Relations between residents and the police were ruined. City prosecutors maintained a secret list of officers they did not trust to testify in court. Officers who made lots of arrests, or found lots of guns, benefited from impunity-carrying on working even when accused of civil-rights violations. The problem with the way it was done in Baltimore was that it was not intelligence led, and so not sustainable. Flooding high-crime areas to search for guns can reduce violence, says Mr Webster. A large share were released without charge. In 2003 over 110,000 people were arrested. Cops were directed to flood crime hotspots and search almost everybody. In the decade or two before the riots the bpd had a zero-tolerance approach to policing. In essence, a model of policing that relied heavily on mass arrests rather than intelligence gathering suddenly and catastrophically failed. But Mr Webster puts forward what is probably the most accepted explanation. Understanding the exact causal mechanism is difficult. “I had this sinking feeling that we were in for a very long period of trouble.” Violent crime usually climbs after riots it did so in 1968, after the murder of Martin Luther King. “I can remember so vividly as I watched parts of Baltimore burn,” he says. A predictable upsurgeĭaniel Webster, who studies gun violence at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, says that this was predictable. By the end of 2015 the city had suffered almost 350 murders, up from 211 in 2014. But almost immediately afterwards, the rate began climbing. Before Gray’s death, homicides in Baltimore had averaged around 200 a year, a big number for a city of only 600,000. By nightfall, buildings across the city were ablaze and dozens, if not hundreds, of businesses had been looted.
After days of peaceful protests, teenagers who had walked out of school started looting a pharmacy. The arrest was captured by bystanders on mobile phones.īefore his funeral two weeks later, anger at the police department reached boiling point. When the van stopped, his spine was almost severed. Mr Gray was bundled into a van and driven round the city at high speed without being strapped in. On April 12th 2015 Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old, was picked up by police officers in West Baltimore who searched him and found a knife (which is not illegal). And it did so in response to a riot, sparked by police brutality. Yet unlike other cities, Baltimore’s homicide rate did not spike in 2020: it soared earlier, in 2015, and has remained elevated ever since. Few cities illustrate the unhappy relationship between broken policing and violent crime better than Baltimore.
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