain Baltimore communities is broken… This fractured relationship exists in part because of the Department’s legacy of zero tolerance enforcement,” the report said. “‘Zero tolerance’ enforcement made police interaction a daily fact of life for some Baltimore residents and provoked widespread community disillusionment with BPD.”

“Here We Go Again”

In June of this year, newly elected Baltimore City State’s Attorney Ivan Bates encouraged Baltimore officers to once again ramp up enforcement of low-level offenses. This time, officers wouldn’t make arrests for “quality of life” offenses. Instead, they would give Baltimoreans citations and have them appear before the newly-established Citation Court. There, they could face a fine or jail time—though mostly likely community service—and with it, Bates claimed, access to “wraparound services.” 

A Baltimore Police department that has failed to reduce violence and regularly claims it lacks the manpower to do so is now being told to write tickets for violations such as sleeping outside or drinking beer in public.

Health Care for the Homeless CEO Kevin Lindamood told The Real News that this is the sort of policy he hoped would not return to Baltimore.

“I think it’s fair to say that we sort of brace ourselves for this type of policy to return. We’re aware that the lives of those that we’re working with are poised to become more complicated,” Lindamood said. “By virtue of living private lives in public spaces, they’re going to be collecting citations: loitering, open container, peeing in public. And we are talking about folks that don’t have stable addresses, and so they don’t get the notice, that then turns into a failure to appear, that then turns into a more serious set of escalations.”

Last year, arrests increased in Baltimore City for the first time since 2010. Politicians and police stress that current calls for increased enforcement are not the same as zero tolerance because they are not currently engaged in a mass arrest program. But these kinds of policies should not be happening at all, Peter Sabonis, co-founder of the Homeless Peoples’ Representation Project, told The Real News.

“Oh, so it’s going to be ‘a humane citation.’ You’ll go to ‘a special court,’” Sabonis said. “The whole issue with law enforcement, especially with the low-level offenses, is it brings people who are living lives that are relatively unstructured and it is imposing these deadlines, appointments, court appearances that are a challenge for those folks to make.” 

At a hearing in June about a proposed $15 million increase to the Baltimore Police Department budget, City Council President Nick Mosby asked then-Baltimore City Police Commissioner Micheal Harrison about the new policy: “The idea that now we’re going after and starting to do engagement on low-level citations, how will that affect violent crime? How will that affect officer response?” Mosby said.

“This is not a strategy to reduce violent crime,” Harrison told Mosby. “This is a strategy to reduce the number of complaints for those quality of life offenses.”

According to Harrison, the policy described by the State’s Attorney’s Office as a way “to change the culture of accountability and improve safety in the City” was not about violent crime or safety at all. What had been for decades promoted as the key to all things violent crime reduction—arresting low-level offenders—now had nothing to do with violence reduction. This was simply about reducing citizen complaints.

During the first month of Citation Court in July, The Daily Record reported that nearly everyone cited was Black and the charges were what many expected: selling bottled water without a license, drug possession, open container. Some who received citations showed up in court only to be arrested for an outstanding warrant. Those who believed they were wrongly cited often realized it was easier to plead guilty to something you didn’t do and reduce the charge rather than try and fight it in court. The Daily Record noted that, at the very moment one man stood before a judge to answer for drinking in public, there were “white baseball fans openly drinking beers on Baltimore’s light rail.” 

The second month of Citation Court in August was more of the same. The Baltimore Sun reported that some people cited showed up only to learn their charges had already been dropped. Those who did not show up had a warrant out for their arrest. “Only one of 16 people who had cases scheduled… showed up to court that day,” the Sun reported. “Over the three days of citation dockets in the week of Aug. 21, [judges] issued arrest warrants for offenses such as open containers, drug possession, theft, and disorderly conduct.” 

The Real News’ requests to the police department and State’s Attorney’s Office for comprehensive data about citations so far have not been answered. 

The policy is not substantively addressing residents’ complaints, as Harrison suggested. And it isn’t getting those who were cited the help they need, as Bates claimed: Policing of low-level offenses undermines the outreach work already being done, especially when police are stopping people, ticketing them, and sending them to court.

“An outreach worker tries to build a relationship of trust in a context where—rightly or wrongly—those in uniform (any kind of uniform) are often perceived as someone that has caused someone living on the streets trauma,” Lindamood said. “All that work to get someone to talk to us, can sometimes take months or even years—and it can take 20 seconds to completely fragment. Once that’s fragmented, it takes an awful lot of time for us to reestablish those relationships.”

Lindamood said that a man in his seventies who has used Health Care ḟor the Homeless’ resources for decades and experienced the destructive zero tolerance era responded with resignation when he heard about the return to policing low-level offenses.

“Here we go again,” he told Lindamood.

“A Grave Human Rights Error”

At the same June hearing where Harrison was asked about citations, he, along with then-Deputy Commissioner Richard Worley, was also pressed on violence by the City Council. The clearance rate was once again low—around 40%. Just weeks before the hearing, on Memorial Day weekend, five people were shot near Lexington Market in the middle of the day, a few feet from police officers sitting in their cars.

