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By Stephan Janis, Special to the AFRO

If there is one question that looms over what appears to be another year of near record violence in Baltimore, perhaps it would be, why isn’t the city’s massive investment in public safety paying off? 

While police spending is on the rise along with the homicide rate, city leaders again are raising questions about the effectiveness of the primary agency tasked with confronting violence and the rising costs that come with funding it.  

“This police department is in greater disarray than we’ve ever seen, and we don’t have a plan,” said State Sen. Jill Carter (D-41)  “I know they’re working on one, but it seems like we would have a plan by now.”

Along with the roughly $500 million in city funds invested in the operational budget, there are less visible costs that make the city’s spending on law enforcement even more eye popping.  

Among them, a $137 million contribution in 2018 to fund fire and police pension liabilities that continue to consume a greater portion of the city budget. In fact, the ever-escalating number has sucked nearly $700 million dollars from the city budget since 2010.  

Then there is the steady flow of overtime spending, which consumed $46 million in 2018 and is expected to reach similar levels this year and into the foreseeable future.  

But yet Baltimore is in on pace again to reach once unfathomable levels of violence, begging the question: What is Baltimore getting for the money invested in law enforcement?

“I think that a cursory examination of how much has been allocated to the police budget since the 70s [to the present] shows an exponential increase in the money which they receive year after year after year, and yet what has been the result?,”  community activist Christopher Ervin told the AFRO.

“There is more than enough data and other scholarship produced at this point to support a shift from funneling resources to increased policing and its budgeting to instead focusing on the organizations and systems addressing the social factors which drive the results that we call violent crime,” he said.

Last week the Baltimore Sun reported homicides were 17 percent, and non-fatal shootings had risen by 25 percent. A trend that makes Baltimore one of the deadliest cities in the nation for several years in a row.

Police Commissioner Michael Harrison has pledged a new crime plan soon. Requests by the AFRO for an interview to discuss what that plan might look like was declined by city officials who said instead it would be released shortly. 

To be sure the police department has been struggling under a federal consent decree, the result of a justice department investigation that found the BPD engaged in racist and unconstitutional practices. 

But leaders like Carter say the city is facing an existential crisis.  A sense that intractable poverty and dysfunction on many levels of government had sown a sense of despair among residents that drives the impulse to act out.

“You can’t kill people’s hopes and dreams and opportunities and spirits and expect them not to kill each other,” Carter said.

“The only reason we strive as young people is because we think that it matters, and we think that life matters.  When you see nothing everywhere, it dims hopes.”

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