Baltimore will end 2008 tonight with its fewest homicides in two decades, fighting through a late-year spike to mark one of its biggest year-to-year drops.
The decline - a drop of almost 50 killings, from 282 to 234 as of midnight - continues a trend that began in late 2007 when Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III took command of the Police Department. It restores the city's homicide total to levels not seen since the late 1980s, before an infusion of crack cocaine routinely drove the annual body count above 300.
But the improvement has been tempered by several confounding factors. While homicides and nonfatal shootings are down, violent crime overall is largely unchanged and Baltimore remains one of the most violent large cities in the country. The killing of a former city councilman also served as a sobering reminder that while the majority of the victims are involved in the drug trade, the city's crime problem touches all corners.
Officials say that too much emphasis is placed on the city's homicide tally, yet they hope that this year's reductions can help convince an apathetic populace that change is possible.
"So much has been built around the homicide number that I think [a significant drop] can help galvanize people in the city around the possibilities of what can be accomplished here," Bealefeld said.
City leaders hope that a sustained decline might help shake Baltimore's violent reputation, a key to reversing decades of population decline and disinvestment in the inner city.
Relations among state and federal agencies - marked in the past by bickering and finger-pointing - are the strongest in recent memory, officials say. And the centerpiece of the city's crime prevention strategy - targeting the most violent offenders and those with prior handgun violations - appears to be paying off. A new unit, called the Violent Crimes Impact Division, sent hundreds of officers to West and East Baltimore, where some of the more notable homicide reductions have been achieved.
The city's Western District, for example, where nearly 90 people were killed in 1992, recorded 23 homicides in 2008. It has not recorded fewer than 32 homicides in a year since at least 1970.
But the Western District is also emblematic of the past year's uneven results: While it recorded the largest drop in homicides of any district, shootings rose and robberies increased by 37 percent.
Trina Johnson, 40, was arriving home Dec. 23 from her job as an intensive-care nurse at the University of Maryland Medical Center when she encountered flashing police lights and caution tape. The disparity of her neighborhood is striking: On one side of the street are new brick-front homes of Heritage Crossing, their grassy yards clean and windows decorated with Christmas lights.
But a flashing blue police light in front of those homes bounced off of two rundown convenience stores, where a man had just been shot in the head. That side of the street is marked by trash-strewn curbs and rowhouses, nearly all boarded up. Officers spoke to a woman seated in her car, too shaken by the incident to drive.
In a three-block radius, three people were killed in the five previous months, including Ronald Jackson, 14, who was shot while taking a grapefruit to an elderly neighbor. The man shot in the head that night, a former Marine, would die on Christmas Day.
"You can't tell by the numbers," Johnson said. "It's getting rough around here - people without jobs or getting out of jail. There's always shootings. I can't believe this is happening right around the corner from my house again."
A few nights earlier, neighborhood activists had gathered at the Western District police station for a holiday party. Elder C.W. Harris, founder of a recovery program for women called Martha's Place, sat behind a computer and stereo system playing Mary J. Blige songs as neighbors ate turkey, ham, corn and macaroni and cheese. Women got up and danced in step to "The Cupid Shuffle."
The residents say their efforts are paying off and that police have been more responsive to their concerns.
"This used to be the worst of the nine districts. All the misfits used to come here," asserted Pearl Moulton. "But we changed it."
It could be argued that Baltimore is only catching up to a nationwide trend. Last year, New York tallied its lowest number of homicides since 1963, while Chicago's count was its lowest since 1965. And Detroit, long linked with Baltimore at the top of most lists ranking urban violence, this year is set to record its lowest total in 40 years.
Among large cities, Baltimore's rate of 36 homicides per 100,000 residents is still higher than Washington (31), Philadelphia (22), Chicago (18), Boston (10) and New York (six). Detroit's rate fell to 37, keeping the two cities together near the top.
Still, in the past 40 years, only one Baltimore police commissioner has overseen a more substantial homicide drop, when there was a reduction of 59 homicides in 1976 under Donald C. Pomerleau.
Commissioner Edward T. Norris achieved a similar drop in killings in 2000, when homicides fell from 305 to 261. He said he and then-Mayor Martin O'Malley celebrated the milestone of falling below 300 by sharing a shot of Irish moonshine whiskey. But after clearing what he called "low-hanging fruit" and putting new initiatives in place, further gains proved difficult.
Norris, who now hosts a radio show and speaks often about crime, said the current administration's strategy is effective.
"I'm an advocate of keeping the pressure on every day - the crooks can feel it, when things are hot and when they're not," Norris said.
