Baltimore Mayor Touts ‘Renaissance’ yet City Is ‘Ravaged’ by Crime and Residents Are Fleeing in Droves

“A renaissance” is what Baltimore’s mayor says is underway in the city, yet troubling crime rates, fleeing residents, and thousands of vacant homes are leading observers to wonder where he purchased his rose-colored glasses.As Baltimore’s mayor, Brandon Scott, kicked off his second term this week, he repeatedly told residents that they are “in the midst of Baltimore’s renaissance” and called on visitors and locals to “grow this renaissance.” “It rings hollow when people hear the mayor talk about how we’re in a renaissance,” a Baltimore resident and the Maryland Public Policy Institute’s chief economist, Stephen Walters, tells the Sun. “We’ve lost population for seven consecutive decades and we’re on to the eighth here, it’s hard to claim renaissance when you keep losing people, shrinking, and getting poorer.”While police data indicate that Baltimore’s homicide rate has been falling – down 26 percent from last year — there has been mounting concern over other criminal activity, especially juvenile crime.“These young people out there just continue to wreak havoc on our city,” Baltimore’s police commissioner, Richard Worley, said in a recent interview while addressing a 233 percent increase in juvenile carjackings and 40 percent surge in juvenile robberies. “We just announced two arrests of two juveniles, a 12-year-old and a 15-year-old, for carjacking. The 15-year-old had six prior arrests.”Crime is a top issue to residents in the Baltimore region, recent polling released by the Baltimore Metropolitan Council indicates, with 41 percent of respondents putting “crime and drugs” as the most important issue to them. The findings suggest that crime is a more urgent issue to residents than other concerns including the economy, jobs, housing costs, education, public health, and transportation. While the declining homicide rate should be applauded, Mr. Walters tells the Sun, there are “other manifestations of criminal activity, especially juvenile criminal activity, that are troubling to people.”“The kids are not behaving themselves, and the juvenile justice system is not coping with it very well,” he says. He adds that even police data showing crime rates can be “misleading.” “Because if people feel unsafe, they stay home, they don’t go out at night, they don’t walk in certain areas. And so when I stay home, I don’t get mugged,” he says. Crime statistics can “go down at the same time that people still feel unsafe, because we adjust our behavior in line with what we believe to be true about public safety.”As public safety concerns linger, the city has also faced economic issues, a declining population, and a vacant home crisis. The city has been losing more than 500 residents a month since the 2020 census, and “our 1.8 percent GDP growth last year was 1.1 percentage points (or 38 percent) lower than the nation’s 2.9 percent,” according to Mr. Walters. He attributes the shrinking population to factors including fewer job opportunities, lagging wages, and inflation.“We’re just not an attractive place to locate businesses, and it’s a hard place to prosper,” he says. “So people are leaving. They’re voting with their feet.”Maryland’s governor, Wes Moore, has recently called attention to the city’s “13,000 vacant and abandoned homes or structures” and more than 20,000 vacant lots. Mr. Walters says that number is actually higher, and that there are “many more homes” that are vacant and on their way to being abandoned.“In a city that’s enjoying a renaissance, you don’t have 13,000 abandoned properties,” he says, noting the city’s high property taxes that are twice as high as neighboring counties. Although he says the city has “a lot of potential,” until it corrects its tax problems and bad investment climate, a lot of the problems that follow it — such as crime and poor schools — will persist.“There’s a pervasive sense that we’re still not making the progress that we need to make for the city to say that we’re trying to pass the peak of the crime wave that began in the city, actually almost the same time Marilyn Mosby took office,” he says. Ms. Mosby, who was once the top prosecutor at Baltimore, represented a more permissive approach towards prosecuting and garnered national attention for her refusal to prosecute low-level offenses such as drug possession and prostitution. Violent crimes such as homicides, rapes, and aggravated assaults “exploded” after she was sworn into office in 2015, the Heritage Foundation notes. Ms. Mosby is now serving out a home detention sentence after being convicted of mortgage fraud earlier this year. Now, it’s up to Baltimore’s leadership to get serious about beefing up the police response and prosecuting crimes, a legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, Zack Smith, tells the Sun.“I think many parts of the city are still being ravaged by crime, violent crime, particularly,” he says. “We know what works to bring down violent crime rates. It’s putting more police on the street, empowering them to responsibly do their jobs, and then having a prosecutor who will go out and hold those offenders appropriately accountable.”As juvenile crime surges, Mr. Smith says that Baltimore’s leadership has “bought into this idea that juvenile offenders should never be prosecuted as adults, no matter how heinous their crimes, no matter how many times they repeat even very violent crimes.”That approach essentially hands a “get out of jail free” card to those offenders and leads to gangs recruiting them for criminal activity, he adds. “If the mayor is serious about creating a renaissance in Baltimore, about creating conditions where those who live in Baltimore can thrive, first and foremost, he has to get the violent crime problem under control,” Mr. Smith says.The mayor’s office did not respond to a request from the Sun for comment. When he was sworn into office for his second term this week, he said the city was starting a “new chapter.”“We have laid the groundwork on so many of our priorities — in public safety, in our fight to end vacants, modernizing city government to better serve residents, and in doing all of these things the right way — and a more equitable way – than we’ve tried in the past,” he said.

Baltimore Mayor Touts ‘Renaissance’ yet City Is ‘Ravaged’ by Crime and Residents Are Fleeing in Droves

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