Baltimore’s Turn

When I went to Baltimore in 1999 and became a cop, I thought my first book was going to be about Baltimore’s Great Crime Drop. A national “trend” and all. It seemed Baltimore’s turn. But it didn’t happen. That’s not how crime works. But it’s happening now! Well worth reading this by Charles Fain Lehman: https://www.thefp.com/p/baltimore-crime-rate-drop

When I went to Baltimore in 1999 and became a cop, I thought my first book was going to be about Baltimore’s Great Crime Drop. A national “trend” and all. It seemed Baltimore’s turn. But it didn’t happen. That’s not how crime works. But it’s happening now! Baltimore has always been a bit resistant to national trends. And sure, it’s fun to say: “That’s just Baldimore, hon!” But looking at _why_ the city bucks so-called trends is revealing. (thread)

Baltimore was a blue-collar union town that lost its blue-collar union jobs. The population peaked in 1950 at just under 1 million people. This happened in many cities. (Indeed, one could call it a national trend.) But it hit Baltimore pretty hard. The city peaked in population in the 1950s at one million. Then the population would drop every year until 2014, when it rose ever so slightly as violence declined. And then with riots and violence exploding in 2015, the decline continued. The current pop is about ~570,000.

Let’s take modern Baltimore’s crime history back to the election of Kurt Schmoke as mayor in 1988. He pushed “harm reduction” and an end to the war on drugs. The city had 226 murders in 1987. I arrived in Baltimore during his last months in office in 1999. Coming from Harvard, where the well-educated progressive mayor was lauded, I was shocked to find how unpopular he was in Baltimore. Not an unmitigated disaster, but certainly a mitigated one. Murders were above 300. Quality of life was terrible. Vacant buildings, residential and commercial. Addicts scavenged the city for _anything_ they could sell, and then nodded out on the sidewalk. Martin O’Malley, a white mayor in a majority black city, took over in 2000 and did an OK job.

The problem was crime, and his “let’s arrest our way out of the murder problem” tactic did bring down murders a bit, but ultimately failed. I describe this in my book “Cop in the Hood.” The policing strategy was just “more,” and was not focused on the smaller number of repeat violent offenders. I left the city in 2001 to finish my PhD. Arrests peaked at 108,000 in 2003. Then something interesting happened….

After 2003, both arrests and murders started to decline. Policing was getting more targeted, and prosecution was playing its role. In 2011 murders dipped below 200 for the first time since like WWII or something. Arrests were down to 60,000. A lot, but down 40% from 2003. This is important because you see it time and time again in cities with big declines in murder. Arrests often also go down. Because policing gets smarter and doesn’t judge success on arrests numbers. Now this was only a 1/3rd reduction in murders, but still. Good for Baltimore.

This all went to hell in 2015, with the Freddie Gray riots and depolicing and also the massive Gun Trace Task Force scandal. This pattern of urban disorder and depolicing and a massive increase in violence happened in most of the rest of the nation 5 years later, in 2020. Here, Baltimore was ahead of the national trend for once, albeit a bad one. Baltimore did not see a rise in violence in 2020. The city had already somewhat depoliced in 2015, and settled on a new, more violent status quo. There were 25,000 arrests in 2019. Finally the city started to turn around for the better in 2022.

Worth noting that there were 17,188 arrests in 2025. While this is *way* down from historic levels, it’s still significantly up from 11,000 in 2022. Arrests are a tool, not a cure-all. But if you arrest and prosecute and incarcerate the right people, violence goes down.