Overall, murders and nonfatal shootings were declining, though the police command admitted that there were more people being shot in each incident. “There is one incident that made the nonfatal shooting numbers higher,” Harrison argued. “One incident where one person pulled the trigger but six people were shot. So it was one incident. We’ve had a decrease in the number of incidents. Now that does not make it less violent… but it was a decrease in the number of incidents, but more victims were shot.”

Two days later, Harrison announced he was stepping down as police commissioner. He was replaced by Worley, a Baltimore Police veteran of 25 years—nearly the entire three-decade period of police failure covered by The Real News for this project.

A week later, the Baltimore Police Department’s $15 million budget increase was approved, putting police spending at a record-breaking $594 million for the next fiscal year.

A little after midnight on July 2, 30 people were shot and two were killed in the Brooklyn Park area of South Baltimore. They were the 139th and 140th homicides of 2023. 

The shooting happened at the end of Brooklyn Day, an annual Fourth of July weekend tradition in the Brooklyn Homes public housing complex that brings hundreds of attendees. There were no police present and they seemingly weren’t interested in being there—even after it was reported that some in the crowd had weapons. 

Reviews of police scanner audio that night reveal that, as early as three hours before the shooting, there were reports of people armed at the party, and one cop joked that the National Guard should handle it rather than the Baltimore Police Department. An hour later there were more reports of possible violence, including claims of people fighting and shooting.

“We’re not going in that crowd,” a cop announced over the police scanner.

As of press time, there have been 255 murders in Baltimore this year. More than 100 more people have been murdered since July’s mass shooting. However, this also means Baltimore will not surpass 300 homicides in 2023 for the first time since 2014. 

Keeping the homicide number under 300 has been a top priority for Baltimore Police, if not the entire city government, since around 1990. While 300 is a shocking number of murders, far too much of the city’s policy-making is centered around this threshold. Baltimore saw 305 murders in 1990, and as violence increased it became easier to focus on that number—which O’Malley did, becoming mayor and governor and, for a brief moment, a Democratic hopeful for president. In 1990, 305 murders in a city of 730,000 residents equaled a murder rate of 41.5.

There are many other significant problems that go largely unaddressed. Baltimore had over 730,000 residents in 1990, which dropped to 648,000 by 2000, and then to 583,000 by 2020. The most recent census data for the city—2022—put the city at an even further reduced 569,000. A Baltimore that shrinks by 20% should adjust its threshold for what constitutes an unacceptable number of homicides. 240 murders per year in a city of less than 570,000 is the equivalent of 300 in 1990.

The ideal number of murders, of course, is zero. And nobody would reasonably feel safer in a city that experiences 290 murders instead of 300, especially when major cities like New York have a murder rate that hovers around only 3.5 per 100,000 residents. 

As long as less-than-300 murders per year is central to police and politicians’ conception of a safe Baltimore, “zero tolerance-style” approaches will always be a tempting option for city government. There can never be too many arrests—even when too many is defined as nearly one-sixth of the city’s population, as was the case during the O’Malley era.

“What I am still struggling with today, 20 years later, is that in this majority Black city—with so many intelligent, active Black people in positions of power and leadership—such a grave human rights violation occurred with no repercussions,” Carter told The Real News. “It is truly something that will never not bother me.”

The recent soft return to zero tolerance makes a cynical kind of sense. Barring the ability to actually make the city significantly safer through policing, officers can at least harass and possibly even arrest those that make people feel unsafe. The Baltimore Brew reported that at an October fundraiser Mayor Brandon Scott provided a laundry list of his crime fighting accomplishments, including the removal of squeegee workers from many Baltimore streets.  “We don’t see squeegees anymore,” Scott declared.

As of November, Baltimore murders for 2023 were down 18.9% and nonfatal shootings were down 9.9% from the previous year. This has the mayor, police, and advocates taking a victory lap. But violence reductions are happening nationwide. New Orleans had more than a 20% murder reduction this year. Detroit is on track for its lowest number of homicides in more than 50 years. Baltimore’s homicide reduction puts the city at around 260 murders for 2023. With the current population of Baltimore City hovering around 565,000, the murder rate is 46 murders per 100,000 people—near where the homicide rate was in the early ’90s when O’Malley and others deemed the violence unacceptable and called for “zero tolerance.”

Two recent surveys illustrate little improvement in how Baltimoreans feel about their police department. A Consent Decree community survey report found that, “when it comes to BPD and public safety and crime, participants reported that they disagree that BPD quickly solves crimes and arrests criminals, that BPD effectively reduces crime, or that BPD has a good working relationship with the community on matters of public safety.” A Johns Hopkins University survey found that 74% of Black Baltimoreans fear the police.

“Why do we have to do this through law enforcement? If our desire is to help people, there are better structural ways to engage people,” Health Care for the Homeless’ Lindamood said. “We’re seeing the pendulum swinging back and you know, it’s frustrating. Have we learned nothing?” 

