Forget It Jake, It's Baltimore

 Akshually, it's a positive story about Balmer at the Freep, Why Did the Murders Stop in Baltimore?

... the levels of crime Baltimore now experiences were seen as inconceivable just a few years ago. And the numbers keep falling. In April, Baltimore had four homicides, the lowest total for any single month since at least 1970. So far this year, there were 38, compared with 51 in the same period last year. At the current rate, Baltimore would end 2026 with fewer than 100 homicides. There were 323 just four years ago.

How did we get from a city in which the question was how high can crime rise, to one where the question is how low can it go? The answer might be linked to the nationwide decline in murder, spurred by a restoration of policing as the excesses of the George Floyd years recede. But that begs the question of what cities across the country are doing right. And it skips over how Baltimore has bucked nationwide murder trends at times, with homicides in the city staying high as violence fell elsewhere in the 1990s and 2000s.

When you look closely and talk to the people on the front lines, some strong patterns emerge, with two competing stories coming into focus. One is the return of a program focused on deterring the small fraction of offenders in Baltimore who commit the large majority of violent crimes. The other is the election of a new tough-on-crime prosecutor, who replaced a scandal-plagued “progressive.”

Which story you prefer has increasingly become a partisan matter, producing unnecessary political feuding. The bigger lesson is that intelligently targeting the most violent offenders, both through deterrence and incapacitation, can yield large, durable reductions in murder. Baltimore’s success shows that its homicide problem was, in reality, just the result of its past leaders’ failure to take violence seriously enough.

As they say, read the whole thing.