BACK in the 1980s and early 1990s, when Dante Barksdale was playing the game in Baltimore—dealing drugs, toting guns, making some money—there was a process to killing people. “You couldn’t shoot someone without asking permission from a certain somebody,” muses the former gangster, on a tour of the abandoned row-houses and broken roads of West Baltimore, the most dangerous streets in America. “It’s become like, “I’m going to kill whoever’s got a fucking problem with it.”

Mr Barksdale, who spent almost a decade in prison for selling drugs, speaks with authority. His uncle, Nathan “Bodie” Barksdale, was a big shot in the more hierarchical Baltimore gangland he recalls. Avon Barksdale, a fictional villain in “The Wire”, a TV crime drama set in Baltimore, was partly inspired by him. The younger Mr Barksdale was himself fleetingly portrayed in it. (“‘The Wire’ was a bunch of bullshit,” he sniffs. “I got shot in the fourth episode and I didn’t get paid.”) Now employed by the Baltimore health department, in a team of gangsters-turned-social workers known as Safe Streets, he uses his street smarts to try to pre-empt murders by mediating among the local hoodlums. This also gives him a rare vantage onto the city’s latest upwelling of violence, which is concentrated in poor, overwhelmingly black West Baltimore—and is horrific.

Hours after Mr Barksdale conducted his tour of some of Baltimore’s most troubled streets on June 12th, they witnessed another six murders. That raised the number of killings in the city to 159, the highest recorded so early in the year at least since 1990, even though the city’s population was much bigger then than it is now. If weighted to reflect the fact that the murder rate always climbs in the hot, fractious summer months, this suggests Baltimore may see more than 400 murders this year. That would smash the existing record of 344 killings, which was set in 2015, fuelled by violent rioting over the death in police custody of a drug peddler called Freddie Gray.

This is catastrophic. A 50-minute drive from Washington, DC, black men aged 15 to 29 are as likely to die violently as American soldiers were in Iraq at the height of its Baathist insurgency. Yet there is no sign of Maryland or the federal government taking the sort of emergency action such a disaster would seem to justify. Instead of bolstering law enforcement in Baltimore and a few other violent cities, including chiefly Chicago, but also St Louis and Milwaukee, Jeff Sessions, the attorney-general, has tried unsuccessfully to row back a modest federal-government intervention devised by his Democratic predecessor. Meanwhile he has used the violence in those places to misrepresent the much more pacific state of America at large.

“The murder rate is up over 10%—the largest increase since 1968,” Mr Sessions said last month in testimony to the Senate intelligence committee. He neglected to clarify that, notwithstanding that rise, the murder rate is at close to its lowest level in a quarter of a century. In most places, Americans have never been less likely to be murdered; the homicide rate in New York is below the national average. More than 55% of the increase last year was accounted for by Chicago, where 781 people were murdered—more than the total for New York and Los Angeles combined.

America is not experiencing a crime wave, in short, but rather historic progress marred by a few exceptionally bleak places. That does not justify Mr Sessions’s campaign for harsher custodial sentences across the board, which would not cut violent crime much or at all in Baltimore or anywhere. The attorney-general would do better to fathom what is causing the bleak spots, starting with a few stark truths.

As American as cherry pie

Most murder victims in America are black people shot dead by other black people. Blacks represent 13% of America’s population, yet in 2015 they represented 52% of the slain. The toll on black families and communities is appalling; between 1980 and 2013, 262,000 black men were murdered in America, more than four times America’s total number of casualties in Vietnam. If black Americans were murdered at no more than the national rate, America would still be an unusually violent developed country; its murder rate would fall from the current level of 4.9 per 100,000 people, which is similar to that of some African countries, to 2.4 per 100,000. That would make America merely three times as dangerous as Germany.

Criminologists have for decades argued about what makes young black men so much likelier to commit murder than young men of other ethnicities. The answer lies in some combination of poverty, family instability, epidemics of drug use in the wretched inner-city districts into which many blacks were corralled by racist housing policies, and bad, or non-existent, policing. The last of these, which may be the most important, extends far beyond occasional instances of police brutality. In America’s overtly racist past, the killers of black Americans were less likely to be caught than the killers of whites because black lives were valued less. These days, inadequate resources, recruitment and training of inner-city police officers are bigger problems. Yet the outcome is the same. In the 1930s, Mississippi solved 30% of black murders; in the early 1990s, Los Angeles County, then in the grip of a violent crack-cocaine epidemic, solved 36%; in 2015 the police in Baltimore solved 30.5% of murders, most of which involved blacks.

