Hoping to reduce the record number of homicides and overdoses in the city, the team has already begun working a handful of cases together and this week secured nearly 75,000 square feet of office space in Southwest Baltimore so its members can move into a shared headquarters. Officials say that will speed up the identification, investigation and prosecution of some of Baltimore’s most violent gang leaders.

“We’re teaming up to go after the bad actors in this city who are threatening to destabilize it,” said Don Hibbert, assistant special agent in charge of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s Baltimore field office and a key organizer behind the effort. “Simple as that.”

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Baltimore is on course to reach more than 300 homicides for the fifth year in a row, with 232 killings through Wednesday compared with 199 through the same time last year. Overdose deaths slowed in the first quarter of this year after consecutive years in which the state recorded more than 2,000 such deaths — with 2,385 total overdose deaths around Maryland last year, many of them in Baltimore.

Baltimore Police Commissioner Michael Harrison said he was “extremely pleased” with the new Strike Force, which he said will “enhance our ability to rid Baltimore of its most violent offenders” and interrupt the city’s “long-standing culture of violence,” which he called a symptom of “organized crime that goes hand in hand with illegal drugs.”

Hibbert and Harrison joined Maryland U.S. Attorney Robert K. Hur in his downtown offices on Wednesday in announcing the Strike Force, first hinted at by Gov. Larry Hogan (R) last year. Also there were Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby, Baltimore County Executive Johnny Olszewski Jr. and officials from more than a dozen other partner agencies.

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“The idea behind the Strike Force is straightforward,” Hur said. “It takes the principle that local, state and federal law enforcement are most effective when working together, and it goes all in on that idea.”

Officials said they hope the effort will lead to entire criminal organizations being indicted — from big-time bosses to low-level street dealers. They also said they hope to see the local gangs’ overseas suppliers driven out of the area or arrested alongside their local counterparts.

Officials acknowledged other efforts by local, state and federal law enforcement agencies to collaborate in Baltimore in recent years — such as the city’s “War Room” initiative, or the “B-FED” task force pairing city homicide detectives with federal agents — but said the Strike Force is different, in large part because it is permanent.

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“This is not going to be something for six months or a year and then we dissolve,” Hibbert said. “No Strike Force in America has ever gone out of business.”

Hibbert said the Baltimore Strike Force features seven individual groups, one each led by the Baltimore police, Maryland State Police, DEA, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the FBI, Homeland Security Investigations and the U.S. Marshals Service. Personnel from each of those agencies and the other partner agencies will be intermixed within the groups so that each one has a broad range of skill sets, he said.

In addition to federal and state partners, personnel will be provided by Baltimore County police, Anne Arundel County police and the Baltimore City Sheriff’s Office. Prosecutors will come from Hur’s and Mosby’s offices.

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The Baltimore County Council agreed last month to allow the county to serve in the fiduciary role and on Tuesday approved a 10-year rental agreement for the Strike Force’s new headquarters worth more than $16 million. An earlier proposal to have the city of Annapolis serve the fiduciary role fell apart, delaying the project, officials acknowledged.

A copy of the Baltimore team’s application to create the Strike Force, obtained by the Baltimore Sun, outlines the challenges the teams will face.

A major focus of the Strike Force will be disrupting long-standing relationships between wholesale drug suppliers from Mexico and the Dominican Republic and an “upper echelon” of Baltimore gang leaders who officials said “exert near-complete control over the supply and distribution of heroin, fentanyl, cocaine, and marijuana in the Baltimore region.”

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Mexican cartels use long-standing relationships with some of Baltimore’s “largest and most violent street gangs” to supply the region with drugs, the application said, while Dominican wholesalers use distribution cells along Interstate 95 to push drugs to larger Baltimore gangs, who in turn supply the city’s “pervasive heroin and crack cocaine shops and street corners.”

Those smaller distributors, the application said, “engage in violence and stockpile weapons to further their business” and maintain territory.

Hibbert estimated that it will take about four to six months to complete the new office space for the Strike Force, after which he expects more cases to be brought and at a quicker clip.

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A few cases have already been filed.

Last month, 25 defendants were accused of selling heroin, fentanyl and crack and powder cocaine to individual drug users in East Baltimore and in bulk to other distributors. Investigators seized nine guns, about 20 kilograms of cocaine, heroin and fentanyl, nearly half a million dollars in cash and jewelry and another half a million dollars worth of cars.