The line was a block long outside the Metropolitan Baptist Church on McCulloh Street on Wednesday when the city kicked off its Safe Surrender program, which allows city residents wanted for minor, nonviolent crimes to turn themselves in and get their records cleared. Saturday is the last day for people to seek favorable consideration under the program.
The city wants to clear some of the 40,000 outstanding arrest warrants on its rolls by encouraging nonviolent fugitives to resolve the charges against them and avoid spending hours in jail at the Central Booking and Intake Center. Officials are betting that allowing people to surrender voluntarily in a reassuringly secure and comfortable setting like a church will save both the fugitives and the criminal justice system time and money. Most of the people who showed up at the church this week had their cases dismissed by the end of the day.
The program is sponsored by the U.S. Marshals Service, and Baltimore is the 17th city in which it has been tried. Other cities include Cleveland, Detroit, Philadelphia, Newark, N.J., and Washington, D.C., all of which reported great success in helping nonviolent offenders get a fresh start in life. It helps police, prosecutors and judges because it reduces the risk to law enforcement officers who pursue fugitives; the neighborhoods in which the fugitives live; and the fugitives themselves by helping keep minor infractions from leading to more serious offenses as a result of their attempts to avoid capture.
You'd think the city would offer the program more frequently for all the benefits it offers. But the reality is that putting an operation like this together is a very complicated and expensive undertaking.
This week's event, which took a year and a half to plan, saw prosecutors, public defenders, judges and a small army of court clerks set up temporary headquarters inside the church and another building across the street. They were joined by dozens of officers from the city and state police, the U.S. Marshals Service and the city sheriff's department, which provided security and directed traffic around the area.
In all, there were at least 270 staffers on hand to keep the program up and running, according to an official on the scene. That's in addition to all the equipment — computers, extra phone lines, portable air-conditioning units and extra chairs and tables — that had to be brought in and set up before the first cases were heard.
No one really thinks Baltimore City has the resources to establish a program like this on its own. The city got a $117,000 grant from the state and about $20,000 from the federal government, but that only covered a fraction of the event's cost.
Yet it's a good bet that the price, whatever it turns out to be, will have been worth it. A report earlier this week by an independent judicial watchdog group criticized Baltimore for jailing a higher percentage of its residents than nearly any other American city and concluded that alternatives to incarceration make a lot more sense than jail time for low-risk, nonviolent offenders who commit misdemeanor and nuisance crimes.
A few cities, such as Camden, N.J., have tried to duplicate selected features of the Safe Surrender program, such as offering amnesty days in regular courtrooms. Baltimore should experiment with that idea as well as other ways of getting people to cooperate in resolving their cases. The fewer low-risk, nonviolent offenders police officers have to chase after, the more they'll be able to concentrate on the hard-core, violent career offenders who commit the kinds of serious crimes that most concern the public.