The city of Baltimore has now recorded more than 230 murders this year and we haven’t even reached the end of August. If the pace doesn’t slacken, Charm City is on track to reach 300 murders by November, setting up the possibility that they will break their all-time record for killings in a single year. Other categories of crime are up nearly across the board as well. Mayor Brandon Scott promised the city a five-year plan to significantly reduce murders and other crimes, but there’s no sign of that happening thus far. In fact, things are only getting worse and there are large portions of the city where the gangs clearly control the streets far more than law enforcement does. The mayor has tried blaming the media and gun manufacturers, but even his staunchest supporters aren’t buying it. So just how bad has it gotten? The NAACP has petitioned the Governor to declare a public state of emergency in Baltimore and deploy the National Guard to get the violence under control. (Zerohedge)
Democrats have controlled Baltimore for more than half a century. The failure of Baltimore as a city should be directed at those with progressive policies and ideas about policing and operating a city.
But there is a glimmer of hope for the city: Baltimore state’s attorney Marilyn Mosby, who aligned herself with radical criminal justice reformers, just lost in the Democratic primary. She acknowledged a federal investigation into her finances cost her the election.
[Mayor Brandon] Scott might need to tweak his crime reduction plan or face the wrath of Hogan or even voters. This comes as a civil rights organization (Randallstown’s chapter of the NAACP) in a suburb in Baltimore County requested the governor to declare a “public emergency” and deploy the National Guard to the city to quell out-of-control violent crime.
As Tyler Durden points out in the linked article, there is a glimmer of hope showing up in Baltimore that we’ve covered here before. The city’s soft-on-crime, anti-police State’s Prosecutor Marilyn Mosby was recently defeated in a primary challenge. Unfortunately, she will just be replaced by a different Democrat and most of the opposition against her stemmed from the many corruption charges she’s facing, but it does seem to demonstrate that the voters do have a limit as to how much failure they will tolerate.
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The move by the NAACP is remarkable as well. Traditionally, both the Democrats in Baltimore and civil rights activists have shied away from blaming the failed policies of Democratic administrations for the city’s enormous murder problem. Similarly, it’s been considered impolite to point to the fact that the gangs are responsible for nearly all of it. Placing blame on the largely minority membership gangs or the city’s majority Black municipal leadership was considered racist, so other scapegoats had to be found.
But now even the NAACP is raising the flag of surrender and asking for the National Guard to ride to the rescue. That’s as close as we’re likely to get to an admission that the policies of Baltimore’s government have failed and the people are effectively living in a war zone. If the NAACP is willing to speak up, perhaps others will as well.
But could the National Guard really make a difference? It would be a drastic move on the part of the Governor and the Guard could only be used for law enforcement purposes during a state of emergency. The optics of having Guard members out in the streets getting into running gun battles with the gangs (and likely killing some of them) would be “complicated” to say the least. And how long could such a state of emergency last? I’m not arguing that Baltimore isn’t in a state of emergency, but it’s been this way for the better part of a decade and it’s unlikely to slow down soon. I’m not sure how the courts would treat the question of whether or not this could be allowed to become “the new normal” in Baltimore.
There’s no word from Larry Hogan yet as to how he will respond to this request. But if I had to place a wager on the question, I would bet that he will see this idea as a bridge too far.
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