Baltimore's deadliest month in decades ends as former mayor launches 2016 bid

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/may/31/baltimore-martin-o-malley-crime

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A day after the former Baltimore mayor Martin O’Malley declared his campaign for the White House in 2016, two deaths left the city to digest its deadliest month in more than 40 years, the Baltimore Sun reported.

In his speech at Federal Hill park in the city on Saturday, O’Malley said he and others had “given so much of our energies to making our city a safer, fairer, more just and more prosperous place”.

On Sunday, the newspaper reported two double shootings – one which left one person dead and one injured after both were shot in the back, and one in which two men died after both were shot in the head.

The person who died after being shot in the back was the 43rd to be murdered in the city in May, the highest monthly total since December 1971, when 44 people were killed. By Sunday evening, the newspaper said, police were investigating 106 non-fatal shootings in Baltimore in May.

The Sun, which maintains an interactive map of homicides in the city, said there had been 116 homicides in the city in 2015, compared with 208 last year.

The news came a day after O’Malley, who went on from Baltimore to be governor of Maryland for eight years, launched his campaign for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination with an event staged against the city skyline.

The announcement was attended by a small number of demonstrators protesting the conduct of the city’s police. Last month, rioting broke out in Baltimore over the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old African American man who died after being taken into police custody. The current occupant of the mayor’s office, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, was criticised after she said she had told police to “give those who wished to destroy space to do that”.

Since the riots, O’Malley has come under increasing scrutiny. During his time as mayor, incidents of crime as measured by the FBI fell by 43% – the steepest drop for any big US city.

However, some critics have accused O’Malley of manipulating crime data in the manner of the fictional Tommy Carcetti, the mayor on Baltimore-set cable smash The Wire who is often said to have been partly based on his real-life equivalent. Some Baltimore residents have also blamed O’Malley’s support of “zero tolerance” policing while mayor for contributing to present-day tensions.

In an interview with ABC that was recorded on Saturday and broadcast on Sunday, O’Malley said: “When I was elected in 1999, our city had become the most violent, and addicted, and abandoned city in America. It was a huge challenge. But we went on in the next 10 years to achieve the biggest reduction of [serious] crime of any city in America.”

However, as he did in an exclusive interview with the Guardian just after the riots – in which he said he had “never once declared ‘mission accomplished’” on crime – O’Malley added a caveat.

“For all of the progress that we make,” he told ABC host George Stephanopoulos, “there’s always so much more that needs to be done.”