This story was produced in partnership with The Garrison Project, an independent, nonpartisan organization addressing the crisis of mass incarceration and policing. The investigation was supported with funding from the Data-Driven Reporting Project. The Data-Driven Reporting Project is funded by the Google News Initiative in partnership with Northwestern University | Medill.

by Brandon Soderberg
Data Analysis by Megan Kenny and Vida Fye
Additional research and analysis by Andrew Friedman
Illustrations by Evangeline Gallagher

At a January “Take Back Our Streets Town Hall,” Baltimore City officials gathered to discuss the ongoing spike in violent crime and to tell the public what they were going to do about it in 2023.

2022 was the eighth year in a row the city endured more than 300 homicides.

Organized by newly-elected Baltimore City State’s Attorney Ivan Bates and moderated by a former Baltimore cop and city Judge Wanda Heard, the conversation gestured towards diversionary programs, but mostly proposed the kinds of tough-on-crime policies the city has attempted plenty of times before: demands for additional “accountability” in the form of increased arrests and enhanced sentences; calls for more cooperation from the overpoliced yet underserved community to help solve crimes; and the targeted policing of certain offenses, such as illegal gun possession. 

“Every time I turn around, the police are talking about getting more and more guns off the streets,” Bates said. “Guns are what’s being used to kill and terrorize our community.” 

The Baltimore City police commissioner, Michael Harrison, boasted to those in attendance that the police had seized thousands of guns last year. “In 2022, the Baltimore Police Department took over 2,400 guns off the streets of Baltimore, making over 1,600 arrests for people with those guns—in one year,” Harrison said. “That’s more guns taken off the street and more arrests than when the department had 3,000 police officers ten years ago. So, we’re doing more work, better work, with far fewer people.”

The exact number of gun seizures in 2022, according to Harrison, was 2,416. But seizing over 2,000 guns is not a useful benchmark to measure improvement, given how consistently Baltimore police clear that number. The department confiscated 2,296 weapons in 2012, and has topped 2,000 gun seizures eight of the last 10 years.

Regardless, while Baltimore police are surely doing more work—indeed, fewer officers are seizing more guns—how this police work is “better” is not clear. In 2012, there were 218 homicides and 370 nonfatal shootings. In 2022, the year Harrison claims Baltimore police were doing more and better work, there were 333 homicides and 688 nonfatal shootings.

About two hours into the town hall, many in attendance lost patience with officials citing data that does not address the deadly reality. Mourning friends and family of murder victims yelled out from the crowd.

Heard lectured them. “You’re being rude,” she said. “So your issues are more important than everyone else’s? Because you won’t let me talk.”

“You don’t know how the mother of a murder victim feels every night,” a woman in the audience shouted.

For decades, Baltimore City’s threshold for an unacceptable amount of violence has been 300 murders. The city has exceeded 300 murders per year in 17—more than half—of the last 32 years. Additionally, there have only been seven instances when Baltimore City’s murder rate has dipped below 40 murders per 100,000 residents—even in years when the total number of murders was below 300. Only once since 1990 have there been fewer than 200 murders per year in Baltimore.

The past 30 years are also marred by chaotic crime interventions—strategies introduced only to be directly contradicted or undone by new commissioners or administrations. None of these strategies have resulted in sustained reductions in violence.

In lieu of significant, long-term successes when it comes to reducing murders and nonfatal shootings—or “failed murders,” as cops often call them—the Baltimore Police Department frequently leans on short-term and often minuscule increases or decreases in police metrics to assuage community concerns. Talk of gun seizures is a way to demonstrate that the police are “doing something” and shift attention away from the headline-making 300-plus homicide number.

Those who spoke out at the town hall were talking about Baltimore’s violence from experience, but what they said is backed up by the data. The Baltimore police are not preventing murders and nonfatal shootings and they are solving fewer and fewer of the murders and nonfatal shootings they do not prevent.

We began by analyzing the solutions police have cited over the years as central to reducing violence: solving homicides, making arrests, seizing guns, and increasing police spending. We found that in years when Baltimore police solved a large number of homicides, murder numbers were high; murders are high again, this time amid plummeting clearance rates. Similarly, Baltimore has experienced high numbers of murders and shootings both when it was making around 100,000 arrests per year and now when its arrest numbers are less than 20,000 a year. Strategic focus on gun seizures is not associated with reductions in the number of murders or nonfatal shootings. 

Meanwhile, Baltimore spends the most per capita of any major city in the United States on policing. 

Common, carceral wisdom on violence reduction has not worked in Baltimore. The city has effectively been in a “crime spike” the past three decades, and in periods where violent crime numbers have dropped, police cannot always convincingly demonstrate that it was their own policies that caused the decline.

Dirty Cops, Dirty Data

There is no way to discuss crime from a statistical perspective without first discussing the statistics themselves. Police practices are opaque at best—fraudulent at worst—and each stop, arrest, and seizure by police represents a judgment made by the officers involved. This means the validity of any number—whether it accurately represents the thing it is intended to measure—that relies on the discretion of police is questionable. An increase in gun seizures at a specific point in time may not reflect more guns out on the street, just a greater strategic focus on guns. Even drawing certain conclusions from the homicide rate is difficult when we can’t easily audit why some deaths are ruled accidental and others are ruled intentional.

