Baltimore’s Crime Numbers Game
A three-part series on the past 30-plus years of rising crime and rising police budgets
By Brandon Soderberg, Megan Kenny, Andrew Friedman, and Vida Fye
Illustrations by Evangeline Gallagher
Baltimore spends more on policing per capita than any other major American city. In 1990, the police budget was $169 million. In 2024, the police budget is $594 million.
Baltimore City has endured 300-plus murders per year in 18 of the last 33 years. The city’s murder rate has dipped below 40 murders per 100,000 residents just nine times since 1990.
Meanwhile, the Baltimore Police Department has gotten worse at solving murders. Since 1990, the homicide clearance rate has plummeted. From 75% in 1990 to 45% in 2023.
In the late ’90s, Baltimore began an ambitious experiment in mass incarceration dubbed “zero tolerance.” At its peak in 2003, there were nearly 110,000 arrests in a majority Black city of 615,000 people.
Following the police killing of Freddie Gray in 2015, promised reforms of the Baltimore Police Department have been slow-going amid corruption scandals, six different police commissioners, and an ongoing failure to curb officer misconduct.
A 2023 Johns Hopkins University survey found that 74% of Black Baltimoreans fear the police.
Part One
For more than 30 years, “common wisdom” regarding violence reduction has failed in Baltimore, a city with one of the highest murder rates in the country and a police budget that’s among the highest of any major American city.
Part Two
The short history and long tail of Baltimore’s “zero tolerance” policing under Mayor Martin O’Malley and the recent soft return to “zero tolerance” amid an increased focus on low-level offenses and reduced police oversight.
Part Three
An analysis of Baltimore City Police Department arrest data and the city’s Open Baltimore database shows that data transparency and retention have gotten worse amid ongoing reforms such as the federal Consent Decree.
This three-part series was produced and supported with funding from the Data-Driven Reporting Project. The Data-Driven Reporting Project is funded by the Google News Initiative in partnership with Northwestern University | Medill.
Part Two of this series, “Here We Go Again,” was produced in partnership with The Garrison Project, an independent, nonpartisan organization addressing the crisis of mass incarceration and policing.
Our print partner for this series is Baltimore Beat, a Black-run, Black-led, free nonprofit newspaper focused on equitable access to news and other vital information.
