Jacquelyn Smith’s husband, Keith Smith, and her stepdaughter, Valeria Smith, told local media and authorities in December that Jacquelyn Smith was stabbed by a man on a street in East Baltimore after she opened her car window to help a woman who was seeking help with her baby. They said she died of the wounds she sustained from that attack on the way to a hospital.

It was another weird and awful story for Baltimore, and it slipped right into the narrative that people both inside and outside the city have constructed to fit it into their sense of the world. Well, of course Baltimore is dark and dangerous and violent. The facts of an incident notwithstanding, at times like this they demand to be molded into a plot point in a narrative.

But the consequence is that we end up assigning blame and guilt to certain people and certain aspects of the community, while absolving others. And although Baltimore has been inflicted with an especially negative narrative, it is not alone.

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Listen to the way President Trump talks about “inner cities,” or the way other Americans use “West Philadelphia” or “South Central” or “Compton” as a shorthand for violence — this is a problem that attaches to neighborhoods of color generally.

Media mogul Oprah Winfrey tweeted that she’d think twice before she gave someone her money the way Jacquelyn Smith supposedly had. Closer to home, an influential developer, David Cordish, CEO and chairman of the Cordish Cos., published an op-ed in the Baltimore Sun warning that beggars and squeegee kids on street corners were bad for safety and bad for business.

“Of course society should and could do more to cure the underlying problems of homelessness and mental health. Solving the problem will take years, if not decades,” he wrote. “In the meantime, before heaven on earth reigns on our planet, society has the right for citizens not to be murdered in their cars waiting on a light to change.”

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It’s such powerful argument. It’s just that, as police now believe, the danger wasn’t on the street corner, but within Smith’s own (suburban) family.

It’s true that the city struggles with crime, and that the answers aren’t easy. According to the Baltimore Sun, there have been 49 reported homicides in Baltimore this year. Last year closed out with 309. Mayor Catherine Pugh’s job is not easy. And if she is defensive, it’s easy to see why.

Talk to Pugh, and she’ll tell you, as she did in a January 2018 Washington Post editorial, that the violence here creates “a sad narrative of a truly great American city.”

In fact, the mayor’s time in office has been marked by what some might call a preoccupation with narrative. She’d like to impose her own narrative, but good luck dislodging the one already in place. In February of last year, the Baltimore Sun’s editorial board wrote a piece titled “Chaos overwhelms Baltimore Mayor Pugh’s ‘narrative.’”

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What’s especially striking about the Smith case is that Keith Smith apparently took advantage of the Baltimore-is-dangerous narrative to hide his alleged crime, and he nearly got away with it. After Jacquelyn Smith’s killing, he told sympathetic reporters: “Be careful, when we see the panhandlers getting in close proximity of your car. Because like me, I’m from Baltimore. I never thought they were going to take my wife’s life and so now I have to live with that every day.”

In the days since police said that his story was fake, some in Baltimore have pointed out the holes that were there from the start — including the fact that panhandlers are seldom seen in the part of the city where the attack was alleged to have happened. No one brought that up at the time, though. What we saw instead were tearful, sympathetic interviews with Keith and his daughter.

The Baltimore narrative is a handy touchstone for those who want to explain the city’s entrenched problems without truly understanding them. In Baltimore, the rush to stamp out crime comes hand in hand with calls for more police, and the Smith case, for a while at least, was Exhibit A. The problem? The Baltimore Police Department is still very much struggling with tension between many residents and the department, tension that was ratcheted up after the death of Freddie Gray in 2015. The city is still under a consent decree with the Department of Justice stemming from poor policing practices that mostly affected the city’s poor, black population.

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The reality is that Baltimore’s most vulnerable people are the ones who suffer, and for them, calls for more police sound like a threat rather than a solution. They’re the ones who would have taken the blame in the narrative that the Smith slaying seemed to reinforce. It’s a small but happy irony that it was that same police department that turned the story in a different direction.