The problems with policing are structural: A community oversight board will address individual, not systemic, problems

A protesters walk down Lakeside Avenue towards the Justice Center during a rally, May 30, 2020, for justice in the death of George Floyd. Photo by John Kuntz, Cleveland Plain Dealer ("Protestors break windows, set police cars on fire as George Floyd demonstrations turn violent in downtown Cleveland").

The Washington Post reports ("Cleveland residents look to take police reform into their own hands") on an effort in Cleveland where a citizen referendum will be voted on this fall.  

If passed, it will create an independent commission to review and investigate complaints of police misconduct, including officer involved shootings, independent from the police department and local prosecutors, who are seen to be too much a part of the system to crack down on misconduct.  From the article:

If passed, the ballot initiative would amend the city charter to take the power to investigate misconduct out of an office within the police department and give it to the Civilian Police Review Board, which has existed since 1984 but would gain new powers under the amendment. Now, the board can only make recommendations on discipline. The amendment would empower it to investigate complaints against officers and directly mete out punishment. The police chief could disregard the board’s directives, but the amendment would give the final say over whether an officer is disciplined or fired to a 13-member civilian-led Community Police Commission, a board that was created by the 2015 consent decree but that is set to expire when the decree does. Members of both boards would be chosen by the mayor and the City Council.

This is a tough issue.  To me there are many problems with public safety and policing generally, and in center cities like Cleveland, but most people are only focused on one element.  Here are the issues:

• the volume of crime, shootings, and killings, especially in high crime neighborhoods more generally ("Most dangerous neighborhoods in Cleveland, Ohio," "Shooting unnerves Cleveland's Tremont neighborhood, but it remains among city's safest," PD)
• warrior policing and officer involved shootings -- which is what is getting the most attention
• zero tolerance policing, mass incarceration and lack of fairness in the criminal justice system ("White woman who stole $250K gets probation, while Black woman who stole $40K goes to jail. Disparate sentences spark calls for reform," Cleveland Plain Dealer)
• the criminalization of many social problems (as described in the book The End of Policing, "The opportunity to rearticulate public safety delivery keeps being presented") and the failure of police response, such as with mental illness
• and relatedly, the redefinition of public safety more broadly, beyond strict policing (often called "defund the police")
• the rise in violent crime since the pandemic, especially seen in the rise of shootings and homicides ("How bad is the rise in US homicides? Factchecking the ‘crime wave’ narrative police are pushing," Guardian, "The US saw significant crime rise across major cities in 2020. And it's not letting up," CNN), including Cleveland ("One dead, more than a dozen hurt in another weekend plagued by gun violence in Cleveland," PD).

This proposed "reform" in Cleveland only looks at one issue.  An important one.  Key.  But maybe not even the most important.  From a "path dependence" standpoint, it will likely divert attention from all the other issues involving policing and public safety.  (A comparable issue in housing policy is a focus on creating "inclusionary zoning" programs instead of a comprehensive program and funding for the development of affordable housing at scale.)

Most importantly, it will focus on individual misconduct not structural changes to the department, criminal justice system, and the delivery of public safety in Cleveland.

Fullerton California as a counter-example:  completely revamps use of force, training, and other practices after the after a police officer beat to death a homeless man.  By contrast, when police officers in Fullerton, California beat a homeless man to death, it ended up leading to top-down, down-top overhaul of the department, including an annual independent audit of the police department.  From "Where is the risk management approach to police misconduct and regularized killings of citizens?":

After the fatal beating of Kelly Thomas, a schizophrenic (the city paid a big judgement to his family) rather than accept what happened as "an accident," the City of Fullerton evaluated various police processes and changed them, to reduce the likelihood of injury and death in interactions between the police and the public ("Here's how Fullerton police have improved since Kelly Thomas' death," Orange County Register).

The changes in practice were not limited to dealing with homeless people or people in mental distress, but in how all of the city's police officers interact with the public and how they are trained.

