In this file photo, a man walks past a corner where a victim of a shooting was discovered in Baltimore. (Patrick Semansky/AP)
Baltimore’s homicide count surpassed 100 this week, a number the city has not seen so early in the year for nearly two decades.
The city, which was torn apart by civil unrest in the wake of Freddie Gray’s death in April 2015, has experienced record-high homicide rates the past two years. But this year’s numbers have put the city on an even more troubling trajectory, raising alarms among the public and authorities.
On Monday alone, three people were killed, pushing the number of homicides this year to 101. Last year during the same period, the city saw 77 killings. By comparison, the District has recorded 35 homicides this year — one more than last year during the same period.
“To us, one is way too many,” Detective Donny Moses, a spokesman for the Baltimore Police Department, said Tuesday. “We focus on each case as it comes, and unfortunately they are coming way too fast.”
Moses said the department is “determined to come up with solutions to slow this rate down and, prayerfully, ultimately stop the killings. Each of these victims had faces, and they had families.”
This month, a federal judge approved a plan to overhaul the city’s police department — a consent decree signed by city and federal officials in the final days of Barack Obama’s presidency.
[Federal judge approves Baltimore police consent decree]
The judge’s actions faced immediate criticism from the Trump administration’s Justice Department, which issued a statement saying the agreement would make Baltimore “a less safe city” at a time when it is “plagued by a rash of violent crime that shows no signs of letting up.”
Baltimore came under Justice Department scrutiny following the riots that were set off by the death of Gray, who suffered fatal injuries while in police custody. Violence spiked in the city afterward, and that year saw 344 homicides, the highest per capita figure in Baltimore’s history. The next year the city recorded 318 murders, making it the second-deadliest year.
The last time Baltimore saw more than 100 homicides by late April was in 1998.
Moses said the homicides are a problem not only for the police department. It also falls to the courts, churches and communities to address the violence, he said.
“These cases cannot get closed if no one is bringing forth information,” he said. “The flip side of that is we have to do more to ensure people feel comfortable coming to us with that information. . . . The bad people in the community have to know, ‘If I do something, someone might tell.’ ”
On Tuesday, the department posted a plea for help in solving one of Monday’s murders. Police identified the victim as 53-year-old Mackinley Williams, and released a surveillance video showing a man walking with a gun and then running.
The video had been viewed more than 1,600 times by late Tuesday afternoon.