The City of Baltimore: A reputation not to die for

Killings: It's fact, not fiction. Baltimore has been gaining national attention with its growing murder rate. Instead of a new police commissioner every year or so...me thinks the city needs a new Mayor.//JW sends.

The Los Angeles Times - a Tribune Publishing newspaper, as we like to note here at The Sun - wrote that "Baltimore's narcotics dealers dispense crack and heroin like fast-food orders" and said, "Warring factions are killing rivals at a relentless clip."

The LAT called the city's nearly one-a-day homicide rate through the first five weeks of the year "harrowing" and said, "The revolving door at police headquarters on Fayette Street has complicated O'Malley's crime-fighting campaign, eroding officers' morale, deepening public cynicism and threatening to become a drag on the mayor's statewide political ambitions."

Then again, the story described the muscular mayor as "reed thin."

For good measure, The Boston Globe chimed in last week with a story on witness intimidation that recounted the firebombing of the house of a Harwood community leader in January and the arson fire that killed the Dawson family in Oliver in 2002.

Other cities are up in arms over homicide rates that Baltimore would envy.

I was in Philadelphia this month when The Philadelphia Inquirer ran a front-page story describing a decline in violence last year in Chicago as offering "lessons to teach that cities such as Philadelphia and Camden can learn."

And Philadelphia saw its homicide numbers decline last year, from 348 to 327. That's in a city with 1.48 million people, which works out to 22 killings for every 100,000 people.

Baltimore last year had 278 homicides in a city of 643,000 people, or 43 per 100,000 people, nearly twice the rate in Philadelphia.

Last month, I was in Dallas shortly after The Dallas Morning News ran a lengthy front-page analysis of what it called the city's "culture of murder." The story was followed by an editorial that declared, "It's action time." The city's police chief "must make an appreciable difference in Dallas' crime statistics," the editorial said. "Nothing less should be tolerated."

The 2004 homicide total that prompted the story was 248. That's in a city of 1.2 million people, or a rate of about 21 per 100,000 people, about half the rate in Baltimore.