The police department has set a goal of being one of the best police departments in the country for its size, and measures its success in part   The OCR article reports on the most recent review:

The study offers a half-dozen recommendations – compared with 59 in its first review – that range from striving to use the least force necessary to more cautious foot pursuits.

.. Four years ago, OIR Group recommended that officers – when safely possible – employ less force by increasing time and distance, using cover and concealment, creating barriers, and calling and waiting for backup.

“The department,” the document says, “has substantially addressed many of the shortcomings we noted in our 2012 report.”

First, a new training room was built for officers to practice lesser-force techniques. Then, a video-based interactive training system was installed. It offers more than 200 bad-guy scenarios, and each one can be altered with the touch of a screen.

“These upgrades in training facilities,” the report concludes, “allow trainers to emphasize the importance of tactical alternatives to force, particularly deadly force.”

The training may be paying off. Citizen complaints have dropped from a high of 36 in 2014 to a low of 24 last year.

Still, the new report offers new suggestions. They include requiring incident reports to check off threat perception, least-use-of-force efforts, and adherence to reporting policies.

The process in Fullerton appears to be a national model, albeit a one-off that hasn't been adopted elsewhere, unlike the whitewashes that seem to be happening in most other cities when it comes to evaluating police departments and officers in terms of excessive force and deaths at the hands of police officers.

OIR Group reviews in Fullerton. (From their website.)  The death of a mentally ill homeless man following a brutal encounter with Fullerton Police officers created a public outcry for an independent investigation of the circumstances behind that death. The City engaged OIR Group to complete an internal affairs investigation into the involved officers’ conduct.  OIR Group also performed a full systemic audit of the Department focusing on force policies, internal investigations of force, the imposition of discipline, and police leadership issues.   

-- Fullerton Police Department: Audit of Force Reviews and Internal Investigations, August 2016
-- Interim Report Regarding Issues Surrounding the Death of Kelly Thomas, February 2012
-- Report to the City of Fullerton: Systemic Review of the Fullerton Police Department, August 2012

DC as a case study in the debate over investments in place over investments in people and the recent mass shooting

This piece is sparked by the recent mass shooting in Southeast DC a couple days ago, where as many as four people shot into a large crowd of people at a community barbecue, shooting at least 20 people and killing one ("Shootings in District surge as officials confront mass shooting that killed 1, wounded 21 at block party" and "After a mass shooting at a block party, community leaders are left reeling, seething and pleading," Washington Post).

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In Muriel Bowser's first campaign for Mayor, in the Fall of 2013 I had a long talk with one of her campaign staff about what I called "creating a Marshall Plan for East of the River," a social urbanism program for the city's two poorest wards (but should also be extended to parts of Wards 1 and 5).

I proposed that a new Deputy Mayor for East of the River be created to oversee such a program.

I never heard from them again, but later I read an article in the New York Times about her proposal for a "Deputy Mayor for Greater Economic Opportunity," which was her transmogrification of my concept.

The difference between my idea and what she implemented is investments in place versus investments in people ("human capital")--the Deputy Mayor for Greater Economic Opportunity position mostly focused on worker training and readiness programming.

While at the time I hadn't developed the concept in detail, these writings capture the thinking behind it:

-- "An outline for integrated equity planning: concepts and programs," 2017
-- "Social urbanism and Baltimore," 2019
-- "Outline for a proposed Ward-focused (DC) Councilmember campaign platform and agenda," 2015
-- proposal for an Ivy City Village Community Development Corporation, 2005
-- ",Lessons from Culture-based revitalization efforts in the European Union" Europe in Baltimore blog, 2014
-- "In lower income neighborhoods, are businesses supposed to be "community organizations" first?," 2012

What I was proposing was wide ranging investments and innovation and transformation in civic assets and programs in those communities, with the intent that the programs and facilities--what Klinenberg in Palaces for the People calls "social infrastructure"--would improve people's lives and their communities, including:

