Why it is open season for killing in Baltimore

A mural depicting Freddie Gray is seen along Mount St in the Sandtown-Winchester neighbourhood. Photo / Washington Post

Daphne Alston used to go to every funeral.

A co-founder of Mothers of Murdered Sons and Daughters United, Alston has worked with hundreds of families in Baltimore, helping them navigate the pain, paperwork and logistics that come with each killing. But recent years have brought such a spike in violence that there are now too many funerals for Alston to attend. She has enlisted other members of her group to help her with outreach to the families of the slain.

A key component of that contact was once helping families endure the legal proceedings that followed - and sitting next to them during the trials. But this year the court cases are scant. Alston knows of just a few killings for which anyone has been arrested.

As Baltimore has seen a stunning surge of violence, with nearly a killing each day for the past three years in a city of 600,000, homicide arrests have plummeted. City police made an arrest in 41 per cent of homicides in 2014; last year, the rate was just 27 per cent, a 14 percentage point drop.

Of 50 of America's largest cities, Baltimore is one of 34 where police now make homicide arrests less often than in 2014, according to a Washington Post analysis. In Chicago, the homicide arrest rate has dropped 21 per cent, in Boston 12 per cent and in St Louis 9 per cent.

Baltimore is also one of 30 cities that have seen an increase in homicides in recent years, with the greatest raw number increase in killings of any city other than Chicago, which has four times the population. While homicide rates are near historical lows in most US cities, Baltimore and Chicago both have murder tallies that rival the early 2000s.

The wave of violence here began not long after the April 2015 death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man arrested in west Baltimore and placed - hands cuffed and legs shackled - in the back of a police van. There, he suffered a severe neck injury and lost consciousness. He died in the hospital about a week later.

Daphne Alston is a co-founder of Mothers of Murdered Sons and Daughters United. Photo / Washington Post

Gray's death prompted massive protests that at times turned to riots. The years since have come with a documented officer slowdown - patrol officers say they are hesitant to leave their vehicles and have made fewer subjective stops of people on Baltimore's streets. That, coupled with a crisis of police legitimacy as residents express distrust and frustration with the force, has fuelled a public safety emergency in parts of the city, community leaders say. "It's an open market, open season for killing," said Alston, whose son Tariq was murdered in 2008. "After Freddie Gray, things just went berserk."

While there is evidence for and against a nationwide Ferguson effect - the theory that crime increased after 2014 as police faced more scrutiny following the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri - in Baltimore there is an indisputable Freddie Gray effect. As violence in the city has risen since 2015, the likelihood of a killer being arrested has dropped precipitously.

For most of the decade before 2015, Baltimore's annual homicide arrest rate hovered at about 40 per cent. Since 2015, the arrest rate hasn't topped 30 per cent in any year. And while most cities saw their arrest rates drop gradually, Baltimore's decline was sudden - plummeting 15 percentage points in 2015, after Gray's death, the largest single-year drop for any city already solving less than half its homicides.

"Our clearance rate isn't what I think it should be," Baltimore Police Comissioner Gary Tuggle, who has been running the department since May, said. "We've got a really, really talented homicide unit, but we're understaffed."

Tuggle, who noted that violent crime is down from its peak levels last year, said that the depressed arrest rate is due to a combination of factors. In many cases, detectives struggle to find cooperative witnesses. Police grapple with community relationships still deeply singed by the unrest that followed Gray's death. And the department's homicide detectives are overwhelmed.

A protest for Freddie Gray in Baltimore on April 27, 2015. Gray died from spinal injuries after he was arrested and transported in a police van. Photo / Washington Post

Each Baltimore detective, on average, now is responsible for nine homicide cases and, with other suspicious deaths factored in, about 31 total active cases. A Washington Post analysis of US homicides found that major police departments that have success in making arrests generally assign detectives fewer than five cases a year.

"Our average caseload per detective is far higher than it should be," Tuggle said. "Generally, if we can't clear a case and get it off of the board within the first 25 days, chances are it's going to be a lot longer. If we can ever get it off of the board at all."

Community leaders and residents say that leaves hundreds of families who have been robbed of a loved one without a chance at seeing justice done. Of the 1002 homicides between 2015 and the beginning of this year, just 252 resulted in an arrest.

"It's a cold case," said Cynthia Bruce, whose son Marcus Tafari Samuel Downer, 23, was shot 19 times and killed in broad daylight in Baltimore in July 2015. No one has been arrested. "They have a suspect and the detective is confident that someone witnessed my son's murder, but people are scared to come forward because of retaliation."

The killings, both solved and unsolved, are clustered in a small number of the city's neighbourhoods. They fall within what is known as the city's black "butterfly," a set of neighbourhoods that spread out to the east and west of the city's centre.

Sandtown-Winchester, where Gray died, has seen 22 more homicides in the three-year period since Gray's death than it did in the three years before he died. Southwest Baltimore saw its homicides rise by 35, and Greater Rosemont has seen 26 more since 2015. In each of those neighbourhoods, police make an arrest in fewer than 25 percent of cases, including 16 percent in Sandtown-Winchester.

These areas long have been among the city's most economically depressed and, because of years of residential segregation, populated almost exclusively by low-income black residents.

Baltimore

Population: 600,000
Homicides: A rate of a killing each day for the past three years
Arrests: Last year police made an arrest in 27 per cent of homicides