Baltimore voters are looking for a leader who can rein in crime, address poverty and restore trust in local government in their mayoral election, the highest-profile contest on Maryland's ballots today
“The three main players, the police department, the state’s attorney’s office, and the U.S. attorney’s office, saw crime-control as a zero sum game: anybody gets any credit for anything, the others lose.
.” Kennedy came to Baltimore in 1998 and spent more than two years working with police and prosecutors to set up a focused deterrence strategy. It collapsed after O’Malley was elected. “O’Malley didn’t want it, didn’t like it, wanted New York-style zero tolerance in Baltimore,” Kennedy wrote. “He got it. The Baltimore Police Department started arresting everybody in sight.” When Dixon became mayor, she cast aside O’Malley’s approach, which he’d modeled on the zero-tolerance tactics used in New York under Mayor Rudy Giuliani, in favor of a more targeted policing strategy. “I knew that zero tolerance was not the route that we needed to go, that we needed to focus on the most violent offenders, that we needed to bring all of our public safety entities to the table,” she told me.embraced a focused-deterrence strategy that Maryland’s U.S. attorney, Rod Rosenstein, had started setting up in O’Malley’s last year as mayor. Rosenstein—who would go on to serve as deputy attorney general overseeing Robert Mueller’s investigation—and one of his deputies, Jason Weinstein, modeled their strategy on Kennedy’s. The strategy relied on aggressive prosecution of what they termed “violent repeat offenders” paired with call-ins held in churches and community centers. Sometimes Weinstein would hold them in neighborhoods in which he’d recently sent a violent repeat offender to federal prison, to give his warnings more credibility. “We would say, ‘We’re standing up here because we don’t want to prosecute you,’” Weinstein told me. They delivered the ultimatum as some ofThe strategy worked. The number of murders fell to 234 in 2008 and held steady at 238 the following year, even as the number of arrests declined. The call-ins played “a significant part in driving down violent crime,” Fred Bealefeld, whom Dixon tapped as her police commissioner and who helped lead call-ins himself, told me. “When Freddie Gray died, that was the end of that brief but hopeful moment in which there seemed to be enough common ground amongst the principals to do work.”After Dixon resigned in 2010, the call-ins continued under her successor, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake. The following year, the number of murders fell to less than 200 for the first time since the 1970s. But the strategy started coming apart after Bealefeld retired in 2012. Two aides deeply involved in implementing focused deterrence under Dixon, who had initially stayed on under Rawlings-Blake, left around the same time as Bealefeld, along with a crucial O’Malley aide. The collaboration required to keep the strategy going eroded. “People didn’t understand what it took to sustain it,” Bealefeld said.after Rawlings-Blake read his memoir and recruited him. He started holding call-ins in the police department’s Western District, which he described in an interview as “extremely successful.” He’d just started expanding into the Eastern District—the other one of the two most violent in the city—“when Freddie Gray died,” he said. “That was the end of that brief but hopeful moment in which there seemed to be enough common ground amongst the principals to do work.” It’s hard to tease out how much of the decline in the murder rate under Dixon was due to her leadership. Others certainly contributed. O’Malley, who remained so intensely focused on crime in Baltimore as governor that he got daily reports on the number of homicides in the city, directed state authorities to step up their supervision of those on parole and probation in Baltimore.when Dixon took office. But Dixon backed the idea once she took office even though she hadn’t come up with it herself—something other mayors haven’t done.Melvin Russell, a police colonel who tried to set up his own, more modest version of focused deterrence in the aftermath of Gray’s death. He started holding call-ins, working with a local judge, the state’s attorney office, and eventually some police officers. But Pugh and the police department’s leadership never bought into the strategy. Pugh’s chief of staff that the police department wasn’t interested in focused deterrence anymore. “We were pretty much mocked, laughed at, shamed,” Russellafter Harrison arrived rather than accept a demotion. The call-ins he’d been holding have stopped. The collapse of Russell’s effort disappointed the Reverend Alvin Hathaway, senior pastor of Baltimore’s Union Baptist Churchwhere Russell had hosted some of his call-ins. Hathaway urged the next mayor to return to focused deterrence. “The next administration should revisit that call-in and exponentially scale it up,” he said. The latest collapse of targeted deterrence policing disappointed Alvin Hathaway, the senior pastor of Baltimore’s Union Baptist Church, pictured here. Like many Baltimore voters, he's hoping for a return of the strategy.in her devotion to what might be called constituent service, although she’s still doing it a decade after leaving office. “She will find out that you were a welder and your welding license expired because you didn’t pay the annual fee, and she’ll give you the phone number of the office to call to get your welding license back,” Martha McKenna, a longtime Dixon adviser and a former Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee political director, told me, recounting an interaction earlier this year. “And then she’ll tell you, ‘And then you call me when you get your welding license back, you call me and I’ll get you a job with so-and-so construction firm.” Still, it’s hard to understand the depth of Dixon’s appeal until you walk around the city with her, which I did one afternoon in February when she went to knock on doors in Cherry Hill, a neighborhood of worn rowhouses on the southern edge of the city. Dixon can be brusque, even critical, but she’s also a charismatic retail campaigner. When I met her, she was wearing a black Adidas hoodie, bright red Adidas pants, black boots and red knit cap. She’s 66 but looks“That’s