The Baltimore Police Department provided The Real News with data that is frequently inconsistent and sometimes incomplete. The data we did receive is often contradicted by other statements by police, and even their own reports. For example, in April of this year, the Baltimore Police Department published its year four review of its “Crime Reduction and Departmental Transformation Plan”, implemented from July 2019 through March 2023. There, gun seizures for 2022 are listed as 2,688—272 more than Harrison himself cited at January’s town hall. 

Most of the data cited and analyzed for this series was obtained via Maryland Public Information Act Requests, which the Baltimore Police Department frequently failed to respond to in a timely manner. Sometimes, the police did not respond at all. When police did not provide data, we consulted Federal Bureau of Investigation data, reached out to community organizations, and consulted city documents to obtain basic information about the city and how it operates. 

All of this information should be much more easily accessible. 

Moreover, the way the Baltimore Police Department previously categorized some crime statistics means that even full transparency from the department about their records wouldn’t necessarily answer questions about missing or inconsistent data. For example, they explained that because nonfatal shootings were counted within the broader category of “aggravated assault” before the year 2000, they could not tell us how many nonfatal shootings there were during the ’90s. A current key metric cited by Baltimore police to determine their success at crime reduction can’t be easily compared to any year earlier than 2000.

Additionally, decades of perverse incentives to push the narrative of a safer city have inspired corner-cutting, corruption, and criminality within the notorious Baltimore Police Department, both in its vaunted homicide unit of the ’80s and ’90s and its “elite” plainclothes squads such as the Gun Trace Task Force. And since 2017, following the police killing of Freddie Gray, the Baltimore Police Department has been under a federal consent decree.

There is no way to properly quantify the effect that decades of police mistrust has on Baltimore City, let alone the harm of real, literal crimes committed by police: beatings, shootings, evidence planting, drug dealing, lying in paperwork and on the stand, sabotaging violence interrupters, exploiting informants and sex workers, and more.

In 2021, American Civil Liberties Union Maryland attempted to calculate the scale of police corruption between just the years 2015-2019 and discovered misconduct complaints filed against 1,826 cops—10% of those for “false arrest or imprisonment,” and 40 of those complaints for “criminal association.”

That 300 Number

“300-plus homicides” has often been a death knell for police commissioners and elected officials’ careers in Baltimore City, former Baltimore Police Commissioner Frederick Bealefeld told The Real News. “If there were 300 homicides in Baltimore, the commissioner was out. I mean, it was the trip wire. You cross that line, ‘See ya, look for another job,’” he said.

When Kurt Schmoke, Baltimore’s mayor from 1987-1999, entered office, the city’s homicide number was nearing 300, but murders didn’t yet dominate the conversation about crime. The focus was drugs, he explained, with murder primarily viewed as a problem experienced by the city’s majority Black population in historically redlined and divested neighborhoods: “It appeared to the community that the high level of violent crime was concentrated in two sections of town: one on the far west and one in the far east. So it was not perceived as a citywide threat the way it became later and is now,” Schmoke told The Real News.

But then Baltimore ended 1990 with 305 homicides—a jump from 259 in the previous year—and the murders became a larger part of the discourse. This rise in murders coincided with New York City’s ongoing drastic reduction in homicides, putting pressure on a much smaller city such as Baltimore to get that homicide number under 300. “If New York had not seen as dramatic a decline as they did, the 300 number probably would not have been as magnified by the press, community, and policymakers,” Schmoke said. “The significant reduction in New York started in the late ’80s, so the comparison kept getting greater and greater.”

In 1993, Baltimore saw 353 homicides, the most of any year on record. 

That same year, Schmoke noted, Homicide: Life On The Street, an hour-long network drama based on reporter/showrunner David Simon’s 1991 book of the same name, premiered on NBC. The book and show focused on Baltimore’s homicide detectives—“murder police”—who were single-minded in their quest to solve each murder and remove it from the hundreds on their “open cases” dry erase board. 

Along with the daily news, Schmoke said, “David Simon’s book, the TV show, and all that stuff had the community fixated on the homicide number, and particularly on 300.”
Cases are “cleared” when a suspect has been identified and arrested (a conviction isn’t required) or by “exceptional” means (such as the accused dying). In recent years, it has been argued by many law and order pundits that clearing cases reduces homicides. This is one of the central arguments of Jill Leovy’s 2015 book, Ghettoside—solving murders facilitates community trust and reduces people’s perceived need to take justice into their own hands.

In the ’90s, more alleged murderers were being arrested, but the city’s homicide rate was not that much lower than it is now, when the murders are high and the clearance rate is low. Baltimore has seen over 300 homicides both in years when police cleared over 70% of cases and in years when the clearance rate sank below 40%. Since 1990, Baltimore police have actually become much worse at solving murders. In 1990, the Baltimore Police Department clearance rate on homicides was 75%. By 2022, that number was down to 36%.

The homicide clearance rate is a measure of how often police are able to close a murder case, but it is also a measure of the strength of the political and professional pressure put on cops to clear more cases.

