But when budget deliberations came in 2021, and Scott proposed increasing the police budget by $28 million, those same supporters became outspoken critics of the mayor. His allies actively pushed the mayor to continue making cuts to the police budget, reductions he successfully lobbied for as City Council president last year. Baltimore spends more per capita on policing than any major city in the country, far outpacing New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, and it was Scott’s pledge to make sweeping change that won over far-left voters. Scott rose to power by tying these factions together with a central promise: to reform the Baltimore Police Department, an agency under federal consent decree, while shifting police resources to other agencies to combat the drivers of violence. In Baltimore, political lines are drawn in shades of blue, separating moderate Democrats, progressives, and those farther left. That Schleifer would propose cash rewards, a strategy that has limited evidence of success behind it, speaks to the city leadership’s state of desperation to tamp down violence: People are willing to try something, anything, to stop the city’s record-setting pace of homicides-more than 250 by the end of September.īut the pressure coming from the mayor’s left flank, his own base, may be the greatest threat to the still-early days of his leadership. “Right now the clearance rate is under 50 percent,” Schleifer says, “so you have over a 50 percent chance in Baltimore of getting away with murder.” That said, just as police found the man’s body, the City Council considered its latest strategy in beating back the steady pace of killings and shootings: cash rewards for any information that could lead to an arrest, through a bill introduced by Councilperson Isaac “Yitzy” Schleifer. Like so many killings in Baltimore, where violence spiked in 2015 following the death of Freddie Gray and has remained high, Nettles’ death attracted brief media attention before quickly fading from the news. He was shot on July 19 in Forest Park, a Northwest neighbor- hood lined with single-family homes, blocks away from where many wealthier Black professionals call home. Baltimore’s 190th homicide victim this year was a 64-year-old man named Vaseles Nettles.
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