BALTIMORE — It has been a bleak winter in the housing projects and row houses where Baltimore's narcotics dealers dispense crack and heroin like fast-food orders. Warring factions are killing rivals at a relentless clip. The bodies have mounted at a rate of almost one a day over the last month.
The numbers are harrowing -- 36 homicides since Jan. 1 -- and the city's mayor, Martin O'Malley, has agonized about them.
Crime was at the top of O'Malley's agenda when he delivered a sobering "state of the city" speech last week to the City Council; he then asked council members to endorse his anti-crime strategy by appointing his nominee for police commissioner. Despite Baltimore's lingering reputation as the most violent city in America, O'Malley said, "we have led America's big cities in reducing violence."
As he grapples with the latest killing wave, O'Malley has had to contend with another nagging statistic -- five commissioners have come and gone since he was elected mayor five years ago. The revolving door at police headquarters on Fayette Street has complicated O'Malley's crime-fighting campaign, eroding officers' morale, deepening public cynicism and threatening to become a drag on the mayor's statewide political ambitions.
"It gives the appearance of chaos at the top," said Bert Shirey, a retired Baltimore police veteran who served briefly as the first of O'Malley's commissioners. He was succeeded by a procession of men whose exits were brought about by policy disputes, a federal corruption conviction and domestic-abuse allegations. "You end up with officers who feel whiplashed with all the change, and citizens who wonder if the department knows what it's doing."
Near the Somerset Court housing project in east Baltimore, James Boston grumbled as he hosed down salt-caked cars outside an auto body garage. "Every time you turn around, they got a new chief," Boston said. "They're not going to clean the streets up out here until they get their own act together."
Boston complained of having to watch his back in a neighborhood where gunfire is as common as birdcalls. The east Baltimore police district, with 55 homicides in 2004, led all other sectors in a city that recorded 278 killings for the year.
While New York, Los Angeles and other big cities have seen homicide rates drop over the last two years, Baltimore's tally has crept upward, from 271 killings in 2003 and 253 in 2002.
