Crime Time 2008

I was looking up something yesterday, and came across a set of entries from the summer of 2006, when there was another significant increase in crime in the city. See:

-- Crime Time (7/18/2006)
-- Crime Time #2
-- Crime Time #3
-- Crime Time #4 (7/31/2006)
-- Crime Time #5
-- Crime Time #6 (Baltimore)
-- Crime Time #7 (8/13/2006)

Yesterday's Baltimore Sun has a cover story about the significant drop in the murder rate there, in "Killing pace slows in city." Baltimore has experienced a significant drop in murders over the past year, some neighborhoods have gone from 10 murders in the first half of the year to one. From the story:

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.

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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.

It appears as if DC's program of street roadblocks isn't nearly as focused.