• schools ("Schools #2: Successful school programs in low income communities and the failure of DC to respond similarly")
• libraries ("Neighborhood libraries as nodes in a neighborhood and city-wide network of cultural assets")
• parks and recreation ("The layering effect: how the building blocks of an integrated public realm set the stage for community building," "Sounds familiar to me: recommendations from a guy who visited every park in Boston)
• addressing crime ("Crime time re-revisited: a set of programs focused on reducing crime," "The state of "broken windows" versus "problem oriented policing" strategies in 2016: Part 1, theory and practice," and "The state of "broken windows" versus "problem oriented policing" strategies in 2016: Part 2, what to do")
• transforming the health care system ("More communities need to integrate health care and public health programming")
• housing ("Revisiting the need for 'Tower Renewal' programs")
• transit ("Will buses ever be cool? Boston versus the Raleigh-Durham's GoTransit Model")
• sustainable mobility ("Revisiting assistance programs to get people biking: 18 programs") 
• workforce development ("One potential solution to the problem of "finding work" for homeless adults," cooperative high school, Tower Hamlets Idea Stores linking libraries and workforce development training, a community college branch in Southeast, social enterprise development, etc.)
• economic development ("Creating a graduate health and biotechnology research initiative on the St. Elizabeths campus," "Wanted: A comprehensive plan for the "Anacostia River East" corridor," "DC has a big "Garden Festival" opportunity in the Anacostia River")
• entrepreneurship and retail business development
• etc.

This is a big debate in urban economics.  Do you invest in people or places. Cities are fixed, they can't go anywhere. People are mobile.

-- City Success: Theories of Urban Prosperity, CEOs for Cities

So it's in the interest of cities to invest in place, to increase retention of residents and businesses, to spark and attract new businesses and residents, to increase property values, and property and sales taxes, to pay for the programs and quality of life that people want.

If you invest in people that supports the knowledge economy, which is what post-industrial capitalism is all about.  But people can leave.  (E.g., one of the downsides about a "nationally-focused" state university like the University of Michigan or the University of California-Berkeley is that many of the students do not stay in the state, and the state's investment in the university is wasted on those students who leave).


A lease sign on a vacant business property on Martin Luther King Avenue in Anacostia (2007), 

But if your "place" is severely deficient--wracked by crime, poor schools, poor health outcomes, deteriorated living conditions, poor mobility and access, etc.--do investments in people matter?

This is an especial issue of equity, as major center cities have proven that they can succeed as bifurcated places of both wealth and poverty ("'Two cities' collide as Chicago's social time bomb explodes," Guardian).

But success for some comes at the failure for others, and is costly socially, politically, economically, and morally.

Sure you're spending money on education, but a lot of K-12 reform efforts, especially DC's ("Fawning coverage of DC school "reform" doesn't push better practice forward") tend to be flawed and don't have great outcomes.

I've applied the Herzberg Motivation-Hygiene Theory to this, at least conceptually. Herzberg argued that in the workplace there are different factors concerning job satisfaction and dissatisfaction. That it isn't a continuum from dissatisfaction to satisfaction.

My take for cities is that you need to have great places to set the stage to best realize investments in human capital.

Like how what fuels dissatisfaction is separate from what fuels satisfaction, focusing investments on human capital while blowing off place conditions mean that your investments go for nought.

I think that's likely when it comes to the "Deputy Mayor for Greater Economic Opportunity."

When I had my Marshall Plan idea, it was engendered by my grand jury duty experience, and being aware of various poverty interdiction efforts in cities like Charlotte-Mecklenberg, Dallas ("Grow South"), Richmond, Virginia, and Toronto, social urbanism programs in Bogota but especially Medellin, and various innovative program delivery models in North America and Europe, the kind of stuff I've been writing about in the blog since the beginning.

Mayor Bowser's focus was jobs, jobs, jobs.  She always talked about jobs as "the gateway to the middle class," figuring that if people are employed that goes a long way towards addressing other problems. While that is true in many cases, when you're dealing with multi-generational poverty, usually it's not that simple.

Conclusion.  It's not that DC hasn't been or recently committed spending billions of dollars on civic assets like new or refurbished schools, libraries, and hospitals.  But for the most part the spending isn't particularly organized, integrated, coordinated, inspired and visionary, or transformational.

