Here is what should disturb us the most about Baltimore's grim march past the 300-homicide mark this year: It's that we seem to have failed to realize that even our "best" years when it comes to murders are grossly unacceptable. In 2011, when the city dropped below 200 killings for the first time in decades, Baltimore was still the sixth deadliest big city in the U.S., with nearly double the homicide rate of Washington and triple that of Boston. The question is not whether we will wind up normalizing a 300-murder-year rate, as we did in the 1990s, but why we have already normalized a level of violence that virtually any other community in this country would find shocking.
Baltimore's new mayor, Catherine Pugh, said she was distraught by the grim milestone but that it needs to be considered as part of an interconnected web of problems that will require a response from more than just the police department. Community leaders will need to be a part of a cultural change to convince people to turn away from violence, she said. True enough. As for what the city can do, Ms. Pugh reiterated a campaign suggestion of installing thousands of streetlights throughout the city and said did not intend to dictate police department strategy.
But in the immediate term, Ms. Pugh does need to get more directly involved, not because she knows better than Chief Kevin Davis how to fight crime but because there are some problems only she can solve. She needs to take a careful look at the police department's budget to analyze staffing levels and whether decisions in previous years to reduce its size by hundreds of positions and to hold open hundreds of other vacant ones have hampered its effectiveness. Is the department's new patrol shift schedule tenable at current staffing levels?
She needs to marshal all of the city's resources — from the health department to social services — to examine every homicide like we do overdoses and child deaths to determine whether any intervention might have made a difference.
Of crucial importance, Ms. Pugh needs to make sure negotiations with the Department of Justice over a consent decree related to its report on unconstitutional policing practices is completed before the Obama administration leaves office. Mr. Davis has urged patience, saying a consent decree will be in effect for a decade or more, and Baltimore can't risk a flawed agreement. In ordinary circumstances, we might agree, but given the skepticism President-elect Donald Trump's nominee for attorney general has shown toward such intervention by the Justice Department, we think it's not unreasonable to fear that if we wait there may be no agreement at all, or at least that any deal will lack teeth. If Mr. Davis thinks he faces problems of community mistrust now, wait to see what happens if the DOJ report leads to no real enforceable reforms. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said Thursday that it is possible to wrap up the agreement before Mr. Trump takes office, but the "ball's in the city's court."
And Ms. Pugh needs to put some effort into resurrecting the partnerships that contributed to Baltimore's period of progress in reducing the homicide rate. It's not just a matter of good relations between the police and state's attorney's office, though they could surely be improved. Then, state corrections officials coordinated their efforts with Baltimore police and prosecutors to an extraordinary degree. Ms. Pugh's collaborative approach to governance and the fresh start she brings in the city's relationship with Gov. Larry Hogan could help revive that effort. Meanwhile, she and other Maryland officials should do everything they can to help Maryland U.S. Attorney Rod J. Rosenstein keep his post under the Trump administration. Mr. Rosenstein is a George W. Bush appointee who survived both Obama terms because he works so effectively with others regardless of political affiliation. He has brought important resources to bear on the crime fight in Baltimore, and we dearly hope he stays.
But as we have learned, all that only gets us so far because the problem is far bigger than any mayor or police chief. If Baltimore is ever going to fall out of the list of America's deadliest cities, we need to create an environment in which the opportunities outside the drug trade are far greater than those within it and a culture in which disputes aren't settled at gunpoint. If we don't, Baltimore's "normal" will always be tragic.