Good news if you can believe it.


By Annie Linskey and Nick Madigan | Sun Reporters



The Barclay neighborhood is like much of blighted Baltimore. Gang graffiti cover vacant rowhouses. Blue-light police surveillance cameras twinkle overhead at night. And residents have witnessed plenty of bloodshed - last year 10 people were gunned down there.

But this year something has changed in the community just south of quiet Charles Village. There's been just one homicide, a stabbing in January.

"You feel more comfortable," Solomon Rose, 59, said last week while sitting on the front steps of his Brentwood Avenue house. "At nighttime, we used to go inside when it got dark. Now, not so much. The gangs used to run through here, knocking kids down."

It's a pattern that many other neighborhoods are seeing, despite Friday's killing of the former police commissioner's stepdaughter and last weekend's high-profile homicides in Federal Hill and West Baltimore. In the first six months of this year, the pace of killings and shootings in Baltimore has slowed significantly - a trend that officials attribute to new crime-fighting strategies, including a focus on the city's most violent criminals. If that trend continues, the city could register the lowest homicide rate since 1988, a year before crack cocaine-fueled violence hit America's inner cities.

There have been 104 homicides in the city by Friday, compared with 153 at this time last year. Shootings are down by 26 percent over last year, from 361 to 266 as of Friday. Meanwhile, rates of other violent crime, including assaults, rapes and robberies, has not changed much since 2007, police statistics show.

"There is something really special going on in Baltimore," said David Kennedy, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York who is familiar with crime patterns in Baltimore. "You are seeing reductions in the worst violent crime and not so much in the other crime. There is something particular going on with the kind of violent crime that has plagued Baltimore for such a long time."

Kennedy and other experts rejected the notion that the falling homicide and shooting numbers could be flukes.

"You don't get rid of 50 homicides without something fundamental going on," Kennedy said.

But even the Police Department's biggest cheerleaders remain cautious, recognizing that the summer months in Baltimore tend to be the most violent.

Some cities have seen increases in homicide rates this year, with a 10 percent rise in Los Angeles and a 7.6 percent rise in New York, which posted a record low in 2007. Philadelphia has had a 20 percent decrease in homicides and Washington, D.C., has posted a 1 percent decrease.

Theories vary about the drop in Baltimore. But dozens of on- and off-the-record conversations with police officers, commanders and prosecutors touched on a central theme: a police focus on gathering intelligence about a small circle of violent people and more effectively acting on the information to build strong cases against them.

That plan emerged last year when Mayor Sheila Dixon directed police to find and imprison the city's most violent residents. Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III, who assumed control of the department last July amid an upswing in murders, pulled roughly 250 officers into a group called the Violent Crime Impact Division.

Fifty of that division's officers were sent to the Eastern District (they also work in Barclay, though it is technically in the Northern) and another 50 went to the Western District armed with lists of people with violent criminal histories.

Police draw up the most-wanted lists with the help of informants, homicide investigators and patrol officers. The targets: residents who've been convicted of violent crimes and are out on probation, residents who have "beaten" charges, and even residents who have been homicide suspects but were never charged.

"You don't have to build a murder case to get a murderer off the streets," said Jason M. Weinstein, the prosecutor in charge of the U.S. Attorney's violent crime section. His office works closely with city police to bring federal charges against targeted individuals.

Weinstein and other representatives from the various law enforcement agencies meet and e-mail frequently about suspects on these lists. And they automatically get an e-mail when one of the targets is arrested, making it much more difficult for them to fall between the cracks.

One person on the list is 20-year-old Donatello Fenner, whose criminal record includes a 2005 charge of assault and a 2006 charge of armed robbery. Both charges were dropped. Still, Bealefeld says Fenner is involved in the Young Gorilla Family gang, which was at the center of much of last year's violence in Barclay.

"We try to keep very good track of him. We think he's a catalyst for violence in the neighborhood," Bealefeld said of Fenner, who was found guilty in April of having a concealed weapon and is serving a nine-month prison term, according to court records.

The police strategy is the latest step in data-driven policies. A department analysis determined that last year 50 percent of the city's homicide suspects had gun charges in their records, so now police are focused on gun offenses.

"If we hammer away at that issue we are going to save lives," Bealefeld said. "We are going to pick up someone in that net and catch them before they commit another murder."



However, not all Barclay residents view the police campaign positively. On Barclay Street last week, a group of men smoked cigarettes during a break from a Narcotics Anonymous meeting. Several said they had been harassed by police more than once simply for standing there.

"It reflects poorly on the police," said Sam Harris, 49, who has been going to the meetings for four years and attends Baltimore City Community College with the aim of becoming a nutritionist. "The people they should be looking out for are the ones who are robbing and stealing and killing. They're the ones who get away. The ones like us who aren't doing anything are the ones who are getting harassed."

In a dozen interviews with residents, that sentiment arose again and again.

Bealefeld said such criticism does not surprise him. "I don't see that as our failure or that ... we'll never have a relationship [in Barclay]. It just should make us more committed to being there and working that out. You can't go and act like having a block party is going to solve it. They'll come along."

The commissioner plans widespread training - and this year put an entire shift of 30 officers through a month-long course - so officers will know how to connect with members of the community. In confirmation hearings this week, he said that he wants to free up patrol officers to walk their posts for some period of time every day.

Meanwhile, other agencies are helping to drive down crime.

The state's attorney's office and the parole and probation agents are building cases against people they view as violent, if they commit crimes or break the terms of their supervision, even on the smallest infraction. In three neighborhoods, Health Department pilot projects allow former gang members to mediate street-level disputes before they turn violent. There is talk of including more hospitals in a successful program run out of the University of Maryland Shock Trauma Center that reached out to gunshot victims. And schools are using more in-school suspensions to deal with children who have behavior problems

"There is a tremendous sense that all the agencies need to be supporting the mission to reduce violence," said Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, the city's health commissioner. "Our job is to keep pushing forward."

One pattern to watch closely in the city's crime data is the robbery rate, said Richard Rosenfeld, a professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. It is up 5 percent over last year, according to police statistics from last week. "If they continue up, that will put upward pressure on the homicides," he said.

Simply comparing year-to-year homicides rates can be deceptive because there was a spike in 2007. Nonetheless, this year's homicides numbers have, month by month, consistently fallen below or matched averages for the past nine years.

For example, since 1999, there have been an average of 25 homicides in January; this year there were 14. In February the city fell below the average of 17 homicides by three. The city also fell short of averages for April and May and was behind the June average as of Friday.

Over time the city's population has shrunk, and the murder rate climbed from around 30 homicides per 100,000 residents in the late 1980s to a high of 49 per hundred thousand in 1993, when 353 people were killed Baltimore, according to data from police and the U.S. Census Bureau.

Last year, the rate was 44 slayings per hundred thousand. If homicides continue on their current pace, this year there will be 32 per 100,000, the lowest since 1998.

"If we post this result and it holds up to the end of the year, people will be happy," Bealefeld said. "But our critics would be right to say, 'Now what are you going to do? Let's see you keep going. Let's see you sustain that.'

"That is what we should be doing. We should be dedicating ourselves to sustaining that."

annie.linskey@baltsun.com