Dave Hunt is creating Songs & Videos
Teaching the world about posts
What will I do with Patron support?
"In 2000, as Martin O’Malley took over as mayor of Baltimore and promised to bring crime under control, there was worry on the part of some in the city that the zero-policing, broken-windows strategies he hoped to import from New York might result in a culture of mass arrest and a dimunition of civil liberties.
A year later, after Police Commissioner Ed Norris had trimmed 43 murders to drop Baltimore under the 300-homicide-a-year mark for the first time in a decade, Mr. O’Malley could note — and did note to the New York Times — that the achievement had come without any corresponding increase in the rate of arrest.
“It never happened,” the new mayor said, proudly. “We turned the murder rate by doing a better job of arresting the hard-core criminals.”
And they had. And though Mr. O’Malley at that time claimed an annual arrest total of 78,000 — it would eventually be recorded as 8,000 more than that — he was justified in contending that his administration had made a meaningful and substantial reduction in the murder rate and had done so without resorting to the mass arrests and overpolicing that his opponents had feared.
The quote was telling in that the new mayor clearly understood that while much was being claimed for the Guiliani-Bratton policing methods in New York, there could be a civic cost to indulging in an excess of street arrests in communities that had already come to look upon the Baltimore department with considerable distrust. Mr. O’Malley was instead citing quality over quantity, and making that a hallmark of his new administration.
As a Baltimore resident and someone who had covered crime in the city, I was impressed. Now, Mr. O’Malley said, looking ahead, the task was to reduce the murder rate below 200. His political campaign had promised a ceiling of 175 city murders by 2002, and Commissioner Norris, a veteran detective and supervisor from the NYPD, had clearly re-established retroactive investigation as a departmental priority. In Mr. O’Malley’s first year in office, the clearance rate of current-year murders improved from little more than a third of the total in 1999 to over half of the 2000 cases cleared. Because of aggressive warrant service on old cases from previous years, which allowed the department to credit clearances without counting crimes, the less-meaningful public number was even fatter for outside consumption, even ridiculously so. But still, the trend seemed promising."
“It never happened,” the new mayor said, proudly. “We turned the murder rate by doing a better job of arresting the hard-core criminals.”
And they had. And though Mr. O’Malley at that time claimed an annual arrest total of 78,000 — it would eventually be recorded as 8,000 more than that — he was justified in contending that his administration had made a meaningful and substantial reduction in the murder rate and had done so without resorting to the mass arrests and overpolicing that his opponents had feared.
The quote was telling in that the new mayor clearly understood that while much was being claimed for the Guiliani-Bratton policing methods in New York, there could be a civic cost to indulging in an excess of street arrests in communities that had already come to look upon the Baltimore department with considerable distrust. Mr. O’Malley was instead citing quality over quantity, and making that a hallmark of his new administration.
As a Baltimore resident and someone who had covered crime in the city, I was impressed. Now, Mr. O’Malley said, looking ahead, the task was to reduce the murder rate below 200. His political campaign had promised a ceiling of 175 city murders by 2002, and Commissioner Norris, a veteran detective and supervisor from the NYPD, had clearly re-established retroactive investigation as a departmental priority. In Mr. O’Malley’s first year in office, the clearance rate of current-year murders improved from little more than a third of the total in 1999 to over half of the 2000 cases cleared. Because of aggressive warrant service on old cases from previous years, which allowed the department to credit clearances without counting crimes, the less-meaningful public number was even fatter for outside consumption, even ridiculously so. But still, the trend seemed promising."
;){kind=link}
;){kind=link}