By Brian Witte, The Associated Press
BALTIMORE (AP) - With the number of murders rising, Police Commissioner Kevin Clark blamed the courts on Thursday for failing to keep dangerous criminals behind bars.
With less than a week before mayoral elections, Mayor Martin O’Malley and Commissioner Clark held a news conference to discuss crime statistics they said shows the city has made progress in fighting violent crime, even though there have been 23 more murders this year compared to 2003.
But O’Malley said trying to bring down the number of homicides has been “our biggest frustration.”
There have been 240 murders in Baltimore, compared to 217 at this time last year.
Clark used strong language to express his frustration with city courts and the juvenile justice system.
“The revolving door at the court house needs to be replaced by a steel door with bars,” Clark said.
Marty Burns, a spokeswoman for State’s Attorney Patricia Jessamy, said the courts are flooded with cases and facing growing problems like witness intimidation that make it hard to get convictions.
“It’s a very bleak situation, just by numbers alone,” Burns said.
Clark, pledging to keep hauling criminals to jail, compared making arrests to taking a turn on a roulette wheel.
“I will guarantee you, every time they come out, my people will put them right back in and, hopefully, it’s kind of like Vegas on the roulette wheel, maybe we get lucky one day and the person stays in long enough so that we can all be safe,” the commissioner said.
Many homicide victims and culprits had multiple arrests on their records, Clark said. Last year, homicide victims and suspects had both been arrested an average of six times, he said.
Prosecutors, meanwhile, are overwhelmed, Burns said.
“Our homicide prosecutors have 12 to 16 cases,” she said, double the guidelines set by national organizations that monitor the criminal justice system.
“We have 12 people in homicide who are prosecuting all the murders from 2001, 2002, 2003 and 2004. “The numbers are overwhelming everyone.”
Clark also criticized the city’s juvenile justice center, which has been the focus of widespread complaints and a critical report by a state agency. He said the facility has proven “ineffective in rehabilitating these kids.”
This year, 31 juveniles have been murdered in the city, five more juvenile murders than last year, Clark said.
Despite the rising homicides, police pointed to other categories of violent crime that have been dropping.
Overall, violent crime in the city declined 19 percent from 2002 to 2003 and 40 percent from 1999 to last year, according to FBI crime data released this week.
The data is based on crime reporting from cities across the nation. The FBI doesn’t rank cities based on the statistics and discourages using the data as a measurement of law enforcement effectiveness.
Crime statistics have been a point of contention in the city for years.
O’Malley, as a city council member, accused former Police Commissioner Thomas Frazier of misrepresenting crime statistics. The mayor said he is now “so politically vulnerable” if the numbers are shown to be wrong that his administration has gone to great lengths to ensure statistical integrity.
“We audit the hell out of these numbers,” O’Malley said.
Last year, an audit ordered by Clark found that police improperly ruled 33 rapes as “unfounded,” driving down the initial number of reported rapes. Clark said additional supervisory oversight has been put in place to guard against wrongly reducing crime reports.
Clark and O’Malley blame the higher homicides on hardened drug dealers who mostly kill others involved with drugs.
“We’re not talking about the law-abiding here,” Clark said. “The law-abiding citizen in this city, who lives and works here is safe.”