VICTIMS AND CRIMINALS VICTIMS AND CRIMINALS A look at Baltimore homicides reveals that a large percentage of victims have criminal arrest records -- and have for years. Year Murders Victims with

arrest records 1997 303 74% 2007-1 205 91% 1 -- through Aug. 28 Source: Baltimore Police Department By Julie Snider, USA TODAY Digg



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Facebook WASHINGTON  A spike in murders in many cities is claiming a startling number of victims with criminal records, police say, suggesting that drug and gang wars are behind the escalating violence. Police increasingly explore criminal pasts of homicide victims as well as suspects as they search for sources of the violence, which has risen the past two years after a decade of decline, according to the FBI's annual measures of U.S. crime. Understanding victims' pasts is critical to driving crime back down, police and crime analysts say. "If you are trying to look at prevention, you need to look at the lives of the people involved," says Mallory O'Brien, director of the Homicide Review Commission in Milwaukee. In Baltimore, about 91% of murder victims this year had criminal records, up from 74% a decade ago, police reported. In many cases, says Frederick Bealefeld III, Baltimore's interim police commissioner, victims' rap sheets provide critical links to potential suspects in botched drug deals or violent territorial disputes. MORE FROM BALTIMORE: Cities study victims' criminal past Philadelphia police Capt. Ben Naish says the Baltimore numbers are "shocking." Philadelphia also has seen the number of victims with criminal pasts inch up — to 75% this year from 71% in 2005. In Milwaukee, local leaders created the homicide commission after a spike in violence led to a 39% increase in murders in 2005. The group compiled statistics on victims' criminal histories for the first time and found that 77% of homicide victims in the past two years had an average of nearly 12 arrests. While it was common in the past for murder victims to have criminal records, the current levels are surprising even to analysts who study homicides. "Anecdotally, the detectives on the street knew" victims with prior police contact were being killed, "but we wanted people to start to look at this" in the community, O'Brien says. In Newark, where three young friends with no apparent links to crime were executed Aug. 4, roughly 85% of victims killed in the first six months of this year had criminal records, on par with the percentage in 2005 but up from 81% last year, police statistics show. David Kennedy, a professor at New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice, says the rise in criminals killing criminals has escaped policymakers' attention. "The notion that these (murders) are random bolts of lightning, which is the commonly held image, is not the reality," says Kennedy, who has examined the backgrounds of murder suspects and victims in multiple U.S. cities. "It happens, but it doesn't happen often." The slaying of truly innocent victims is so unusual in Baltimore that the chief prosecutor says the city has become dangerously numb to the carnage. "If we don't put human faces on the victims, we will become desensitized," State Attorney Patricia Jessamy says. Share this story: Digg del.icio.us Newsvine Reddit Facebook Conversation guidelines: USA TODAY welcomes your thoughts, stories and information related to this article. Please stay on topic and be respectful of others. Keep the conversation appropriate for interested readers across the map.