The long-term solution to reducing violent crime has little to do with law enforcement and much more to do with education, housing, job training, and drug treatment.  Criminals are not born – they are made.  We should be suspicious of anyone who thinks we can police our way out of our current situation; if we want to create a sustainable society with less violent crime, we will need to provide everyone with affordable housing of better quality, a decent public education and the opportunity for a job that can support them.  This will be challenging and will require a great deal of political will, to re-invest not just in the waterfront, but in the human capital that will be Baltimore’s future.

 

In the short-term, we must have more officers on patrol, we must increase community involvement in fighting crime, and we must give our children something productive to do rather than getting involved with a criminal element.

 

We must have more officers on patrol.  

 

My understanding is that only a little over 50% of the total officer base in the force is assigned to patrol; the national average for comparable forces is closer to 60%.  I suspect we have an above average amount of specialized units draining our patrol resources for a couple reasons, in part because of the PR value specialized units provide and because more specialized units means more unit commanders making higher-than-patrol salaries. 

 

Patrol is seen as the most dangerous job, while simultaneously the least well-compensated.  We must make the commitment to improve police officers wages. There is no reason why a police officer in Baltimore County or Howard County should make more than an officer in the city, where the job is statistically harder and more dangerous.  We must be prepared to phase this additional cost in over the next few years, or our retention rate will continue to worsen.

 

We must also increase our patrol fleet to the point where officers can take their cars home when they go off-duty.  Maybe we can’t afford to give every officer a car, but we should commit to phasing in an increased fleet, assigning cars to officers on the basis of seniority in patrol and residency in the city.  This is a “three-fer” in that we would improve morale and increase retention by giving some officers a perk, add the deterrence factor of having a police car parked in a city neighborhood, and increase the desirability of both working patrol and living in the city.  I suspect that one or more broad-minded foundations would even be willing to assist the city with the additional capital cost of such a program.

 

Also, our officers work a “6 days on, 2 days off” schedule, every week, all year long.  While this may make some scheduler’s job easier, it means that each of our patrol officers is effectively working an extra day a week each week, before they get their weekend off.  Shifting them to a more mainstream “5 days on, 2 days off” schedule, staggered to match the higher-crime days of the week, would be an easy and (hopefully!) a comparatively inexpensive way to make the day-to-day life of a city police officer a little more pleasant.

 

For neighborhood residents, patrol is the most important job.  We need to make the “average” officer in patrol not just proud to be doing that job, but eager to keep doing it.  Specialized units should be so comparatively rare that only the absolute cream of the crop is assigned to them – the expectation must be that you join the Baltimore City Police because you want to patrol the streets of Baltimore City.  If you do that, Baltimore will take care of you also – if that’s not what you want to do, maybe you should be in somebody else’s police academy.

 

We must increase community involvement in fighting crime. 

 

Several years ago, the Police Department offered federal grant money to neighborhoods to hire off-duty police officers; at the Patterson Park CDC, I used that money to create the Patterson Park Safety Partnership.  Off-duty officers from all over the city walked evening shifts in the blocks around Patterson Park, and neighbors took turns orienting each patrol group – walking with the officers, pointing out trouble spots, identifying problem houses or stores, and generally introducing them to the neighborhood.  This made subsequent patrols more productive for the officers, created a connection between the officers and the community, and made the community feel like they were part of the solution.  We should be able to come up with a pot of money to allow community groups in any area of high crime the opportunity to start their own Safety Partnerships.  By emphasizing that we’re all in it together, we can make crime reduction something that “we” are doing and not something that “they” need to do.

 

We must give our children something productive to do.

 

One of my personal priorities is to implement a “4th District Blue Chip-In” program, helping corner stores and other small businesses to hire local students to clean the streets and alleys around their establishments, using incentive packages with some combination of matching funds, tax credits, and façade improvement grants.

 

I would also work to get kids off the corners by linking needed increases in the budget of the police department to equally-needed increases in the budget of the City’s libraries and recreation centers – if our children have more safe places to play and fun things to do, it will help keep them from doing things that lead to involving the police in the first place.

 

Finally, I support the Safe & Sound Campaign’s effort to use the Baltimore City annual operating budget to fund basic opportunity, leveraging millions of ready state and private dollars to make our city strong and our people safe, healthy and productive participants of our communities.