Baltimore hit the 300 mark in homicides yesterday for the 10th consecutive year, a decade of urban violence fueled by an epidemic of drugs that has stained the city as one of the deadliest in the nation.
A 48-year-old Brooklyn man was found dead Monday night at his home in the 4100 block of Townsend Ave. Police said Larry Langley had been shot several times in the head. No motives or suspects are known, and police said it was unclear when Langley had been shot.
The state medical examiner ruled the man's death a homicide yesterday morning, bringing the number of slayings since New Year's Day 1990 to 3,201 -- about the same number of people killed in 30 years of strife in Northern Ireland.
City officials have long used the 300 mark as a symbolic threshold they did not want to cross. In December last year, police flooded the streets with hundreds of extra officers, but the desperate bid ended in a failure that made national news.
This year, police watched the homicide rate plummet at the beginning of the year, often going days, and once a full week, without a single killing. But a recent surge has wiped out those once-hopeful statistics. There were 31 killings in October, 38 in November and 24 during the first two weeks of this month.
"It's a disappointment, but it's also a call to action," said Acting Police Commissioner Bert L. Shirey. "Statistics are meaningless when you think that each number on that sheet is someone whose family suffered a tragedy."
Baltimore's homicide rate made it the fourth-deadliest city per capita in the nation last year, and bucked a national trend of declining violence in cities such as Boston, Los Angeles, New York and Washington.
The number of people slain in Baltimore during the past decade would fill more than eight pages of listings in a city telephone book. "The citizens of Baltimore deserve better than this," Shirey said.
Alternately nicknamed Charm City and Mob Town, Baltimore has long had a reputation as a dangerous city. The killings this decade were exacerbated by the exodus of residents to the suburbs, estimated at 12,000 a year.
In 1972, when 330 people were slain, Baltimore had 905,000 residents. That record was topped in 1993, with 353 killings, when the population had dropped to 714,000. Last year, 314 homicides were recorded for 645,000 residents.
New York City, with 7.3 million people, had 2,245 homicides in 1990. That dropped to 588 in 1998, though it has risen to 636 through mid-December. Los Angeles, with 3.5 million people, has 412 slayings so far this year. Boston, with 555,000 residents, has 30.
Such comparisons helped Mayor Martin O'Malley take over City Hall on an anti-crime platform critical of the former administration's police commissioner and strategies for reducing violence. He promises to implement an assertive style of patrols similar to New York's zero-tolerance approach to clear drug markets and reduce the number of slayings.
Speaking last week on a street corner to announce a new round of state crime grants, the city's new mayor reiterated his campaign mantra that "crime is unacceptable in every neighborhood in Baltimore."
O'Malley blamed the continued slayings -- despite a 30 percent overall crime drop in the city during the past five years -- on too few arrests by homicide detectives and a courthouse overwhelmed with defendants.
"We have this ghoulish fascination with waiting around for the 300th body to hit the pavement," O'Malley told a crowd at Harford Road and The Alameda on Thursday. "What we should be concentrating on is solving the first murder of the year 2000. We can't have murderers on the street if we expect to reduce the violence and the carnage."
Police say most of the slayings are connected to the drug trade, fueled by an estimated 55,000 cocaine and heroin addicts in the city.
A study by a Harvard University criminologist completed in August proved what most police officials have long believed: Homicide suspects and homicide victims have much in common -- including involvement in drugs and lengthy arrest records.
The professor, David Kennedy, concluded that most of the violence comes from a disproportionately small number of people who can be identified as "impact players" and targeted by law enforcement.
Of 303 homicides and 210 murder suspects from 1997, Kennedy found each of the suspects had been arrested an average of 9.6 times before being charged in a killing and each of the victims had been arrested an average or 8.5 times before being slain.
The study also found that nearly half of the suspects were involved with a drug group and 60 percent of the slayings occurred in or near a street drug market. Many were committed during robberies of drug dealers.
Baltimore police have come up with similar results. Comprehensive data were not collected until 1995, so numbers dating to the onset of the decade were not available. But available information suggests 1998 was a typical year.
