Baltimore's Historic Rise in Violent Crime

Mark Kleiman Quoted in The Atlantic

A recent article in The Atlantic profiles T.J. Smith, chief spokesperson of the Baltimore Police Department, and considers the substantial increase in Baltimore's violent crime rate in the aftermath of the death of Freddie Gray. Mark Kleiman, Director of Marron's Crime and Justice program, is quoted on the cycle behind the city's rising homicide rate.

Mark Kleiman, a crime-policy analyst at NYU’s Marron Institute of Urban Management, cites Baltimore as “one of the clearest cases where a catastrophic breakdown in police–community relations combines with a sheer decrease in police activity to produce a vacuum in crime control. This can be spun as somehow being the fault of community activists who criticize the police, or of prosecutors or the Justice Department scaring the police out of doing their job. But the bottom line is that police misconduct plus community rage leads to more unsolved homicides, and more unsolved homicides lead to more homicides.”

Read More in The Atlantic

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