While Baltimore’s homicide detectives retain the shabby nobility assigned to them by Simon more than 30 years ago, some of the detectives who worked homicides in the late ’80s and into the ’90s (including the real-life versions of “Munch” from Homicide and Law & Order and “Bunk” of The Wire) have since been revealed to have engaged in police misconduct. To clear murders, these cops forced confessions, threatened witnesses until they changed their accounts of events, and withheld exonerating evidence. As a result of such practices, men such as Jerome Johnson and Gary Washington spent decades in prison for murders they did not commit.

These wrongful convictions should call into question the validity of the celebrated 70%-plus clearance rate throughout the ’90s. As New York Magazine reported last year, “since 1989, 25 men convicted of murder in Baltimore have been exonerated, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. Official misconduct was present in 22 of the cases.”

“Zero Tolerance”

By the end of the ’90s, Mayor Schmoke hadn’t located the carceral solution that he believed would get the city’s homicides back below that 300 number. A critic of the drug war, Schmoke opposed calls to ramp up small-time arrests New York City-style, and ultimately decided not to run for reelection. “Honestly, I just ran out of ideas on homicide. That is the reason that I didn’t run for a fourth term,” Schmoke said. “I just said, ‘I cannot figure out any other strategy that’s going to get us under this magic number.’ We tried a lot of different things.”

In 1999, Baltimore City Councilperson Martin O’Malley was elected mayor, largely based on his promises to reduce violence—especially homicides. 1993’s shocking 353 murders was often invoked by his campaign.

O’Malley proposed reducing violence by adopting New York City’s aggressive (and unconstitutional) “broken windows” style of policing which focused on so-called quality of life, low-stakes arrests. The New York strategy, popularized by then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani and then-Police Commissioner William Bratton, relies on the assumption that serious crime is reduced by arresting people for low-level charges (loitering, fare evasion, open containers).

In this metaphor, the low-level charges are the “broken window” that, if not dealt with, leads to more “windows” being broken (more low-level crimes committed), which police argue creates an environment for more serious crimes.

It’s actually simpler than that: Locking up significantly more people means there are significantly fewer people around to potentially commit crimes—and locking up more people is done through constitutionally fraught tactics such as mass arrest and stop-and-frisk.

O’Malley adopted New York’s strategy. He called it “zero tolerance” and, upon his election, enacted an expansive, unprecedented experiment in mass incarceration in Baltimore City. At the peak of zero tolerance in 2003, Baltimore City police made over 110,000 arrests in a city of 610,000 people. That’s nearly 18% of the population.

Frederick Bealefeld, who joined the Baltimore Police Department in 1981 and was a major by 2003, saw cops and command instructed to petty-arrest their way out of high crime. “The city made about a hundred thousand arrests. Now, some of them were the same people over and over again, but think about that: 100,000 adult arrests in a city of [600,000] people. It’s incredible. And it didn’t move the needle,” Bealefeld said.

In 2003, a year with 110,164 arrests, there were 270 murders and 545 nonfatal shootings. This period of years where murders were below 300 perpetuated the idea for those invested in zero tolerance that increasing arrests had “worked.” It also was enough of a reduction to get O’Malley reelected as mayor in 2004.

Bealefeld frequently adopts a fishing metaphor to explain what was going on. Before zero tolerance, he explained, police were looking for a “big fish” (a high-profile dealer or shooter). But under O’Malley, the size of the fish no longer mattered. Arresting a corner boy, a person who uses drugs, or an inebriated person passed out on a stoop—all were deemed worthy endeavors. In fact, not arresting the drunk guy on the stoop is why more serious crimes happen, cops were taught.

“Eventually, Baltimore, in terms of arrests and fighting this drug war—and in hopes of scaling down the violence—built this massive trawler with a giant net behind it and it would go through Baltimore scooping up all the fish we could get,” Bealefeld said. “But you know what happens when you fish with a net? You catch a lot of really little fish, and almost none of the fish you want to catch.” 

Jails overflowed with people arrested for nonviolent crimes. The effects of zero tolerance were truly devastating for Baltimoreans, and it taught an entire generation of cops that policing was solely a numbers game. Community outrage over these arrests—and a 2006 American Civil Liberties Union Maryland lawsuit against the city and police department for a pattern of improper arrests—made zero tolerance unpopular enough that the city was forced to listen to its residents, tired of seeing their friends and family locked up.

While Baltimore looked for another way to reduce its arrests and its murders, O’Malley took the results of zero tolerance—the city had, indeed, seen homicides per year drop below that 300 number—all the way to the governorship. The Washington Post endorsed O’Malley’s 2006 run for governor of Maryland, citing the “dent” he’d made in Baltimore crime.

Bad Guys With Guns

Soon after O’Malley became governor, new Mayor Sheila Dixon appointed Bealefeld as police commissioner. In 2007, the new mayor and new commissioner focused on further reducing murders while also reducing arrests. Bealefeld’s approach shifted to targeted arrests—as he put it, “fishing with a spear,” or going after “the sharks,” the most dangerous and notorious shooters in the city. He took to calling them “bad guys with guns.”