Granted, things are tough.  Addressing multi-generational poverty is difficult even in the best of times and takes a lot of money and time.

But I'd say the focus on worker training and "greater economic opportunity" hasn't moved the needle much in terms of community and human capital improvements in DC's most impoverished areas.

And these areas and households aren't particularly economically resilient when economic conditions change significantly, as they have as a result of the pandemic.  Hence, in pandemic times, we are seeing more shootings, more murders, continued poverty.

Place investments and not just "any old investment" but the right kind of investments are key.

Oklahoma City as a contrast.  Note that this is the fundamental lesson in Oklahoma City, which led to their capital investment program called "Metropolitan Area Projects," which former Mayor Mick Cornett (A Republican!) wrote about in his book The Next American City.

That to invest in (and attract) people a/k/a "human capital" you had to invest in place.

OKC kept trying to recruit big businesses to the city, offering great incentives packages, but they kept getting rejected. 

After many months of badgering one of the companies that turned them down told them why.  They said that the Downtown had no liveliness, no activity, the schools were bad, etc., that their executives couldn't imagine wanting to live there.

It took 6 years from that point to develop the program that became MAPS, and more than 10 years before the first projects started to come to fruition, but through four phases, they've made incredible investments in the community, from streetcars, an arena, improved canal, Canal District, and riverfront, a water sports complex, rebuilding of every school in the main inner city school district, etc.

They're making Oklahoma City a place that businesses want to locate and people want to live.

(OKC's Metropolitan Area Projects capital improvement program is an example of what I call Transformational Projects Action Planning.)

More on police misconduct as a risk management issue

Following "Where is the risk management approach to police misconduct and regularized killings of citizens?" and "How to incentivize better police conduct: pay settlements out of police officer pension funds".

Could the City of St. Paul sue Minneapolis, because of their being collateral damage in the damage fueled by unrest after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis? Probably not, just as states and others suing China over the coronavirus won't go anywhere.

Additionally, Alex B. points out that the US Supreme Court has given police officers wide discretion and the ability to evade responsibility for their actions in what is called "qualified immunity" ("The Supreme Court Broke Police Accountability. Now It Has the Chance to Fix It.," Slate).

In this case, pictures are worth 1000+ words

According to the comments on this Minneapolis Star Tribune article, "Buildings damaged in Minneapolis, St. Paul after protests," listing damaged buildings in Minneapolis, St. Paul, and elsewhere in the Minneapolis metropolitan areas, the damage is much worse.


Seen from Hiawatha Avenue, a large fire burns on E. Lake St. during a third night of unrest following the death of George Floyd while in Minneapolis police custody early in the week. David Joles, Minneapolis Star Tribune.


The Family Dollar Store at Lake Street and 10th Ave. burned early Friday morning May 29, 2020, in Minneapolis, MN. David Joles, Minneapolis Star Tribune.


St. Paul firefighters battled fires at Sports Dome and other businesses near the Midway Center on Friday in St. Paul. Elizabeth Flores, Minneapolis Star Tribune.


Police officer pepper spraying demonstrators, Minneapolis. Mark Vancleave, Minneapolis Star Tribune.

The Minneapolis 3rd Police Precinct was set on fire on Thursday night. Carlos Gonzalez, Minneapolis Star Tribune.

Where is the risk management approach to police misconduct and regularized killings of citizens?

Again, I have not yet read the new book published by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, Scenario Planning for Cities and Regions: Managing and Envisioning Uncertainties, although it's in my pile of "to read."

Officials and stakeholders as managers of the city's identity and "brand." In 2005 I wrote a piece about commercial district revitalization making the point that if we think of ourselves as "destination managers" we will make places great for both residents and visitors.

In 2008, I extended this concept to city elected and appointed officials and stakeholders as a community's collective of "brand managers" responsible for the brand promise of a community:

... elected officials need to take their responsibilities as stewards and managers of a community's image very seriously:
Just as the study team believes that “we are all destination managers now,” elected and appointed officials in particular and in association with other community stakeholders serve as a community’s “brand managers”—whether or not they choose to think of their roles in this manner.