Where murderers operate with a sense of impunity, they are likely to commit more murders. “I probably know ten dudes right now who have shot people and never been arrested,” says Mr Barksdale. Another grim indicator of impunity is that, while the number of fatal shootings has soared this year, the number of non-fatal ones has hardly increased. “Instead of taking a shot and running away, the gunmen are walking up and taking multiple shots to leave no witnesses alive,” says Cassandra Crifasi, a researcher into gun violence at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Health. In the absence of effective policing, friends and relatives of murder victims are also more likely to take the law into their own hands—and so the virus spreads.

The same pattern has been noted in other poorly policed societies, especially those experiencing upheaval or trauma. The homicide rate among black Americans, notes Jill Leovy, a writer on murder in America, is similar to that among Arabs in some parts of Israel’s occupied territories and American frontiersmen in the 18th century. “Like the schoolyard bully,” she writes in “Ghettoside”, “our criminal-justice system harasses people on small pretexts but is exposed as a coward before murder. It hauls masses of black men through its machinery but fails to protect them from bodily injury and death.”

Better policing contributed to the drop in violent crime seen in most American cities from the mid-1990s. The size of its contribution is unclear, however: the complexity of local circumstances and the patchiness of America’s crime data makes accounting for changes in crime rates hard. Even with decades of data to mull over, and a list of likely factors including better policing, strong income growth, demographic changes and reduced alcohol consumption, researchers at the Brennan Centre for Justice, at New York University, could account for only half of the national reduction in violent crime. Accounting for the recent surge in killing in Baltimore and Chicago is even harder. Yet it is striking that both places have recently suffered a dramatic collapse in public trust in the police, sparked by acts of brutality.

Loathed but needed

Just as the killing of Freddie Gray, who suffered a fatal spine injury in the back of a police van, lit up Baltimore, so the killing of Laquan McDonald, another young black man, who was shot dead in possession of a pocket-knife, led to protests in Chicago. In both cases the police, undermanned and unsure how to comport themselves in a world of mobile-phone cameras in every pocket, retreated. Between November 2015 and January 2016, the number of suspects briefly detained in Chicago dropped by 80%. In Baltimore, arrest numbers have fallen in the past three years, even as the murder rate soared.

Baltimore’s police department was thrown into additional disarray last year by a damning report from the Department of Justice, which concluded that many of its officers were poorly trained, racist and incompetent, especially in their bungled efforts to police poor black neighbourhoods. This finding led the feds to demand the overwatch role that Mr Sessions has tried unsuccessfully to give up. Another scandal, in March, has made matters worse; seven members of an elite Baltimore police unit were charged with robbing drug dealers and law-abiding Baltimoreans, among other crimes. “I sell drugs,” one allegedly boasted. Baltimore’s police bridle at the suggestion that they are to blame for the city’s violence. They are at least trying harder. The case-closure rate for murders is currently around 50%. In response to the six murders on the day of your correspondent’s visit to West Baltimore, the city’s police commissioner, Kevin Davis, also announced what amounted to a weeklong state of emergency. He dispatched most of the city’s 2,850 police officers—including many previously dedicated to office-work—on 12-hour patrols. If such efforts could be sustained, they would probably be popular, even though the police are not. “No one trusts the police, no one wants to tell them anything,” said Yolanda Stewart, a resident of the troubled Sandtown-Winchester neighbourhood, whose 21-year-old nephew was recently shot and maimed outside her house. “But we need strong police around here to protect us.” A tour of Baltimore’s trouble spots also evinces some sympathy for the cops. Better policing alone cannot curb a major crime wave; though New York’s crime-fighting success is often attributed to an imaginative crackdown on petty crime in the 1990s, the city’s long economic boom probably played a bigger part. By contrast, the state of Baltimore’s poorest neighbourhoods, huddled on either side of the Patapsco river, is unrelentingly dire. Whole streets have been boarded up against the junkies who hunker miserably on the weedy verges. Where an occasional inhabited house interrupts the monotony of abandonment, a glimpse of curtains or a pot-plant appears both valiant and acutely pathetic. (“The people in these communities are doing the best they can,” says Ericka Alston, a former addict who runs a much-praised after-school club in West Baltimore.) The city has an estimated 16,000 abandoned houses, some of which have lain empty since its previous big riot, in 1968, following the death of Martin Luther King. Most of the damage is more recent, however. A former steel and manufacturing hub, the city has lost 75,000 factory jobs since 1990; as a result, around a quarter of Baltimoreans are stuck in poverty, with few obvious exits. A 25-year-long study of 790 children in Baltimore by the sociologist Karl Alexander and colleagues, from 1982 to 2007, found only 4% of poor children made it through college. In Sandtown-Winchester, shortly before the riots, 52% of adults were unemployed, 49% of teenagers were “chronically absent” from school and a third of houses were empty or abandoned. Whatever caused the drop in crime that Baltimore experienced with the rest of America, such indicators suggest it was fragile progress.