Arrests began to decrease, with no increase in murders, and then murders decreased more—but internally, many cops raised on zero tolerance resisted. Former cops explained that Deputy Commissioner Anthony Barksdale was especially unforgiving when it came to dressing down higher-ups and the cops they oversee for focusing too much on context-free stats and not reducing violence. Many cops complained about Barksdale’s approach, saying he was too mean and needed to ease up.

This period was also one of aggressive plainclothes policing; both Bealefeld and Barksdale had come up as plainclothes cops—or “knockers,” as they were called on the streets. 2007 also saw the creation of the Gun Trace Task Force, whose approach to catching “bad guys with guns” would soon go terribly wrong.

Then, in 2010, Dixon resigned after she was found guilty of theft, misconduct, and perjury. The city’s leadership changed—then-City Council President Stephanie Rawlings-Blake became mayor—and another new administration meant, again, new priorities.

In 2011, Baltimore police made 60,008 arrests and recorded 196 murders and 379 nonfatal shootings—the lowest murder count in the 1990-2022 time frame we analyzed. The homicide clearance rate in 2011 was 46.2%.

“What we accomplished with that homicide mark in 2011, people thought it was a fait accompli,” Bealefeld said. “The fact of the matter was, it was all just a good start.”

Bealefeld and Barksdale left the Baltimore Police Department in 2012. That year, there were 218 murders and 370 nonfatal shootings. The homicide clearance rate was 48.1%.

By 2015, homicides began to skyrocket beyond ’90s levels. In 2014, there were 46,231 total arrests, 211 murders, and 370 nonfatal shootings. The homicide clearance rate was 45.5%. In 2015, there were 32,932 total arrests, 344 murders, and 635 nonfatal shootings. The homicide clearance rate was 30.7%. 

Baltimore’s reduction in arrests is partially explained by the 2014 decriminalization of cannabis possession. In 2014, there were 13,356 arrests for drug offenses. In 2015, the first full year of cannabis decriminalization, that number dropped to 6,604 drug offense arrests.

The national murder rate also increased by 11% between 2014 and 2015. Law and order pundits invoked the so-called “Ferguson Effect” to explain Baltimore’s 2015 violence. They claimed that, following the April 2015 death of Freddie Gray and the massive uprising against police violence, embattled cops stopped doing their jobs, both out of revenge and for fear that they would become the next “viral video.” 

If police refusing to police is to blame for 2015’s murder spike, it would mean that the department is engaging in an eight-plus year work slowdown during which there have been 2,667 murders and 5,588 nonfatal shootings.

No Legitimate Authority

2015 began a period in which the police and elected officials, as far as many residents were concerned, had almost no legitimate authority. The thousands who took to the streets in protest of Freddie Gray’s death were not only angry about what happened to Gray but at the entire city’s policing apparatus reverting to the zero tolerance policies of the recent past.

The United States Department of Justice’s 2016 report on the Baltimore Police Department blamed O’Malley’s policies for the public’s distrust of the police, and for poor policing: “Zero tolerance enforcement made police interaction a daily fact of life for some Baltimore residents and provoked widespread community disillusionment with [Baltimore police],” the report says.

Promises of radical change and serious reflection “post-Freddie Gray” morphed into technocratic reforms and short-lived do-gooder organizations that didn’t do too much good.

Then, in 2017, the Gun Trace Task Force scandal shocked many and confirmed so much of what Black Baltimoreans had been saying for years: the Baltimore Police are ostensibly a criminal gang, creating crime rather than stopping it and lying, stealing, dealing drugs, and planting evidence.

While the plainclothes squad was essentially a robbery crew, its public-facing mission was to “get guns off the street,” which they did by driving around, stop-and-frisking dozens of Black Baltimoreans each night. If they found someone with a gun, they made an arrest. If they found someone without a gun, they might plant one. It was a disastrous, stats-driven hybrid of “zero tolerance” and the “bad guys with guns” strategy.

The revolving door of police commissioners has also undermined the department’s credibility. Counting interim appointments, there have been 15 Baltimore Police Department commissioners since 1990, five of those since 2015. Anthony Batts and Kevin Davis, the two commissioners after Bealefeld, were fired because of their inability to reduce homicides. Davis’ replacement, Darryl DeSousa, lasted just a few months before he was federally indicted for tax fraud in 2018. He was replaced by interim Commissioner Gary Tuggle and then, in 2019, Commissioner Michael Harrison.

Harrison was hired due to his role as superintendent of the New Orleans Police Department during a period in which he oversaw New Orleans police’s federal consent decree and was credited for reducing murders and nonfatal shootings—reductions that have not sustained themselves.

Population Decline

Since 1990, Baltimore’s population has declined by 150,000 people. In 1990, Baltimore’s population was 736,000. As of 2022, there were about 570,000 residents. That loss of residents makes decade-to-decade and year-to-year comparisons regarding crime deceptive—and makes some of Baltimore’s most significant and celebrated homicide reductions far less impressive.

