In the squad room of Baltimore's famous homicide unit, the murder board is back, telling a more upbeat story.
For years, the wall-sized Formica board symbolized Baltimore's losing battle with violence, captivating viewers of the TV show "Homicide: Life on the Street." Yet frustrated police leaders viewed it as demoralizing, a reminder that killings in the city had spiraled out of control. They removed it two years ago.
"It got to be a morale factor," Detective Maj. Robert M. Stanton, commander of the homicide unit, said yesterday. "The detectives were getting their butts kicked."
This year, Stanton and homicide detectives asked to restore the white board, where names stenciled in black signified a solved case, red an open one. They were confident that they could raise the number of cases cleared and help reduce the number of city homicides.
Detectives are now clearing more than half the cases, a sign of a turnaround that has reduced city homicides this year to well under the 300-plus average of the past decade. The total yesterday stood at 258.
"There's more black on the board," Stanton said.
With two days to go, police were taking extra steps to keep more names from joining the list.
District sergeants, holding morning roll call yesterday before dispatching patrols in the city's nine police districts, pushed for a stepped-up effort to keep the streets as safe as possible, particularly with a football playoff game and New Year's celebration on the horizon tomorrow.
For the first time in a decade, the city is almost certain to finish with fewer than 300 killings. Part of the reason, police say, is that the number of cases closed by Baltimore homicide detectives is 20 percent higher than a year ago, when two of every three cases remained open.
Although this year's improvement isn't close to the 65 percent clearance rate Stanton remembers from a decade ago, morale in the squad is again rising.
In his first act after being inaugurated in December 1999, Mayor Martin O'Malley abolished the department's rotation policy. Under the policy, the police administration transferred detectives out of the homicide unit after a few years, trying to make each one a jack-of-all-trades.
Officers protested the policy, which cost Baltimore some of its most experienced homicide investigators.
