Efforts to cut crime were also hampered by bad blood between police and prosecutors, particularly after O'Malley unleashed a profanity-laced tirade at State's Attorney Patricia C. Jessamy. She later became a public critic of the zero-tolerance policy.
"Their message was, 'These guys are really inept. No wonder people don't trust you,' " Norris said. "It became a self-fulfilling prophecy."
Jessamy said she never attacked the department but disagreed with police commanders on policy. "My position has always been that it's not the number of arrests that count; it's the quality of the arrests that count."
City police and the FBI define a case as "cleared" when there is an arrest or when the case is cleared by "exception," often when the killer has been killed.
After The Sun ran a 2002 series, Justice Undone, which documented repeated failures to obtain justice for murder victims, prosecutors began tightening their procedures.
Foremost among the changes was that Jessamy's office assumed power over charging murder suspects.
McLarney said he has about a dozen homicide cases in which he is ready to make an arrest, but the cases "are not prosecutable by most standards."
And he said that although disagreements with prosecutors can be fierce and frequent, the homicide unit "isn't going to be rushed into anything that will be detrimental to an eventual prosecution."
Cherry and McLarney said police are working around the stop-snitching culture by arresting homicide suspects on gun or drug charges.
Such efforts are not reflected in homicide clearance rates.
McLarney pointed to the case of Johnnie "JR" Butler, 33, who was arrested by city detectives and federal drug agents in a September raid targeting his heroin organization. Detectives, he said, believe that Butler has played a role in at least three homicides.
"You have to remember a lot of our [homicide] cases are drug-related," he said.
"You're going to have evidentiary issues in a lot of them. That's why we use our drug squads and federal partners, and we target people. There's no way for me to take those arrests and put them in [the homicide clearance rate], but people are going to jail."
calculating the clearance rate
The Baltimore police and Federal Bureau of Investigation's uniform crime reporting program use the same formula to calculate clearance rates. It is the number of homicide cases cleared in a calendar year divided by the total number of homicides recorded that year. Sometimes homicides aren't cleared until years after they occurred, so if a city solves older cases, it can achieve a clearance rate above 100 percent.