Comparisons using the total number of homicides recorded per year without considering the proportion of the city population represented by that number mask how little has changed even in years when homicide numbers have dropped. The murder rate (the number of murders per 100,000 people) is a clearer illustration of the difference from year to year.

In 1993, when Baltimore experienced 353 homicides—a record high number—the population was 724,671. The city’s murder rate that year was 48.7 murders per 100,000 people. In 2007, when O’Malley campaigned for governor on his success reducing murders via mass arrest, there were 282 murders. The population in 2007 was 606,006, making the murder rate 46.5 murders per 100,000 people. 

Comparing only the raw number of recorded homicides shows that there were 157 fewer murders in 2007 than in 1993. But accounting for population between those years reveals that the celebrated reduction in murders is a difference of only three people per 100,000. During this period, the population of Baltimore declined by 16% and murders dropped by 20%.

Fewer people were killed in 2007 than 1993, but how much of that can actually be credited to policing is hard to determine. The city failed to protect nearly the same percentage of people from murder in 2007 as it did in the early ’90s.  

Since 2015, Baltimore’s population has declined by around 50,000 people. Considering the murder rate rather than total homicides also shows just how dire the situation has been in Baltimore. In 2015, the murder rate jumped to 55.2 murders per 100,000 people, from 33.8 murders per 100,000 people in 2014. It has remained in the 50s for the past eight years. During the ’90s when the 300 number first became a concern, the murder rate was in the mid-to-high 40s. 

The national murder rate as of 2020 was 6.52 people per 100,000.

The difference between the ’90s homicide rate and now, when accounting for changes in Baltimore’s population, is about 10 murders. The city has never really escaped its troubling ’90s numbers. Based on the data from the past 30 years, it is conceivable that the spike in arrests during the era of zero tolerance policing in Baltimore had minimal effect on homicide and nonfatal shooting reductions.

Factoring in population change further illustrates how solving homicides does not help reduce violence. Comparing the clearance rate to the murder rate shows that since 1990, the number of cleared homicides has generally followed the same increases and decreases as the total number of homicides.

Nonfatal shootings in Baltimore are generally around twice the number of homicides. The nonfatal shooting clearance rate over the past 30 years in Baltimore is not clear. The Real News’ request to police for nonfatal shooting clearance rates going back to 2000 was ignored. The nonfatal shooting clearance rate was 20.2% in 2020, 25.3% in 2021, and 23.3% in 2022.

Funding the Police

The police murder of George Floyd in 2020 mainstreamed calls to defund police departments, and with those calls came a backlash of easily disprovable claims that reducing police budgets increases crime. Baltimore City seemed to be an ideal candidate for “defunding the police”: The city spends more per person on policing than any other major city in the country and it has one of the country’s highest recorded levels of violent crime.

The current Baltimore City police budget is nearly $580 million per year, which breaks down to around $1000 per resident spent on police.

In 2020, the abolitionist group Organizing Black mobilized Baltimoreans to show up at the city’s Taxpayers’ Night budget hearings and demand that the city reduce the police budget. Their messaging stressed that for every dollar spent on policing, 50 cents is spent on public schools, 20 cents on public housing, 12 cents on homeless services, 11 cents on recreation and parks, and 1 cent on mental health services.

That year—both a mayoral election year and part of the momentary “racial reckoning” in response to George Floyd’s murder—there was a slight reduction to the Baltimore City police budget. That decrease was followed by an increase the next year. A look at the Baltimore Police Department budget over the past 30 years shows occasional reductions which are often made up the next year.

In 1990, the police budget was $169 million. Accounting for recent inflation of 2.3%, the 1990 police budget was $395 million. In 2022, the police budget was $555 million.

In Baltimore, there is no connection between decreasing the police budget and increases in violence, and no connection between increasing the police budget and decreasing crime. A department which has not effectively done its job reducing violence receives more and more money to do more of the same thing.

“The community is saying this ain’t working, and we need to cut the funding to the police department,” Organizing Black’s Rob Ferrell said back in 2021 as his organization rallied around reducing the police budget again.

Epilogue

This year, Baltimoreans once again gathered at Taxpayers’ Night events to provide their input on the city’s proposed budget. The proposed budget for the 2024 fiscal year adds up to $4.4 billion in total, and despite cuts to other programs, includes around $15 million more for the Baltimore Police Department, increasing its budget from $579,579,068 to $594,475,789.

Some budget cuts, people stressed, could be easily avoided if police were given just a fraction less in 2024. For example, Mayor Brandon Scott’s budget proposes reducing the city’s public library budget by $2.6 million. Housing advocates, meanwhile, called for $1.6 million so that Baltimore’s “right to counsel” law for tenants could be implemented.

“I call on the city council to invest in critical investments that our community needs, such as affordable and safe housing, rather than the same field pattern of increased police spending and subsidizing of wealthy developers,” Loraine Arikat, senior policy analyst with 1199SEIU United Healthcare Workers East, told the council last month.

Along with the proposed police budget, the city pays out additional money because of past police corruption. Last month, Baltimore City Comptroller Bill Henry released a Gun Trace Task Force Settlement Tracker, which provides a searchable database of settlements tied to the GTTF scandal and calculates how much money those corrupt cops have cost the city. Since the 2017 Gun Trace Task Force scandal, 41 settled cases involving the GTTF have cost the city nearly $23 million.

