September 27, 2009
Reducing Baltimore's homicide rate will take more than just getting illegal guns off the streets and arresting the most violent offenders. It will also require putting more resources into apprehending the illegal-gun dealers who provide the weapons that fuel the city's homicide epidemic.
That's the conclusion to be drawn from Sun reporter Peter Hermann's perplexing report last week that the steady decline in nonfatal shootings in Baltimore over the last 12 years has not been matched by a comparable drop in gun fatalities.
Mr. Hermann reported that while nonfatal shootings in Baltimore dropped 60 percent between 1996 and 2008, homicides fell by less than half that much. A decade ago, one of every six shooting victims died of their injuries. Today that figure is closer to one in three. Put another way, today's victims are nearly twice as likely to be killed in a shooting than they were 12 years ago, despite advances in medical science and quicker emergency response times.
Have weapons gotten more lethal? Do today's killers have better aim? The result seems counterintuitive to police accustomed to thinking of fatal shootings as homicides that failed. According to that model, a drop in nonfatal shootings should be accompanied by a corresponding decline in homicide deaths.
That this has not been the case suggests that police may need to rethink their overall strategy, which so far has been based on going after the violent, repeat offenders who commit most serious crimes, and confiscating their weapons.
That approach undoubtedly has produced successes. Last year, homicides reached a 20-year low in the city, and despite a string of shootings involving multiple victims over the summer, Baltimore is on track to match or even beat that record this year.
But police have had less success in shutting down the illegal trade in weapons that fuels such violence. A revised strategy would target not only the criminals who use guns but also the gun dealers who supply them. Once the illegal guns get into criminals' hands, it can be too late.
Consider the example of Newark, N.J., a hard-pressed, post-industrial city with a violent crime problem that is in many respects comparable to Baltimore's. But last year Newark's homicide rate was only about 24 for every 100,000 people, compared to Baltimore's nearly 37 per 100,000. What accounts for the difference?
The guns confiscated by Newark's police were just as lethal as those in Baltimore, and the city has a similar hard core of violent repeat offenders who commit most of its serious crime. But for reasons both historical and geographical, criminals have a far harder time obtaining guns in Newark than in Baltimore. In fact, the easy availability of guns here turns out to be one of the biggest differences between the two cities.
Homicide is a complex issue, and there are many factors that influence the murder rate, including community policing strategies, violence-reduction initiatives and neighborhood intervention programs that mediate disputes between rival gangs. The fact that nonfatal shootings have steadily declined in Baltimore suggests that community-based efforts like the Safe Streets program have been at least partially successful in deterring some gun violence, particularly among juveniles.
But the worst violent offenders can't be reached by such programs. They must be disarmed - and the dealers who supply them put out of business. That will require beefing up police operations like the gun trace unit that tracks and apprehends illegal-gun dealers. Unlike the drug trade, which has hundreds of suppliers, there are only a relative handful of illegal firearms dealers. Shutting them down could put a real crimp in the killing.
City police can't do it alone, however: They'll need help from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives as well as the cooperation of Maryland state police and local police in neighboring jurisdictions. Gov. Martin O'Malley and Mayor Sheila Dixon must push for a coordinated statewide effort with federal support.
The drug trade is a violent business, and it's rendered all the more deadly by the abundance of illegal weaponry that finds its way to Baltimore. The prevalence of guns creates a "shoot first, ask questions later" mentality, lest one's adversary gain the advantage.
Yet most of the city's crime-fighting effort remains focused on a fruitless war on drugs rather than on putting illegal gun dealers behind bars. It's time to consider whether we're fighting the wrong war, and whether a revised strategy might be better suited to the reality of Baltimore's epidemic gun violence.
