BALTIMORE—Will Lockett’s brother was murdered last week. His name got one mention in the paper.

“Charles Adams, 57, died after a Thursday shooting on the 1800 block of Ramblewood Road.”

Adams was a father of four. He was shot in the back outside his stepmother’s house in a quiet neighbourhood. He had been sitting on the porch with his 17-year-old niece, who now trembles from the emotional trauma, and a male friend of hers, who was shot in the stomach.

None of this qualifies as news. Not in Baltimore, not right now.

The one-day riots following the killing of Freddie Gray attracted international attention. There were no deaths. After a few days of apparent calm, the cameras went away.

And then the city suffered through its deadliest month since 1996.

A 31-year-old mother and her 7-year-old son, killed inside their home on Thursday morning, were Baltimore’s 37th and 38th homicide victims since May 1. Toronto, a city with five times Baltimore’s population, had 57 homicides all of last year.

Gray lived in West Baltimore. Anybody with a car there is a few minutes, at most, from the teddy bears and “I Love You” balloons of a fresh roadside memorial to a young black man murdered in the street.

“It’s off the chain,” said Daisy Bush, 61, the owner of a variety store near the centre of the riots. She gestured behind her. “Just had this boy last week. They found him two blocks over. Somebody shot him dead, found him in the alleyway. Had his funeral today.”

She gestured in front of her. “Then they found one over in a children’s playground around the corner.” She gestured to her left. “Then three or four people got shot around here.”

The spike in shootings has occurred at the same time as a steep decline in arrests. The heavy police presence in crime-ridden neighbourhoods has vanished since the city’s chief prosecutor charged six officers in Gray’s death in custody.

By all appearances, at least some officers have made a conscious decision to do less policing.

“After the protests, it seems like the citizens would appreciate a lack of police presence, and that’s exactly what they’re getting,” one officer anonymously told Fox News host Sean Hannity.

The police commissioner, Anthony Batts, said officers feel confused and “unsupported” in the wake of the charges. The president of the police union said his members are “afraid of going to jail for doing their jobs properly.” Many black residents believe they are waging a passive-aggressive campaign to make a petulant point about their value.

“Since the whole Freddie Gray situation took place, the police are like, ‘Oh, that’s how you feel?’ ” said Timeeka Addison, 42. “I live on a very busy street and people call 911 all the time. You have to be in it to see it, but they aren’t responding as quickly, and that’s the scary part. They’re mad. But it’s like — you still have a job to do. You still have to protect and serve. But now it’s like it’s us against them. So — what are the kids to do?”

Addison, who leads a smoking-cessation program, was watching her 7-year-old daughter march in an outdoor rehearsal of the New Edition Marching Band. She doesn’t let her daughter participate unless she can hover nearby. Her young sons, age 12 and 13, aren’t allowed to hang out outside of her home.

Her brother was shot dead in 2006. Shaquil Hinton, the 21-year-old son of her sister’s best friend, was shot dead on Monday.

“Nobody even wants to be here any more,” Addison said. “Everyone wants to pack up and go. Especially people with boys. Black boys. They don’t want to be around here. They don’t want to be anywhere near here. But where do you go?”

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Will Lockett is 59. When he was growing up, he said a day before his brother’s funeral, Baltimore’s black boys would go to recreation centres.

The city government, beset by budget woes, has closed four centres since 2012. All four were in West Baltimore, where the streets are lined with thousands of vacant row houses. At the same time, the city has handed glamorous waterfront development projects tens of millions in public subsidies.

“Building up the Harbor? That’s cool, but come on,” Lockett said. “You’ve got to get inside these neighbourhoods and start helping these people.”

A 21-year-old man pacing a street corner on a sweltering Wednesday afternoon said the mayhem of this month has been caused by “the usual” — money, disrespect, tempers rising with the temperature.

He would not offer his name or do much talking; an interview, he said, was too much like a police interrogation. Before he walked away, though, he paused to make one demand.

“They need to give us back our recs,” he said.

Recreation would help. But the centres were also closed last spring. Their absence this spring is an inadequate explanation for a murder binge few in Baltimore blame entirely on police tactics.

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At a loss for new answers, people affected by the shootings cite the usual toxic mix of systemic problems: poverty, incarceration, the drug trade.

“Money and drugs. Money and drugs. Money and drugs,” said Lockett, a recovering addict. “It's drug-infected. That's the whole thing that's happening here.”

Duane Simmons, senior pastor of Simmons Memorial Baptist Church, offered an additional theory. He said he has been told by gang members that their leaders have declared an “open season” period, running until August, in which personal “beefs” can be settled without fear of a gang war.

“We’re going through a killing spree. It’s not about Freddie Gray, it’s not about the system, it’s just open season,” Simmons said. “And what we are attempting to do in the church is find a way to curb the inevitable. The Crips have said to me, ‘Reverend, you can do all the preaching you want to, it ain’t going to stop. We don’t care what you say, what politicians say. Because we can’t trust you.’ ”

There were 111 homicides in Baltimore this year as of Friday evening, up from 77 at the same time last year. At this rate, the city would end the year with far fewer deaths than in the 300-plus-homicide years of the 1990s, but far more than the 211 of 2014.

Rush Limbaugh and his brethren in right-wing race-baiting have greeted the crime wave with barely concealed glee. They suggest the murders are evidence that the people of Baltimore, not its maligned police force, are the city’s real problem.

Limbaugh’s defence of the cops is widely rejected in Baltimore’s black communities. His harsh criticism of absent Baltimore parents is echoed nearly word for word by a large number of active Baltimore parents.

“It starts at home. These kids down in the low-budget areas, they don’t have anybody to teach them nothing, so they don’t know nothing,” said a woman, who gave her name as Ms. Rucker, on the middle-class street where the mother and son were killed on Thursday.

“All they know is go out, hustle, make a quick dollar, and if somebody does something to you, defend yourself. They don’t know that a life means just as much as yours.”

Heart-shaped balloons were tied to a stop sign on the leafy street where Tyrin Diggs, a 19-year-old, was shot dead last Friday night. Brenda Jenkins, 51, shook her head as she walked by.

“He was just a goofy kid,” Jenkins said Thursday. “Smiling every day, laughing all day long.”

She is a mother of seven. Her youngest boys are 13 and 14. She tries to keep them in the house.

“These kids, I wish somebody could talk to them,” she said. “Maybe they’ll get it one day.”

Another 51-year-old mother, Erma Brooks, sat on her porch Wednesday near another “R.I.P.” memorial in West Baltimore, looking out at a supposed community garden surrounded by a chain-link fence. She said she has no idea why the violence has worsened.

“I basically stay in my room,” Brooks said. “Bullets don’t have no names on them.”

Only weeds were sprouting inside the garden. A teenager was shot in the adjacent alley two weeks ago, Brooks said, in broad daylight.

A hand-painted sign attached to the garden fence said “All Problems Have Solutions.” Not in Baltimore, not right now.