O'Malley, now governor, has rededicated the departments of Parole and Probation and Juvenile Services to work more closely with Baltimore, as well as Baltimore and Prince George's counties, on targeting those who are at risk for committing acts of violence or becoming victims.
The number of people on parole and probation charged with murder in Baltimore fell from 60 in 2006 to 19 in 2008. And homicides across the Baltimore region fell 20 percent in 2008, according to statistics provided by the state, with every county recording a decline.
"You've got to figure out who the most violent offenders are and try and predict who is the most likely to get back in the game," said Kristen Mahoney, director of the governor's Office of Crime Control & Prevention, who worked for the city from 1998 to 2007. "The [Baltimore] Police Department and Parole and Probation have done a tremendous job to reinvent themselves and walk lock-step in these cases."
As in years past, homicide suspects as well as victims were likely to have criminal records - 87 percent and 82 percent, respectively - and 34 percent of suspects and victims were on parole and probation at the time of the killing, statistics that officials say reinforce the need to serve warrants and watch closely for probation violations.
"I know the research says the ability of police to control or influence homicides is negligible," Bealefeld said. "But I've also been a cop here for 27 years, and I see dead guys that had open warrants on them. I see suspects that had open warrants on them at the time of their offenses. And that tells me, dig in on these warrants and maybe we can do something."
The overwhelming majority of the city's victims and suspects in 2008 were black, 91 percent and 94 percent, respectively, and nearly half were younger than 25. About 64 percent of the city's population is black.
Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox co-authored a recent study showing that gun violence among black youths, while still lower than a decade ago, is rising nationwide. From 2002 to 2007, the number of young black victims rose 54 percent, while such perpetrators rose 47 percent.
"It's not an aberration or a single-year blip," said Fox. "Especially in terms of juvenile justice, we're less equipped to deal with it now than we were a decade ago. There are initiatives and programs that work, but we've let them slide."
In Baltimore, which Fox's research shows had the second-highest number of young black perpetrators behind Detroit, the increase has been less pronounced. But Fox says change will also be harder to achieve here, grouping the city with six others whose problems are so deeply entrenched that programs working in other cities might have little effect.
"You can make improvements, absolutely, but you're not going to have a homicide rate that looks like Boston or Seattle. It's not going to happen," Fox said.
Standing near William C. March Middle School near Lake Clifton last week as police investigated an afternoon killing of a mother of three, James Johnson, 51, agreed that true progress seems far off.
"With the killings down, it does make things look better. But when you look at the whole picture, is it really better?" asked Johnson, a state employee. "With this drug thing we got going on, until they get that controlled, it's never going to be good."
Mayor Sheila Dixon, who often speaks of the city's crime problem in broader socioeconomic terms, said lasting change comes from "breaking cycles - of addiction, of accepting violence in homes and communities."
"People who don't care about life, who don't care about another person, speaks of some basic fundamental values that we could do everything in our power [to fix], but it has to start from home," she said. "There's many areas that we have to focus in on beyond just policing."
Officials throughout the year pointed to efforts that were fueling the decline. But the September killing of former City Councilman Kenneth N. Harris Sr. during a robbery at a Northeast Baltimore jazz club shocked the city, and a bloody November - in which 30 people were killed in 30 days - brought cautions from police and city officials that even their best efforts are often not enough.
Homicides are just a fraction of the total crimes that the Police Department deals with, and at community meetings residents more commonly express frustration about nuisance and property crimes. In the past year, there was a 6 percent increase in residential burglaries, a 10 percent rise in larcenies from vehicles and a 1 percent increase in property crimes overall.
"For most people, murder doesn't affect them," said security consultant Jerry "Buz" Buznuk, a retired Baltimore police captain who blogs about crime. "But if they get held up at a store or at the gas station, or their house gets broken into, or you call 911 and no one comes, you start to lose confidence."
Bealefeld said the city is not turning a blind eye to property crime, but violence must remain the focus. "No one who is the victim of a burglary or had their car stolen is going to say, 'It's OK, go ahead and catch the guys doing the shootings, I'll wait for you to get to me,' and they shouldn't have that expectation," he said. "But we can't even start getting people behind the fight unless we can demonstrate that we can do something about the murders here."
With the troubled economy prompting budget cuts, Dixon has said the city will have to "do more with less" and spend money more deliberately. But officials said they will not deviate from their current strategies, something that most observers agree on.
"Baltimore for too many years has jumped from one strategy to the next," said Daniel Webster, co- director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy Research, who has advised the city on gun policies. "We finally have some stability at the top of the Police Department and better cooperation among various law enforcement agencies. It's working, why tinker with it?"
