Re:Baltimore prosecutor ends drug, sex prosecutions as viole...
by jfengel on Monday March 29, 2021 @12:41PM
(#26624491)
They're talking about announcing a shift in tactic. Until recently, "broken windows policing" had been very popular: prosecute the small crimes and you will remove the criminals from the system, before they escalate to bigger crimes.
Even before that, there was a tactic of prosecutors competing with each other to be "tough on crime", prosecuting every minor offense so that people would feel safe. It's popular with voters, but it doesn't seem to work. Most notably, people don't feel safe, even as crime falls and prisons fill up.
Baltimore has problems of its own, and it's clear that whatever they've been doing hasn't worked. So they're announcing a change of tactic. We won't know if it works for at least five years.
I didn't see an updated graph for 2020, but in 2019 Baltimore set a record for homicides. A graph of the past 30 years is illuminating: https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/20190803_USC48...
Baltimore's homicide rate at around 58 per 100k people makes it the 11th most violent city on earth, second only to St Louis in the USA and over 10x the national average rate (which itself is 5-10x the homicide rate in most other OECD countries): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_murder_rate
Doesn't necessarily argue against ending prosecutions for minor non-violent offenses, but I find this story's framing and blanket rejection of "tough on crime" odd. You could get the impression Baltimore is a major success story in depolicing resulting in a calming peace, rather than it having a (perhaps stochastic) 1 year decline from historic and globally record levels of violence, when the murder rate has been bumping up and down by similar amounts while hovering around an absolutely ghastly level of death.