Time to get inside the heads of the city's killers

IT'S TIME to rethink murder, Baltimore style.

The death numbers are spiking again, moving back toward the 300-a-year level. More people die every day in Baltimore, it seems, than in Baghdad.

It's drug-related, of course. But we have to start thinking outside the drug box, outside the gun control box, outside the bad-guys-killing-bad-guys box, outside all the usual boxes.

We're not getting there right now. "There" is in the minds of the shooters. If we don't know how they think, we aren't going to stop the action that thinking inspires.

It's possible, of course, maybe even likely, that there's not much that passes for thinking.

Various studies show that killer and victim are criminals with records.

The dead are overwhelmingly black - 150 of 160 in the city so far this year. They're male and they're young: 85 were 24 years old or younger; 19 were 10 to 17 years old. Three were under 10.

Of the 160 victims, 51 were shot in the head. Accounts of these deaths in the newspaper read like executions. No one gets shot once, it seems. In 114 of 160 cases, no motive could be established. How much killing is there for killing's sake? Tough question, has to be asked.

These numbers are offered not for prurient value but to show the force and momentum of the problem. Our failure to stop the killing isn't about apathy. People burn out trying to stop the drug dealing and the killing. Parents, police, teachers, politicians, youth workers - kids themselves. They'll burn out faster if they think no one knows how hard they're trying.

This isn't a finger-pointing exercise. It's about wondering if we understand the problem. It's not just the killing. So many who survive are dead men (and women) walking, doomed by neglect, doomed by criminal records at an early age, doomed by so much death.

Is it just the drug wars? Or is there something else?

Drugs, yes, but something else, too, says Philip Leaf of the Johns Hopkins Center for the Prevention of Youth Violence. "Drugs," he observes, "are [in every U.S. city], but not the same level of killing. Something else is going on here."

David Miller, who runs Youth Links, another outreach program, offers this: "Hurt people hurt back. In many communities, you have adults who were victims of trauma as children. We have large numbers who have lived this cycle. Violence has become an integral part of their lives. Violence is as integral for them as going to Starbucks for others."

At Lombard Middle School, he and John Zesiger, a teacher there, started a poetry program. It became a mirror into the minds of creative young people who live in the inner city.

"I saw a woman get pistol-whipped today because she came up short with the money," writes one young girl.

"I feel like God is sweeping up this world like a broom," writes another.

"Every night on my block I hear gun shots ring.

"And people standing on the corner they got a head but no brain.

"People don't care about people getting killed."

It's not true. People do care. But perception can matter more than the truth. How can the caring be communicated?

Councilman Kenneth N. Harris Sr. took 200 kids to the National Aquarium in Baltimore. "The drug dealers," he says, "are outrecruiting us." Mr. Harris also works with a Little League group that occupies 500 city kids.

Hope springs from minds you thought were slammed shut.

"If you go out in the communities, talk to people, even the drug dealers - even the drug dealers - are sick and tired of the killing," says Mr. Miller.

State's Attorney Patricia C. Jessamy looks for leverage in communities. Under Project Safe Neighborhoods, all the dealers, ex-cons, parolees and assorted other bad guys have been called in for meetings and told they were being targeted - for more jail or for help in another direction. School, training and various other helping efforts were there if people wanted to use them.

Why does anyone think such an appeal would work?

Fear. And even the users and the drug dealers burn out. The folklore about going to jail as a rite of passage may be accurate for some, but many have not lost contact with their own aspirations, their families and their hope. Many do have brains.

Police Commissioner Kevin P. Clark wants a civil citation program to warn people off the drug corners. Arrests get people off the street momentarily, but they also recruit people into criminal life. Better to warn them away; better to hope their thinking will change.

Carl Stokes, the former councilman, says Baltimore city streets are populated by "invisible men," borrowing on the title of Ralph Ellison's famous novel Invisible Man. But too many of these men, hiding from the police, believe invisibility is a virtue. More deadly thinking.

"Something else" is in the mind of the city's young killing class. We have to find out what it is. We have to believe we can.

C. Fraser Smith is an editorial writer for The Sun. His column appears Sundays.