Former Richmond Chief Rodney Monroe, who now leads Charlotte's department, said he hired a community advocate to begin mending the department's relationship with the public. She organized candlelight vigils after each slaying and helped spark outrage over the violence. He said tips began coming into the advocate.
Homicides in Richmond peaked at 160 cases in 1994, while Baltimore suffered 282 last year.
The decline in Baltimore's clearance rate began in the 1990s. At that time, a new police commissioner, Thomas C. Frazier, came to Baltimore from California and adopted a West Coast policing strategy. It involved rotating officers out of specialty units and putting veteran homicide detectives on patrol and in desk jobs, in part to open slots for women and minorities.
His theory was to build a well-rounded and egalitarian department, but many detectives "jumped before they were pushed," said Gary McLhinney, a former head of the police union.
Amid the exodus of veteran detectives, the clearance rate plummeted to its lowest point in nearly three decades in 1998. Frazier left to join the Justice Department the next year. The former commissioner declined to comment for this article.
In 1999, newly elected Mayor Martin O'Malley abolished the rotation policy on his second day in office.
The new commissioner, Ed Norris, rehired veteran detectives as consultants, using them to train and assist new detectives.
He also reversed the city's crime-fighting strategy, rejecting Frazier's idea of a police officer as a "social worker with a gun" and replacing it with aggressive - but, Norris insists, targeted - enforcement.
The department briefly returned to 1980s-era clearance levels, which Norris attributed to his attention to about 250 outstanding warrants for murder and attempted murder.
Under his "zero tolerance" policies, Norris said, when a murder occurred, he ordered officers to arrest anyone doing anything illegal in the area, from playing dice to smoking joints. Detectives would then interrogate those people for information about the homicide.
The zero-tolerance approach later came under criticism for fracturing relations with the community. Norris said the practice was taken too far by his successors; the number of criminal cases in the city increased by nearly 20,000 the fiscal year after he left the department.
