Baltimore homicides down to 1980s levels

On the streets, Detective Danny Danzy is known as a “bodysnatcher.”

He’s on the front lines of Baltimore’s battle to reduce homicides, and his job is to find violent suspects who should be in jail — people who, according to research, are more likely than the rest of the population to become killers or murder victims.

The detective goes out most mornings with a list of people with warrants. He knocks on doors, taps on windows, shines his flashlight into desolate row homes. When it’s obvious a suspect is holed up inside, he uses a battering ram.

Danzy is part of the city’s Warrant Apprehension Task Force. His rounds are getting credit for reducing the homicide rate in one of the nation’s most violent cities. Through Wednesday morning, there were 234 homicides in 2008, the lowest total in 20 years. That’s down 17 percent from 2007, when the city had 282 homicides.

“It’s an encouraging start,” Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III said. “We’re posting some real results.”

But Bealefeld and Mayor Sheila Dixon don’t downplay Baltimore’s violence. “We have a long way to go,” Dixon said.

For a city of about 624,000 residents, the homicide rate translates to 37.5 slayings per 100,000 people. That rate, based on 2007 FBI data, would make Baltimore the third-bloodiest city in the nation with a population of 250,000 or more, behind Detroit and St. Louis.

Baltimore’s 2008 numbers would be lower if not for a grim finish: 52 people were slain in November and December. The city hasn’t had fewer than 200 slayings since the 1970s.

Still, the return to a total consistent with what Baltimore endured in the 1980s, when the city averaged 226 slayings per year, is welcome. Homicides topped 300 every year during the 1990s, when the scourges of crack and heroin led to turf wars that earned Maryland’s largest city the nickname “Bodymore, Murdaland” and inspired the shows “Homicide: Life on the Street” and “The Wire.”

City leaders can be proud of their accomplishments, said Daniel Webster, co-director of the Center for Gun Policy and Research at Johns Hopkins University. Fewer homicides “translates into lives saved, fewer family tragedies and hopefully a sense within Baltimore neighborhoods of a somewhat greater sense of safety,” Webster said.

He believes the trend will continue if police continue targeting illegal guns and the people who carry them.

However, criminologist James Alan Fox of Northeastern University in Boston said a one-year drop in homicides doesn’t prove a city has found lasting solutions to violent crime.

“There is a certain degree of randomness with homicide counts,” Fox said. “When cities have large one-year drops, they tend to go up the following year. When cities have large one-year jumps, they tend to go down.”

Homicides nationwide are down since the mid-1990s, but in the last eight years there have been few clear national or regional trends, Webster said.

The homicide total in Washington, D.C., was up slightly in 2008, while Philadelphia experienced a 15 percent drop. Detroit saw a drop of about 13 percent.

Critics have blamed Baltimore’s homicide rate in part on turnover in the police commissioner’s office. Slayings began declining almost immediately after Bealefeld, a Baltimore native with 27 years of experience in the department, took over in July. His message was simple: Target “bad guys with guns.”

Among other things, Bealefeld’s strategy changed how the Warrant Apprehension Task Force does business. Warrants are served more systematically, with a person’s criminal history dictating how aggressively police seek him.

On a recent morning, several teams of officers fanned out in unmarked cars, each officer with names from a list of “priority warrants.” The list included hundreds of names — all of people previously arrested or convicted in violent crimes.

Even on a morning when he knocked on a dozen doors in three hours without making an arrest, Danzy kept his faith in the strategy.

“It’s an awesome idea. We’ve started focusing on the 1 or 2 percent that cause all the problems,” Danzy said.

Stronger partnerships with state and federal agencies have also been critical.

U.S. Attorney Rod J. Rosenstein has made gun crime a priority since he took office in July 2005. His office works with city, state and federal agencies to identify criminals who might be candidates for federal prosecutions and to do what Rosenstein calls “proactive investigations” — using surveillance and wiretaps — to build cases against them.

He said the program works because people with criminal records who use guns can receive long prison sentences in the federal system. For example, drug dealer Jermaine Bell was sentenced in December to 30 years in federal prison for paying $45,000 for the murders of a leader of a rival drug gang and his two associates.

“A large number of violent, repeat offenders in Baltimore city have been removed from the community for long periods of time — 10, 20, 30, 40 years,” Rosenstein said. “We’re getting the worst of the worst so they’re not in a position to commit any more murders.”

The city is also getting increased cooperation from the state Division of Parole and Probation, through the new Violence Prevention Initiative. Offenders on parole or probation who fit certain criteria — younger than 29, with records of multiple arrests and who have used guns before — receive increased supervision and a zero-tolerance policy for violations.

There were more than 2,300 people in the statewide Violence Prevention Initiative database at the end of November, including 1,200 in Baltimore, said Philip Pie, executive director of the Division of Parole and Probation. When those offenders violate parole, warrants for their arrest become priorities for Danzy and his colleagues.