Mayor Martin O'Malley's plan for court watchdogs to monitor gun cases has a seat-of-the-pants quality you'd expect from a brash, young politician: unorthodox and aggressive, announced to a throng of media just two hours after the chance placement of newspaper articles put the idea in his head.
But in some ways, O'Malley has been slowly laying the foundation for this kind of move throughout his 2 1/2 years in office, as he has tried to build community coalitions to help put his ideas into action. A week earlier, he rallied the business community to take a more active role in combating the city's drug problem.
Galvanized by that meeting, business leaders not only pledged to back O'Malley's plan to monitor gun cases, but did so with few details and at a moment's notice. About 20 executives rushed to City Hall to help announce the plan at 10 a.m. Wednesday - about 30 to 60 minutes after the mayor first pitched it to them in a flurry of morning phone calls.
"I don't know what it is. I'm not so sure exactly what we're supposed to do," said Donald P. Hutchinson, president of the Greater Baltimore Committee, a business group. "But I do think there will be a positive response" once the initiative is fleshed out.
O'Malley has not always been able to count on that kind of snap-to-itness among business leaders. The mayor had been frustrated for months with the business community's lack of response to the anti-drug campaign, Baltimore Believe.
However, local executives say they've recently grasped a sense of urgency and are assuming some responsibility to cure the city's problems - in part because of the Believe campaign, which most of them didn't understand until O'Malley gave them an impassioned explanation a week ago.
"I think there's some growing confidence that there's more soldiers in the game here and people are stepping up," said Michael Cryor, an executive who heads a business consulting firm and is co-chairman of the Believe campaign.
The criminal court watchdog group O'Malley wants formed would send observers into courtrooms to monitor gun cases and write reports on whether judges and prosecutors are following state sentencing guidelines. By doing so, the mayor hopes to pressure courts to get tough on violent offenders.
The idea for the watchdog group came to O'Malley about 8 a.m. Wednesday morning, he said, when he noticed two stories placed side-by-side in that day's Sun.
One reported the fatal drive-by shooting of a 13-year-old boy in West Baltimore. The other described a plan by the Downtown Partnership business group to create a "court watch" program to observe and testify in nuisance-crime cases.
Struck by the juxtaposition, O'Malley asked himself: If businesses can keep tabs on the nuisance crimes impairing the west side's rebirth, why not monitor the violent cases that threaten the city's very survival?
He and his staff started working the phones and two hours later, O'Malley was holding a news conference on the plan. At his side were about 20 business leaders who had hastily canceled appointments and skipped meetings to be there, saying the Believe pep talk O'Malley had delivered a week earlier was part of the reason they were so quick to sign on.
"I thought business leaders - black and white - were missing the whole [Believe] message," O'Malley said. "It was a point of frustration for me in these last several months. And now I feel like we have momentum again. I feel like I have much deeper commitment from them now."
The Believe effort has had a mixed record that may say something about the power and limits of O'Malley's bully pulpit.
The $4 million promotional campaign, paid for by private donations of funding and ad time and space, urged everyone in the city - black and white, rich and poor, addicted and clean - to take action of some sort to fight drugs and related violent crime. The ads began in April and ended Sunday, but the program is continuing.
There have been some clear successes. The number of drug addicts seeking treatment in the city doubled in May, more than tripled in June and is on track to quadruple this month, Believe officials said. Nearly 400 people dialed the Believe hot line for information about becoming city police officers. Calls to volunteer with the Maryland Mentoring Partnership and Big Brothers/Big Sisters have tripled.
But even as Baltimore Believe specifically exhorted residents to call police with information about crime, when Tevin Montrel Davis, 10, was shot and wounded while sitting in front of his West Baltimore home last week, as many as 40 potential witnesses said they were unable to help detectives. Days later, Perry Spain - a neighbor of Tevin and many who were questioned - was arrested.
"We can't do this ourselves and it's really, really frustrating," Police Commissioner Edward T. Norris said in an interview early this week. "Everyone is talking about it [violent crime], and people claim they want to make the city safer in many organizations, in leadership positions. But I just don't see the sense of urgency or outrage that is equal to the violence in the city."
Believe officials concede the campaign also initially failed to reach business leaders, who didn't think the ads were aimed at them; they saw it simply as an effort to raise awareness about drug use and failed to see it as a call to action. But after O'Malley's emotional plea to 80 to 100 executives gathered at City Hall last week, they seemed to get on board.
"I, like a lot of business people I talked to about this, just didn't understand what the Believe campaign was about," said developer C. William Struever, of Struever Bros., Eccles & Rouse. "It was a communications issue. What we could see on the surface from the billboards and the bus ads was kind of a reinforcement of the conventional wisdom that the city's got a terrible drug problem."
O'Malley's court watchdog plan is not specifically part of the Believe program, but the mayor considers it "part of the same theme."
"One of the thrusts of the Believe campaign is, look, we all have a job to do," O'Malley said.
The mayor's staff said details of the court watchdog plan will be left to the business community to work out, although Deputy Mayor Laurie B. Schwartz organized a meeting with about 10 business leaders early Wednesday afternoon to get them started. The group was told how court watch programs work elsewhere.
Several executives said they were primed to embrace the court watch idea because of O'Malley's ardent entreaty on behalf of Believe a week earlier.
That gathering started with O'Malley laying out a positive vision for the city. Then his tone turned from optimistic to red-faced anger as he said that drugs and crime threatened bright futures. He played a tape of the Believe ads, then urged leaders to adopt schools, hire recovering addicts and urge prosecutors and judges to be tougher on gun crimes.
The executives gave O'Malley a standing ovation. Many said they walked away believers. Several have volunteered to chair committees being formed to, among other things, work with the school system to determine which schools could best use help.
"His Baltimore Believe campaign is trying to shake and awaken people to the fact that, not only is [drugs] our biggest problem, but don't be numbed by it and don't expect somebody else to fix it," said Henry G. Hagan, president and chief executive officer of Monumental Life Insurance Co. "We've lived with it so long. ... What Martin O'Malley is trying to say is, 'Hey folks, it's your community, too. Step up to the plate.'"