...and you dismiss the drop in crime on one hand and praise his first commissioner for progress in the other. O'Malley has always insisted that the drop in crime was from a combination of policies, but you can only dwell on the zero-tolerance policy as if it was the entirety of his administration's approach. Then you want to take the biased word of this television producer who has every interest in making like his production is real-life drama and accuse O'Malley of the worst motivations for wanting to make more of a difference in the crime in the city he oversaw.
"With nearly 10 percent of the population—60,000 people—addicted to drugs, more than 300 murders a year throughout the 1990s, only 16 percent of third-graders meeting state reading standards, 15 percent of teenagers neither in school nor employed, an unemployment rate twice that of the rest of Maryland, and somewhere between 10,000 and 40,000 homes left vacant by the fleeing population, the city turned over to O’Malley was on life support."
http://www.city-journal.org/html/11_1_can_mayor_omalley.html
God forbid someone assume he actually cared about keeping the community safe, with a murder rate that was six times higher than New York’s when he took office. Heaven forbid we focus on his reform of the police department to make officers more accountable, reform which NAACP's Ben Jealous says resulted in a sharp decline in officer shootings. Don't say a word about his community outreach, expanded minority hiring, creation of an independent civilian review board - don't mention that as governor he decriminalized marijuana possession and repealed the death penalty.
Now, a decade later, the current leadership wants to blame O'Malley for what's happening in Baltimore today. It's ludicrous and self-serving to fault him for the present disintegrating environment while insisting - as Rawlings-Blake does - that they changed police tactics. At some point, the focus has to be on the more pernicious and consequential measure of actual criminality in Baltimore. This griping about a disbanded police policy a decade ago looks to be a way for some to deflect from that point and obscure O'Malley's successes in bring those numbers down. That's not just some abstraction to the people in those communities who have to deal with those criminal acts and enterprises every day.
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