Whose Heart is Baltimore Breaking, Really?

February 7, 2014 at 2:49 pm

There’s a piece about crime in Baltimore over on Medium that’s gone viral.

It’s understandable why this article has emerged right now. In Federal Hill, robbers recently held up and pistol-whipped employees at a popular tavern. A Baltimore Sun editor was held up on a Canton street by a brick-wielding mugger who fractured the man’s skull and knocked out his teeth. In a home facing Patterson Park, burglars beat and stabbed a woman to death in her home. (She had chased one of the burglars out of her house in the early morning just last summer.)

The author of the Medium piece, Tracey Halvorsen, lives half a block from Patterson Park. She is scared.

“I’m tired of being surrounded by drug addicts,” she writes. “I’m tired of looking at 11 year olds as potential thieves, muggers and murderers on my walk home from the office.”

Halvorsen doesn’t want to leave. She loves her neighbors, loves walking outside and seeing “the overall sense of diversity” that city living provides. Baltimore has great restaurants, bright minds, fun bars.

But, she writes, “you just can’t ignore the crime. It’s the elephant in the room in Baltimore City.”

She pins it on the city’s elected leaders, saying she does her part by paying taxes, running a business, reporting suspicious activity, keeping her home “looking nice,” and keeping her outside lights on at night.

Then, this:

“All I know is when there are more police, there is less crime. When people get arrested for littering or loitering or being publicly intoxicated, they go do that shit somewhere else. And yes, I realize this may be a knee-jerk reaction and won’t solve all the problems. But I’m desperate for some kind of help. I want to feel safe.”

Crime, the subhed of the article says, “is why people leave.”

Some people, anyway.

I think Halvorsen is mistaking Patterson Park and similar neighborhoods for Baltimore City. In the 1980s and 1990s, Federal Hill and Canton were the first neighborhoods to attract large numbers of upper-middle class, mostly white homeowners. Patterson Park has been on the same track for years, although some would argue it’s still “in transition,” as it abuts a largely poor part of town that’s heavily black and increasingly Latino.

I produced a series for Baltimore public radio station WYPR called “The Lines Between Us” about how race and class dramatically shape our experiences in Baltimore. We had a lot of data maps built for the series. Canton, Federal Hill, and the area around Patterson Park are veritable islands when it comes to drugs, shootings, and violent crime in general.

Horrific crimes like the ones that just happened in Canton, Federal Hill, and Patterson Park happen against the odds. In the rest of Baltimore, they are the odds.

The “other Baltimore,” which I assume she’s referring to when she says “they go do that shit somewhere else” (and where I assume she believes “they” are coming from) has been scared to death for decades. That other Baltimore is mostly black. There’s a lot of poverty there; but there are also a lot of working people surviving day to day, trying to get their kids a good education and keep them off the streets. There’s a lot of crime there, but there are also a lot of people who have to deal with that crime every day and have been working for decades to pull their community out of an intractable spiral.

And you know what? Despite all that, if you actually talk to them, many of them love Baltimore, too. They have the same love/hate relationship with Baltimore that Tracey Halvorsen does. They weigh the same benefits against the same dangers. But they have fewer resources to make that move out of the city–a move that is clearly at the forefront of many more wealthy city dwellers’ minds right now.

I see where Halvorsen is coming from, and I get the chorus of amens I’ve seen on Facebook and Twitter. I’m white and middle class, I’ve got a lot to lose, and I could easily find an affordable place to live far from the perils of the city.

But when I look more closely at the outrage in her piece, I see its potential to make things worse.

It’s tough to talk about white privilege in the face of crimes like the ones Halvorsen cites, with innocent victims killed and badly injured and stunned families left to grieve. I sympathize with Halvorsen and her fears that she’ll end up like them.

But so far, $32,000 has been raised for the victim of the Canton robbery and beating. The FBI is offering a $5,000 reward in the Federal Hill bar robbery. There’s also a lot that goes on, from individual decisions to local, state, and federal policy, that ensures–whether intentionally or not–that all the social ills stay where they “belong”: in the neighborhoods that people like Halverson and, frankly, I won’t live in. Halvorsen blames the mayor and city leaders, saying they ignore crime. But people in other Baltimore neighborhoods are upset with leadership, too, saying neighborhoods like Halvorsen’s get the resources while poorer neighborhoods are left to wither.

But what will pointing the finger at City Hall do about problems that have persisted through many mayors and many city councils? Perhaps pressuring city leaders can do something for some neighborhoods. Halvorsen says, “All I know is when there are more police, there is less crime. When people get arrested for littering or loitering or being publicly intoxicated, they go do that shit somewhere else.” That sounds a lot like a plea for “zero tolerance” policing.

Baltimore tried that; in 2005, over 100,000 people were arrested…and one out of four was released without charges. More arrests mean more racial disparities, which you’ll find in drug arrests and at every level of the juvenile justice system. (In fact, federal law insists the state measure those juvenile disparities and make plans to address them. The state can lose federal funding if its efforts fall short.) All the stopping and frisking in the world isn’t likely to stop crime, and it certainly won’t end the inequalities that drive crime.

Halvorsen says, “I realize this may be a knee-jerk reaction and won’t solve all the problems. But I’m desperate for some kind of help. I want to feel safe.”

Well, don’t we all.

Crime is not the “elephant in the room.” It’s all anyone talks about here. The elephant in the room is inequality.

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