At Taxpayer’s Night last month, Terrence Fitzgerald, a member of Physicians for Social Responsibility, demanded a reimagining of the Baltimore Police Department: “You can keep pouring money each year into the Baltimore Police Department system but if you do not make fundamental changes, rethink what public safety means, and rebuild the system from the ground up, then you will end up with the same police department that murdered Freddie Gray and has been riddled with corruption for years,” he told the council.

Fitzgerald suggested that the city is stuck in a loop of funding an embattled, corrupt police department, watching it fail to meet its own goals, and then funding it even more. The past few weeks of headlines involving Baltimore police illustrate his point.

On May 11, Baltimore Police Officer Cedric Elleby shot a 17-year-old. It was a sunny Thursday afternoon and Elleby spoke to the teen at length on a stoop, and then asked to search him because, Deputy Commissioner Richard Worley claimed at a press conference, the teen displayed “characteristics of an armed person.” 

The teen refused to be searched and he ran. Elleby chased him through the Southwest Baltimore neighborhood of Shipley Hill. Video shows the 17-year-old removing a gun from his pants and running with it but not aiming it at the officer. As the teen turned a corner, Elleby told him to drop it and, when the teen didn’t, he was shot.

As the teen lay on the ground, residents surrounded Elleby and other police.

“He didn’t even pull that gun out,” someone told Elleby.

“You shot him for nothing,” someone else screamed.

The 17 year-old survived the shooting. He underwent surgery which involved the removal of one of his kidneys and his spleen. He is currently facing first-degree assault charges as well as a number of weapons charges.

Elleby is a member of Baltimore City Police Department’s Southwest District Action Team, a specialized unit established after the Gun Trace Task Force was federally indicted in March 2017. DAT’s job, like the GTTF when it was established back in 2007, is to go after “violent offenders” and get guns off the street, with a focus on illegal handguns.

Baltimore police would not provide any data about DAT’s role in reducing crime. “While it can be difficult to correlate officer proactivity and visibility to what crimes have been prevented, we have seen that when these units are deployed, they have an impact on crime suppression and calming for the community,” Baltimore police spokesperson Lindsey Eldridge told The Real News.

These aggressive tactics by a member of DAT are one example of the department repeating past behavior. Problems with Baltimore’s homicide unit made the news again this year after another past murder conviction was overturned.

On April 18, 2023, Anthony Hall—who was convicted of the 1991 murder of Gerard Dorsey—was released from prison. The case lacked physical evidence, and one of the supposed eyewitnesses to the murder had told Baltimore police detectives multiple times that he did not witness the shooting. Police, however, told the eyewitness he could get out from under drug charges if he identified Hall as the shooter. So he did. Another eyewitness who knew Hall did not identify him as the shooter, and others provided descriptions of a shooter who did not look like Hall.

Back in 1992, this information was not provided to Hall’s defense. Hall was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 50 years. 

Anthony Hall is the 26th convicted murderer in Baltimore to be exonerated since 1989. 

The homicide clearance rate in Baltimore City in 1991 was 70.7%. 

The 2023 homicide clearance rate so far is unclear. In early May, Deputy Commissioner Worley’s presentation before the City Council Public Safety Committee said the homicide clearance rate for this year so far is 13%. After outrage from many—including Public Safety Committee Chair Mark Conway—Worley said 13% was an error and corrected the number to 40%.

At a June 6 hearing about the police budget, Councilperson Zeke Cohen mentioned a Memorial Day shooting near downtown Baltimore just feet away from Baltimore police. “I’m incredibly concerned that people are committing heinous acts of violence with seemingly no fear of consequences,” Cohen said. “Frequently we hear that there was an officer within the vicinity of the shooting within a block or a few blocks—and yet folks are still pulling the trigger.”

Cohen also expressed concern about the 40% clearance rate for murders this year. 

“It’s actually about 47%,” Harrison told Cohen.

“So it went up a little bit since the last hearing?” Cohen asked.

Harrison nodded yes.

On June 8, Harrison announced he would be leaving the Baltimore Police Department. 

Mayor Scott said Worley, a 25-year veteran of Baltimore police, will be the next commissioner. Worley will be Baltimore’s sixteenth commissioner since 1990 and sixth since 2015. 

Along with a new commissioner, Scott recently announced a return to enforcing a youth curfew while State’s Attorney Bates declared a return to policing “quality of life” offenses.

At a press conference about his departure, Harrison took credit for changing the Baltimore police into “a world-class department”—and for slightly reducing violence. 

“I’ve been in conversations with the mayor about my future and the future of the Baltimore Police Department and in those conversations it became convincing to me that this was the most opportune time for me to pass the torch,” Harrison said. “We truly have become the best comeback story in America.”

This investigation was supported with funding from the Data-Driven Reporting Project. The Data-Driven Reporting Project is funded by the Google News Initiative in partnership with Northwestern University | Medill.