In the latest effort to reduce violent crime on the streets of Baltimore, Mayor Catherine E. Pugh last week fired the veteran police commissioner, Kevin Davis, and named a new leader, Darryl DeSousa. Among the sober thinkers at City Hall, this is widely perceived as comparable to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
As 2017 came to a close, Baltimore had 57 murders for every 100,000 inhabitants. That’s the highest rate in the country. In New York, they had 3 murders per 100,000 last year.
In Baltimore, we had 345 homicides last year. But that figure is misleading. We had more than a thousand shootings, but we have a generation of doctors and nurses who have gotten miraculously good at keeping the wounded alive.
So why the lack of optimism over the new commissioner? Actually, it has little to do with DeSousa, who’s a career pro with roots deep in the department and the city itself.
It has to do with problems beyond the reach of the police. They can’t change the gun laws, and therefore can’t stop the easy circulation of guns. They can’t change the narcotics culture, including the half-century so-called “War on Drugs,” which was lost long ago. Narcotics continue to fuel the overwhelming percentage of the street violence.
The police can’t reach into reach into people’s homes either, where children grow up with only one parent – or often only a grandparent – who’s offering any stability. The police can’t do anything about the historically large gap between the super rich and the permanently poor, certainly not at a time when the latest tax legislation out of Washington absurdly gives the biggest financial breaks to those who need it the least.
At a time when education is more important than ever, and college is more expensive than ever, these kids realize pretty early on that the game’s been rigged – and they’ve been shut out of any reasonable chance at a middle-class life. The police can’t convince them to stay in school. They can’t convince them that learning French irregular verbs will help get them into college. They can’t take away anybody’s sheer frustration and rage.
Also, the police can’t take away a growing perception about the city of Baltimore: that it’s getting too dangerous to go there. The perception is wrong. The violence is awful in certain parts of town, but mostly absent in lots of other areas. But every time we learn about another homicide or another carjacking or stabbing, the perception solidifies and becomes pervasive.
Ask any restaurant owner what that means, or ask the Orioles, or the people who run the city’s museums.
And changing the leadership of the police department might offer some fresh insights into crime. But it won’t extend a single officer’s reach into the places where law enforcement simply doesn’t touch.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” has just been re-issued in paperback by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
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