Count falls, hopes rise

City's 2008 homicide total drops to late 1980s level as police target most-violent offenders

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?"