Tackle crime problem at its source

The Baltimore Sun

Baltimoreans are "obsessed" with crime, says the latest Sun poll - and so we should be. We've fought hard for the gains our city has experienced over the last decade - for improving school performance, for rising real estate values, for new energy and life in neighborhoods in the north of the city and around the Inner Harbor. We hoped they presaged greater things for more of us in more city neighborhoods. We don't want to go back.

Sacrificing Police Commissioner Leonard D. Hamm on the altar of political expediency, however, does little to solve the problem. Indeed, missing from the debate about violent crime in Baltimore are two important pieces of contextual information:

1. Violent crime is rising in communities across the country.

2. Violent crime and homicide - especially among juveniles and young adults - have social and economic antecedents. In an article published in Homicide Studies in February, researchers found that "city-level increases in social and economic disadvantage were positively associated with increases in black teenage and young adult homicide rates and white teenage homicide rates." In studying the surge in homicides in the mid-1980s and early 1990s, they found this effect to be present independent of the level of drug activity and arrests. In other words, even accounting for the drug trade, the homicide rate increases along with the rate of economic and social disadvantage.

It is no coincidence that Baltimore ranks among the nation's deadliest cities between Detroit (No. 1) and New Orleans (No. 3). Baltimore's loss of manufacturing jobs, the decades of middle-class flight, the ensuing concentration of poverty and the abdication of the broader community's care and attention fatally link us to our sister cities - where the social fabric has been similarly ravaged by economic calamity, natural disasters or both.

It is also no coincidence that homicide is on the rise again just as our country experiences a growing gap between the rich and the poor, and while the American dream remains a false promise for children and families in areas of concentrated poverty and disadvantage.

Even with the improving economic circumstances of our city in the last 10 years, the 2005 American Community Survey finds that one-third of Baltimore's children live in poverty. There are 40,000 families whose incomes are less than $20,000. Other indicators of population well-being also reveal a lack of opportunity for many. For example, according to the Annie E. Casey Foundation, we rank 47th out of the nation's 50 largest cities in the percentage of babies born at a low birthweight and/or prematurely.

There are concrete steps we can take to turn things around. They include increasing outreach and prenatal care for vulnerable pregnant women; expanding the number and improving the effectiveness of drug treatment programs; ensuring access to high-quality early care and education programs for young children; improving the quality of teaching and leadership in our schools; supporting more and better after-school programs and employment opportunities for young people; and providing families with the pathway to jobs that pay a living wage.

Yes, we need to address the problem of crime through a coherent and coordinated strategy from the mayor's office, the leadership of the Police Department, the state's attorney's office, the federal prosecutor and the courts to target the most violent offenders and make sure justice is swift. And yes, these elected officials, agents and officers of the court need the resources and authority to carry out the plan they agree upon.

But this will be only a short-term fix if we don't demand of our elected officials - on Holliday Street, in Annapolis and in Washington - everything that it is in their power to do to ensure that more babies are born healthy; that more children live in safe, nurturing and economically self-sufficient families; and that more enter school ready to learn, are successful in school and have every opportunity to explore their unique skills and talents, to develop to their fullest potential and to realize their dreams.

Martha Holleman is a W. T. Grant Foundation distinguished fellow at New York University's Robert W. Wagner School for Public Service and an adviser to Baltimore's Safe and Sound Campaign. Her e-mail is mholleman@safeandsound.org.

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