After questioning police homicide commanders for nearly two hours about a decline in arrest rates, the chairman of the Baltimore City Council's Legislative Investigations Committee said he was "partly" satisfied with the explanations offered at a hearing yesterday.
Though he expressed concern over the decline in solved killings, a decrease in the number of veteran investigators and claims of "a breakdown of accountability between supervisors and detectives" by a homicide unit supervisor, committee Chairman Martin O'Malley said he was pleased by the department's efforts to improve its clearance rate.
"I think there's a grudging admission that there's a problem," said O'Malley, the council's most persistent critic of the Police Department. "Overall, I'm glad we acknowledged the problem."
Police said the clearance rate in 1997 was 64.2 percent, compared with 70.4 percent in 1996. Homicide unit commander Maj. Kathleen Patek had connected the decline to fewer domestic slayings and an increase in drug-related homicides, which are considered harder to solve. For example, the Police Department classified 45 homicides as drug-related in 1996 compared with 84 in 1997.
"There isn't one homicide that means less to us than another," said Patek, who attended the hearing with a handful of members of her unit. "I think they [detectives] do an outstanding job."
Besides the arrest rates, O'Malley questioned police officials about a January memo written by Detective Sgt. Mark Tomlin to Patek, suggesting improvements in the system to ensure that open cases are investigated as new ones occur. Based on his review of a random sample of open cases from 1997, the homicide unit supervisor wrote that an accountability breakdown between supervisors and detectives resulted in cases that were "left unattended, or simply pushed to the side."
Patek said that detectives were not ignoring cases, but some were neglecting to document their work in the case files. She said the homicide unit would adopt Tomlin's suggestion to have 30-, 60- and 90-day reviews of investigations this year.
"Some of the detectives really went into every lead they had, but for whatever reason it just wasn't put into the case folder," Patek said. O'Malley, who represents Northeast Baltimore, said he is troubled by what he called a decline in the ranks of seasoned homicide detectives. Since 1991, 21 officers have retired from the unit.
"I think the numbers speak for themselves," O'Malley said.
"I hope they're going to work very hard to not only promote the most qualified people in homicide, but to retain the most qualified people in homicide," O'Malley said.
The councilman said the committee might evaluate the homicide unit's progress in a year.
Pub Date: 2/11/98
