After reading his article about the jubilation felt by Baltimore city officials about the drop in shootings I felt the same way that I felt after watching PBS's "NOW" on their tour of the state of medical care in the African nation of Rwanda: The "success" is only relevant to the dramatically low expectations that one is working from in the first place.
There is no one on this planet who would go over to neighboring Montgomery County, note that ONLY one person per day has been shot somewhere in the county and attempt to market this as a success. This is preposterous!!
When officials in these type of dysfunctional cities are allowed to set their own terms for their own success - we get jubilant reports like this.
For a people who think that the police represent the #1 threat to the Black community- they sure are depended upon greatly to keep the crime under control. Isn't Baltimore the home of the NAACP? Why aren't they using their own backyard as a testbed for their "non-police" interdiction against crime?
Oh I see - There is no ultimate CONSEQUENCE for them failing to do so.
Baltimore Sun Story:
The shooting alerts hit the city police commanders' BlackBerrys in rapid-fire succession.
Friday at 3:03 p.m., 6:20 p.m., 9:52 p.m. and 11:07 p.m.; Saturday at 1:45 a.m., 3 a.m., 1 p.m., 1:06 p.m., 1:13 p.m., 4:01 p.m. and 9:20 p.m.; Sunday at 11:43 a.m. and 11 p.m.
In all, 13 shootings, 15 victims, three of them dead.
Amid the bloodshed, Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III ordered his top staff to convene Saturday to make sure detectives had a handle on the violence. "I wanted to push to see if we're looking deeper into these cases," he said.
The response to the shootings, with recollections still fresh of when gunfire felled 18 people on a single day in July, underscores the department's urgency. Police have long considered a shooting in which the victim survived to be nothing more than a homicide that failed, and they say reductions in this category proves they are making strides in curbing violence.
Nonfatal shootings in Baltimore, according to the latest numbers through Sept. 12, are down 26 percent this year compared with last. Police say 318 people have been shot and survived their wounds, compared with 429 at this time in 2008.
Bealefeld is pleased with the trend, not just because of this year's drop but because it continues a decline that began in the mid-1990s. Other cities have experienced similar reductions.
A persistent question, though, is why the city's homicide count hasn't dropped at the same pace. While nonfatal shootings have fallen about 60 percent between 1996 and 2008, homicides have gone down about 34 percent over about the same period.
The numbers are challenging old axioms that held a direct correlation between nonfatal shootings and homicides; if one dropped, the other should drop.
"We no longer think that," said Daniel W. Webster, the co-director of the Johns Hopkins University Center for Gun Policy and Research. "It's not that they're completely unrelated, but something is going on that is affecting one that is not affecting the other."
The relationship is hard to explain. Crime reduction programs have reached some offenders and driven down violence. But killings persist, Webster said, in some cities where many hard-core criminals remain unafraid of police and uninfluenced by reform attempts.
Nonfatal shootings and other gun crimes have dropped nearly 80 percent in cities across the country from 1993 to 2008, even in places where homicides haven't always followed the same downward trajectory, Webster said.
"It's pretty phenomenal," he said.
City authorities have not been shy about hailing a drop in homicides, as they did last year when the numbers hit a 20-year low. But they have long argued there are other statistics that serve as a better barometer to measure violence.
"The homicide number gets top billing for obvious reasons," Bealefeld said. "But the real secret to violence in Baltimore is the nonfatal shooting number."
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