That means that decision-making on land use and zoning, business issues, infrastructure development (roads, sewers, water, utilities, transit), technology (broadband Internet, etc.) and quality of place factors (arts, culture, historic preservation and heritage, education, public schools and libraries, urban design, etc.) must be consistent and focused on making the right decisions, the decisions that collectively achieve and support the realization of the community’s desired vision and positioning.

In 2015 I extended this argument further, that officials and stakeholders need to see their roles as the managers of a community's assets.

For awhile now, I've been meaning to do this around risk management too, although I have written about that in the context of lawsuits around policing.

Police misconduct settlements can be costly. For example, Chicago spends many tens of millions of dollars every year in settlements for police misconduct  ("Chicago spent more than $113 million on police misconduct in 2018," Chicago Reporter).

Add to that the cost of legal representation, often on outside counsel ("A hidden cost of Chicago police misconduct: $213 million to private lawyers since 2004," Chicago Tribune).

And that this might have to be financed in a way that adds to a city's long term debt ("How Chicago's financing of police-misconduct payouts adds hundreds of millions to the tab," Crain's Chicago Business).

Shouldn't settlement costs be seen as an indicator of a system failure that must be addressed?  You'd think that elected officials would take that as an indicator of a problem with the police department, and look at the need for management, process, and policing reforms, rather than merely as the "cost of doing business."

When I take on planning engagements, I look at outcomes in terms of what is desired and what in fact occurs.

When desired outcomes aren't produced as a matter of course by the system of processes that produces them, that's an indicator of a need to work backwards through the processes, to identify why things aren't working the way that's desired, and make changes.

In the case of policing, it's a clear need for different strategies and tactics and more robust training ("Policing: escalation vs. de-escalation," 2014).

Protesters hold signs outside the precinct building. Stephen Maturen / Getty Images

Police misconduct can lead to social unrest.  Another potential cost derived from police misconduct is rebellion and riot.

That's happening this week in Minneapolis after the release of a video showing the death of George Floyd as a result of police use of force in his arrest ("Man dies in MPD custody, 4 cops fired; protesters, police clash," Minnesota Public Radio; "George Floyd protest turns deadly; Minneapolis mayor requests National Guard," NBC).

For example, the 1965 riots in Watts, the 1967 riots in Detroit, and the Stonewall riots in New York City in 1969, were each the response of fed up publics to what they considered to be unreasonable, oppressive, over-policing

More recently the same is true of Ferguson/St. Louis after the death of Michael Brown in 2014 and the development of the #Black Live Matters movement and riots and ongoing unrest in Baltimore after the death of Freddie Gray in 2015.

And these costs in both St. Louis and Baltimore are ongoing, 5-6 years afterwards.

Ted Rall editorial cartoon.

Police unions focus on protecting police officers not improving outcomes. One of the problems in all of this is police unions. First, these unions tend to be pretty involved in local politics, funding campaigns, etc.

 Second, they work very hard in collective bargaining negotiations to provide lots of protections to officers in cases of charges of misconduct, in ways that can make it very difficult to discipline undesirable behavior.

-- "The unjust power of police unions," The Week
-- "Our Police Union Problem," New York Times
-- "The Impact of Unions on Municipal Elections and Urban Fiscal Policies," University of Pennsylvania

Fullerton California as a counter-example:  completely revamps use of force, training, and other practices after the after a police officer beat to death a homeless man.  After the fatal beating of Kelly Thomas, a schizophrenic (the city paid a big judgement to his family) rather than accept what happened as "an accident," the City of Fullerton evaluated various police processes and changed them, to reduce the likelihood of injury and death in interactions between the police and the public ("Here's how Fullerton police have improved since Kelly Thomas' death," Orange County Register).

The changes in practice were not limited to dealing with homeless people or people in mental distress, but in how all of the city's police officers interact with the public and how they are trained.