That is especially true given the attendant horrors of Baltimore’s other big scourge, drug addiction, which also has a long history in the city. “If you think dope is for kicks and for thrills, you’re out of your mind,” said Billie Holiday, a jazz singer and heroin addict, who grew up in Sandtown-Winchester in the 1920s. Mr Barksdale and many of his ex-gangster colleagues cut their teeth during the crack-cocaine binge of the late 1980s and 1990s. Many, including Mr Barksdale, are the sons of addicts. Underpinning the latest crime surge is a third epidemic, of opioid prescription drugs, which is in some ways the deadliest yet.

According to an estimate by the health department, around 50,000 Baltimoreans are addicted to opioids. Some consider that an exaggeration; a visit to the streets around Baltimore’s Lexington Market suggests it might not be. “See him on the bike! He’s so high he can’t ride straight,” says Mr Barksdale, from behind the wheel, picking out the stoners with an expert eye. There appear to be dozens of them; two dealers are plainly visible, dishing out the content of orange pillboxes. It is probably Percocet, an opioid pain-reliever, with a street value of $30 for a 30mg hit. One of the dealers is operating within a few feet of a police van—perhaps, Mr Barksdale speculates, because he too is stoned. “Everyone’s high!” he exclaims. “You used to be ostracised if you was on drugs. Now it’s so common it’s accepted.”

In the view of Mr Barksdale and his co-workers, these and other changes in Baltimore’s illegal drugs market help drive the killing. The more hierarchical gangs, and regulated murders, depicted in “The Wire” were based on the relative scarcity of heroin and cocaine; a gangster with a good supply of the drugs occupied a commanding position. By contrast, the easier availability of prescription drugs—especially in the aftermath of the riots, during which many pharmacies were looted—has led to a profusion of petty dealers, many of whom are also addicts. The result is constant turf battles which, unchecked by sobriety, are especially liable to turn bloody.

Barksdale, gangster-turned-helper

In turn, the bloodshed has led to a general downgrading of the value of a life. “The normal has changed, violence and retaliation and pain are expected,” says Ms Alston, who estimates that 98% of the 50-100 children who attend her after-school club have heard or seen someone being shot. “This is about six-year-olds walking in and saying, ‘Did you hear so and so got shot?’” That suggests a third way in which violence, which public-health experts increasingly view as analogous to infectious disease, spreads. The community starts taking it for granted.

Safe Streets is one of the more imaginative efforts to stop the contagion. It was launched in Baltimore a decade ago after a model pioneered in Chicago by an epidemiologist, Gary Slutkin. His idea was to erect barriers around the violence in the form of interventions by community leaders and streetwise locals. Of 31 such “violence-interrupters” employed by Safe Streets, all but two have done prison time. “We all did shit, got shot, got hit the fuck up, that’s why we’re credible messengers,” explains Mr Barksdale. “Ain’t none of us were snitches.” Patrolling their areas in orange T-shirts, the violence-interrupters soak up news of the latest disagreements with obvious relish. (“So there are these two marching bands got this beef going on,” recounts one with delight, through an open window of Mr Barksdale’s car, “and they got knives and pit-bulls…”)

Uncertainty about where the violence-interrupters stand in relation to the law has made them controversial. Because they are devoted to forestalling violence, they tend to take no view on the drugs deals they observe. A few have also sought to augment their meagre salaries unwisely. Mr Barksdale concedes that one of the problems is keeping people engaged without dipping back into their old lifestyles. His gangster uncle, who briefly worked for Safe Streets, was one who succumbed to temptation. Nathan Barksdale died in prison in North Carolina in February, aged 54, having been jailed for four years for trafficking heroin. Such controversies have left Safe Streets short of friends in high places; it almost lost its annual funding, of $1.6m, last year. Yet the ex-crims appear to be effective. A study by researchers at Johns Hopkins University published in 2012 found a statistically significant reduction in non-fatal violence in the four neighbourhoods they patrol, and a significant reduction in killings in two of them. Given the high cost of violence, financially and otherwise, that suggests Safe Streets is good value. It is estimated that $80m has been spent on treating gunshot wounds in Baltimore over the past five years.

It will take more than a few more ex-gangsters to pacify Baltimore, however. A straw-poll of Safe Streets workers suggests the city’s troubled parts need four things above all. They need better schools, to mitigate the damaging effects on teenagers of their chaotic families, and to equip them for the jobs being created in Baltimore’s plusher areas. They need fewer prescription drugs. And they need more and better policing. For the last of these, there is at least some hope in the form of the promised reforms and federal oversight. Of better schools and fewer drugs in Baltimore’s violent districts there is no sign and, in the absence of serious attention to this calamity, little prospect.