my girl,” John Brown, a mustachioed man who wore white Nikes with red swooshes, said as Dixon walked up to him in the yard of a brick rowhouse with a chain-link fence.As Dixon bounded on to the next house, I asked Brown, 55, why he supported her. “She’s going to do the same thing Marion Barry did in D.C.,” he said, referring to the former Washington mayor who went to prison in 1990 after the FBI videotaped him smoking crack, only to return to the mayor’s office four years later. “She’s going to turn it around.” He was untroubled by the scandal that forced her from office. “Redemption, man,” he said. “We all need a second chance.” After Dixon stopped to greet voters across town at the Druid Heights Community Development Corporation, a young woman driving an Acura rolled down her window as Dixon crossed the street. “I love you!” she yelled. Dixon greeted her and asked her to consider supporting her. “I’m voting for you, so you don’t have to worry about it,” the young woman said.John Brown“Good luck!” she yelled through the closed window of the bus. Dixon is betting voters remember how much violent crime declined while she was mayor—especially black voters who live in the neighborhoods where most murders take place. Those were also the neighborhoods where arrests soared under O’Malley’s zero-tolerance tactics, which Dixon moved away from.stoop says inA chorus of voices chime in. “Sheila cleaned up these streets,” an older woman says.“She brought the homicide rate down,” a man says, as the words “LOWEST CRIME RATE IN 25 YEARS” flash on the screen.run deep, and focused deterrence won’t necessarily solve them. Gray’s death from injuries sustained after police arrested him for carrying a small knife in 2015 severely eroded many Baltimoreans’ trust in the police. So did the ensuing rise in murder as copsfrom policing after six officers were charged in Gray’s death. The department remains bound by a federal consent decree, put in place after a Justice Department investigation in the wake of Gray’s death found Baltimore’s policing tactics produced “severe and unjustified disparities in the rates of stops, searches and arrests of African Americans.” The prosecution of members of the Gun Trace Task Force, an elite police unit, revealed how its members had robbed people and planted evidence in the years leading up to Gray’s death and immediately afterward. The department has also lost hundreds of sworn officers since Dixon’s time as mayor, making it harder for the ones who remain to police the city. While 120 people have been murdered in Baltimore this year, only 50 murder suspects have been arrested so far this year, according to the police department. Focused deterrence has its critics—including O’Malley, who insists it doesn’t work. “It’s very alluring for wealthier liberal people to believe that if you only bring all of the hit men and the drug gangs in and tell them that they need to behave properly and get a job and you know who they are that it’ll work,” he told me. “But it doesn’t work like that.”conducted by Johns Hopkins University researchers found the focused deterrence program that Kennedy set up when he returned to Baltimore in 2014 “was not associated with any change in the number of homicides in the areas where” it was active. But the researchers allowed the strategy might not have been given a chance to work. “Concerns were raised by staff and community members that there were insufficient resources and commitment to deliver promised services to individuals targeted by the program,” they wrote. Focused deterrence can take time to get right. It requires not only close collaboration between the mayor, the police department, prosecutors and other actors, but also a careful balance of what Harrison described as the strategy’s carrot and stick elements. The Reverend Michael McBride, an Oakland pastor who pushed his city to implement focused deterrence, compared the process of calibrating it to solving a Rubik’s Cube. Oakland tried to make the strategy work twice before pulling it off. But once it came together, it produced dramatic results: Oakland’s murder rate has fallen by half since 2012. Crucially, the strategy has endured in Oakland through two mayors and a succession of police chiefs, despite a police department scandal., after its first attempt fell through several years ago. And Harrison has pushed Baltimore to try again, too. The city is in the process of bringing on a service provider to help run the effort. Once one is hired, “in the very near future after that we hope to host a call-in,” Harrison told me. Dixon supporters tend to be black and working class, while many of those of Miller, above, are white and college-educated.backing focused deterrence, they’ve each tried to distinguish themselves by arguing that he or she is only one who can fulfill the promises they’ve all made to tackle violent crime. “We don’t need more plans to fight crime,” MillerMiller—the only white candidate in the race—has poured more than $2 million of her own money into her campaign. She’s thrown her support behind Harrison, promising to keep him on if she’s elected. Miller, 64, left T. Rowe Price in 2009 to serve as a Treasury Department undersecretary in the Obama administration, and she’s leaned on her time working for the first black president in her ads.obtained an email sent to potential donors by the treasurer of a super PAC supporting her, which outlined a strategy to peel off white voters inclined to support Vignarajah or Scott. Vignarajah, the former prosecutor, has promised not to run for reelection if he can’t bring the murder rate to less than 200 a year—which would still make Baltimore one of the most violent cities in the country. Such pledges can backfire: When O’Malley ran for mayor in 1999, he promised to reduce the murder rate to 175 a year—a target neither he nor any of his successors has achieved. Vignarajah, 43, who came to Baltimore as child from Sri Lanka, has proposed giving rebates to residents and business owners who set up cloud-connected security cameras and register them with the police department, with the goal of adding 10,000 cameras, among other ideas. He’s also backed an aerial surveillance program funded by John Arnold, a Texas philanthropist who gave $100,000 to a super PAC supporting him.
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