Crime in Baltimore declined significantly in 2020. Violent crime dropped 20% from March 2020 to March 2021, property crime decreased 36%, and there were 13 fewer homicides. It wasn’t due to COVID lockdowns — other big cities saw crime increases in the time of pandemic. So what was the secret to the success? Counterintuitively, it was fewer arrests and prosecutions for non-violent crimes.
In March last year, as the severity of the coronavirus became apparent, the State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby announced that the city would no longer prosecute drug possession, prostitution, trespassing, and other minor charges, to keep people out of jail and limit the spread of the deadly virus.
The policy was so unexpectedly successful that Mosby announced on Friday that the policy would become permanent.
One supporter of the measure is Baltimore's police commissioner, Michael Harrison, who had to get his cops to buy into the new philosophy. “The officers told me they did not agree with that paradigm shift.” Adding he had to “socialize” both officers and citizens to this new approach. Harrison admitted he had expected crime to rise — as, no doubt, did most people. However, he said, “It did not. It continued to go down through 2020. As a practitioner, as an academic, I can say there’s a correlation between the fact that we stopped making these arrests and crime did not go up.”
It seems that, if the authorities stop treating everyone as a potential criminal, trust is rebuilt in the criminal justice system. As many parents have discovered, unthinking punishment does not necessarily produce children who better follow the rules. In fact behavior breeds behavior. Spare the rod and you may well end up with a better-adjusted child.
Adults, of course, are not children, but a measured response to ‘bad behavior’ produces more socially positive results — even into adulthood.
In a larger sense, the results of Baltimore’s experiment in lighter policing shouldn’t be such a surprise. There is no evidence that harsher punishment leads to less crime. Murder rates are higher in states with the death penalty than in those without. The US leads the world in incarcerating its citizens — without any concomitant success in producing low crime rates.
The legalization of marijuana by several states has not led to a spike in drug use. And while we will have to see what effect Oregon’s decision to decriminalize all narcotics will have on hard drug use, Portugal’s two-decade-long experiment in treating addiction as a health issue rather than a crime has not led to an increase in drug usage or OD deaths.
Instead, after choosing to decriminalize all narcotics and hallucinogenics in 2001, Portugal has seen its drug-induced death rate plummet to 1/5th the rate of the EU. And 1/50th that of the US. Its rate of HIV infection dropped from 104.2 new cases per million in 2000 to 4.2 cases per million in 2015. Drug use has declined among 15 to 24-year-olds — the most at-risk age group for initiating drug use.
As for prostitution, it is going to exist no matter what the law says about it. Much of the world has acknowledged this truth. In countries as disparate as Israel, Honduras, New Zealand, Denmark, and Bangladesh prostitution is legal — as it is in another 60 countries. And there hasn’t been much demand to re-criminalize it. Especially as it has made the profession a lot safer for sex workers.
Two benefits of Baltimore’s strategy that should make conservatives happy are one, the savings. And two, it allows the criminal justice system to focus on violent crimes — the crimes that actually hurt people. Americans should know, but it is a fact rarely publicized, that 40% of murders in the US go unsolved. And criminal psychologists know by study — as does any thoughtful person by instinct— that it is not the severity of the punishment that deters the criminal — but the likelihood they will be caught, convicted, and suffer the consequences of their action.
Criminal justice in the US is often grounded in hostility, racism, and a belief that poverty is a moral failure — if not an outright crime in its own right. I blame it on the section of Americans who use Christianity as a tool for retribution rather than mercy.
All I can say is well played Baltimore. Who else is in?