The police department has set a goal of being one of the best police departments in the country for its size, and measures its success in part   The OCR article reports on the most recent review:

The study offers a half-dozen recommendations – compared with 59 in its first review – that range from striving to use the least force necessary to more cautious foot pursuits.

.. Four years ago, OIR Group recommended that officers – when safely possible – employ less force by increasing time and distance, using cover and concealment, creating barriers, and calling and waiting for backup.

“The department,” the document says, “has substantially addressed many of the shortcomings we noted in our 2012 report.”

First, a new training room was built for officers to practice lesser-force techniques. Then, a video-based interactive training system was installed. It offers more than 200 bad-guy scenarios, and each one can be altered with the touch of a screen.

“These upgrades in training facilities,” the report concludes, “allow trainers to emphasize the importance of tactical alternatives to force, particularly deadly force.”

The training may be paying off. Citizen complaints have dropped from a high of 36 in 2014 to a low of 24 last year.

Still, the new report offers new suggestions. They include requiring incident reports to check off threat perception, least-use-of-force efforts, and adherence to reporting policies.

The process in Fullerton appears to be a national model, albeit a one-off that hasn't been adopted elsewhere, unlike the whitewashes that seem to be happening in most other cities when it comes to evaluating police departments and officers in terms of excessive force and deaths at the hands of police officers.

Britain. A commenter in one of the many articles on the George Floyd killing mentioned watching the BBC tv series, "Our Cops in the North," (episode one) and made the point that it showed how the officers were very good at dealing with conflict, arrests, etc., without guns and in a manner that didn't escalate conflict, attributing this to the level of training and usually being unarmed. I thought that was an important point.

Contrast that to reality tv shows in the US like "Cops" which show the widespread use of militaristic approaches and tactics to policing here.

Racialized social control as a structural feature of urban police departments.  I have mentioned before the biggest issue probably in the US wrt policing besides the fact that policing is the leading element of what Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness calls "racialized social control" ("Racialized social control and risk management: Baltimore," 2020).

Typically, urban police forces tend to have a majority of white officers and often they don't live in the communities they patrol.  But even in cities where a police chief may be black, like Minneapolis, or in places where a preponderance of officers are people of color like Baltimore or DC, there are still issues.

A man poses for a photo in the parking lot of an AutoZone where a fire broke out.

Video showed the AutoZone with broken windows and spray paint. One bystander was warning people against damaging the business, saying it had nothing to do with Floyd's death.

— Carlos Gonzalez / Minneapolis Star Tribune via AP

Take a risk management approach.  Regularly producing outcomes of death as a function of police processes is an indicator of an endemic, systematic, structural problem, not a series of one-off problems.  It can only be addressed through significant changes in training, hiring, and management.

By this time, most cities have an "Office of Risk Management" or a similar function as a standard element of public administration.  But probably too many communities haven't given this function the ability to think creatively and expansively.

From the report Risk Assessment and Management in Local Government Emergency Planning, by the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction:

The following statement captures the essential elements in dealing with risk:

• risk is the possibility that harm may occur from an identified hazard;
• risk analysis is the process of evaluating the frequency and consequence of the hazard;
• risk control uses methods of reducing the frequency or consequences of a hazard; and,
• risk management is the ongoing process of daily decision-making given the existence of an identified hazard and that all practical and reasonable measures have been taken to
minimize any potential impacts it may have.

the more things change, the more they remain the same: Could McCormick Spice Co. move back to Baltimore City?

The company was founded in Baltimore in 1889 and grew through acquisition.  They left the city for quarters in Baltimore County in 1989.  Their old main headquarters building in the city is long gone.

The Baltimore Business Journal reports ("Spice company McCormick is considering 4 states for its new HQ") that the company is considering Pennsylvania, Delaware, Northern Virginia, and Maryland as sites for a new consolidated headquarters.

The article states that easy access to an international airport is highly desired, mentioning BWI Airport outside of Baltimore.

Why not just move back to Baltimore City?

Too bad the old headquarters is no long around for a triumphant return by the company.

