Mayor Scott talks about the fight to reduce violent crime in Baltimore
BALTIMORE -- Mayor Brandon Scott told WJZ in an exclusive interview on Tuesday that he wants to see the city move away from its dark past and toward a future where its residents are collectively battling crime.
"Nothing keeps me up more at night than people dying in the streets," Scott said.
Crime has plagued the city for years and Scott shared with WJZ his experience of being caught up in poor attempts to address it.
He described to WJZ his memory of being handcuffed and made to sit down in the rain as he was returning home from Saint Mary's College of Maryland.
Officers thought he had committed a robbery even though he was two hours away when it occurred.
Scott said he has been pulled over by the police several times in his life. He said he doesn't want to return to the mindset of that time period.
Instead, he wants to see Baltimore evolve to the point where its violence is attacked from every angle and not just managed by the city's police officers.
People have allowed themselves to be brainwashed into thinking that the Baltimore Police Department and the mayor of the city are responsible for public safety. That needs to stop, he said.
"I want us to get us out of the mindset that it's solely on the police department and solely on folks like myself," he said. "We have to understand this: if the police department is arresting more people with guns, more people with violent guns, why is it that they're seeing the same people back out on the street? Where along in the system do we have to make those corrections?"
The department may not have all the answers, but the solution isn't disbanding it.
"Just because one Baltimore City police district is up 20 to 40% homicides, I'm not just going to say: oh, we're going to stop having the police department," he said.
There are other collective means for combatting crime, he said.
Scott said he believes the city can reduce violent crime through Safe Streets even though a review by his office earlier this year quoted a Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health study on Safe Streets from 2007 and 2017 that contained a lackluster evaluation.
The study said that "Safe Streets Baltimore's sites have not always shown consistent impacts on violence on a year-to-year or site-by-site basis."
The program has gotten stale, but that only means the work must evolve, Scott said.
"We know that the program works," he said. "We know that the impact is there. But what we have to do for those places that don't have that success—why the success hasn't been there—has really been about the leadership, the implementation, not the strategy itself."
Safe Streets has conducted 1,747 mediations in this city in 2022 alone, Scott said.
As for some of the city's other problems, such as tension over squeegee workers, there are no easy solutions, the mayor said.
Scott said he plans to work with incoming Baltimore City State's Attorney Ivan Bates on paving a path forward, but Bates believes that squeegee workers are breaking the law.
A glimpse of that path forward can be gleaned within the upcoming weeks, Scott said. That's when he intends to make public the recommendations of his squeegee collaborative.