Also see "Silicon Valley Fans San Francisco's Flames" from the Wall Street Journal about how many Silicon Valley tech firms are building up their operations in San Francisco, to have better access to quality talent, the same issue that is motivating McCormick to consider options other than their very suburban location in Baltimore County.

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In my forthcoming summary article for the EUNIC Washington Cluster "Europe in Baltimore" project, I suggested that the next phase for culture districts is to move towards knowledge clusters, and I suggest that Baltimore City and the city's higher education institutions need to consider this.

From the article:

From creative clusters to "creative economies" and knowledge quarters/knowledge precincts.  The basic precepts for the development of cultural districts as a revitalization strategy were laid down beginning in the 1980s, starting with various projects in the UK.   Researcher-consultants such as John Montgomery, Simon Roodhouse, Charles Landry and others have written extensively about "the creative city," and culture district development, planning and management.

The "Five Star" Model of Knowledge Development-Innovation Districts.  Source:  Aalto University.

As more places took on culture-based regeneration projects, the field has continued to develop and advance and define culture more broadly and integrate additional disciplines into more wider scale "creative economy" initiatives which tend to be focused on what are called "knowledge quarter" initiatives, as opposed to arts districts.  Perhaps knowledge quarter initiatives should be considered "next generation" culture district initiatives.

The Knowledge Quarter in Liverpool, which includes higher education institutions, government research facilities, private research ventures, medical and health care institutions, and research parks is one example.

-- "Liverpool City Region's Knowledge Economy: Delivering New Opportunities for Growth

Helsinki's Arabianranta district, which is centered around the design oriented University of Art and Design (now part of Aalto University) is another as is the Alexander Innovation District in Thessaloniki.  (There are many other examples around the world, including the MaRS Discovery District in Toronto.)

The URBACT publication, Creating knowledge hotspots in the city: A handbook | Practical guidelines for developing campuses, science quarters, creative districts and other knowledge hotspots, provides guidance for considering the development of broader knowledge development focused initiatives.

and...

3.  Baltimore has an incredible array of higher education institutions and while research and technology development initiatives by certain of the institutions have high profiles and there is the Baltimore Collegetown effort focused on retaining students in the metropolitan area after they graduate, there isn't the sense of Baltimore's higher education institutions operating at the scale of an integrated "knowledge quarter."  This needs to be addressed. 

Presently, there isn't a network of all of Baltimore's higher education institutions, although there are many examples of cooperation between institutions on more bi-lateral bases.  And Johns Hopkins University's president, Robert Daniels, who previously had been Provost at the University of Pennsylvania, which has a wide-ranging revitalization program within its urban interest area ("The University and Urban Revival," Judith Rodin, former president of Penn) has stepped up JHU's interaction with the city at large.

The Baltimore Student Exchange Program, like the Five College Consortium in Western Massachusetts, lets students take courses at different colleges and universities in the city, and is an initiative that can be built upon.

Could Baltimore's higher education institutions develop a network comparable to the Committee on Institutional Cooperation linking the Big 10 universities and the University of Chicago or the Washington Research Libraries Consortium in DC?

4.  Definitely there isn't a university-involved initiative within Baltimore that operates at the scale of Liverpool's Knowledge Quarter.

Could such a district be created in Baltimore, as the next generation of "culture district" development initiatives?

The way that the Arabianranta district was regenerated in association with the relocation of the University of Arts and Design and how design and information technology initiatives developed around it is another example of university-business-community revitalization that is especially relevant to the Station North Arts and Entertainment District as a way to better leverage and heighten the integration of these educational institutions into a broader program.

Also, the City of Helsinki's information technology innovation unit, Forum Virium Helsinki, a public-private partnership but also an agency of the city government, is another example that Baltimore could consider in the development of broader knowledge innovation efforts.

That being said, the East Baltimore Development Initiative, in part focused on leveraging the opportunities present within the medical research community at the adjacent Johns Hopkins University Medical School and Hospital is an example of a nascent effort along these lines.