Martin O'Malley was the architect of Baltimore's failed plan to reign in crime, the New York Times reported yesterday:
Civil rights advocates and some elected officials here trace the tensions to “zero-tolerance policing,” a crime-fighting strategy championed by Martin O’Malley, the former governor and a potential Democratic candidate for president, when he was the mayor of Baltimore from 1999 to 2007. Aides of Mr. O’Malley note that on his watch, the number of annual homicides dropped below 300 per year for the first time in more than a decade, and that violent crime in Baltimore dropped by 41 percent. Steve Kearney, a top aide to Mr. O’Malley when he was the mayor, described the policies as “appropriate for the time.”
The policies have only served to undermine the confidence that the people there have in their police officers. And furthermore, it is not even clear that Mr. O'Malley deserves the credit for the drop in crime in Baltimore. Even if a good argument can be made that Mr. O'Malley's policies helped drop crime in the short term, the problem is that there will likely be a long-term increase in crime given the loss of confidence that the public has in its officers.
These drops in crime have occurred throughout the land, not just in Baltimore. Therefore, neither Mr. O'Malley, nor New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani can claim credit for the drop. In 2013, Mother Jones explained the real reason behind the drop in crime in our cities:
Intriguingly, violent crime rates followed the same upside-down U pattern. The only thing different was the time period: Crime rates rose dramatically in the '60s through the '80s, and then began dropping steadily starting in the early '90s. The two curves looked eerily identical, but were offset by about 20 years.
So Nevin dove in further, digging up detailed data on lead emissions and crime rates to see if the similarity of the curves was as good as it seemed. It turned out to be even better: In a 2000 paper (PDF) he concluded that if you add a lag time of 23 years, lead emissions from automobiles explain 90 percent of the variation in violent crime in America. Toddlers who ingested high levels of lead in the '40s and '50s really were more likely to become violent criminals in the '60s, '70s, and '80s.
And with that we have our molecule: tetraethyl lead, the gasoline additive invented by General Motors in the 1920s to prevent knocking and pinging in high-performance engines. As auto sales boomed after World War II, and drivers in powerful new cars increasingly asked service station attendants to "fill 'er up with ethyl," they were unwittingly creating a crime wave two decades later.
The reason that lead is such a determinant factor in crime is because it messes with the part of the brain which affects decision-making. Therefore, when the government got lead paint out of houses and cars, that led to a drop in crime when toddlers turned into teens and young adults almost two decades later:
Put all this together and you have an astonishing body of evidence. We now have studies at the international level, the national level, the state level, the city level, and even the individual level. Groups of children have been followed from the womb to adulthood, and higher childhood blood lead levels are consistently associated with higher adult arrest rates for violent crimes. All of these studies tell the same story: Gasoline lead is responsible for a good share of the rise and fall of violent crime over the past half century.
When differences of atmospheric lead density between big and small cities largely went away, so did the difference in murder rates. Like many good theories, the gasoline lead hypothesis helps explain some things we might not have realized even needed explaining. For example, murder rates have always been higher in big cities than in towns and small cities. We're so used to this that it seems unsurprising, but Nevin points out that it might actually have a surprising explanation—because big cities have lots of cars in a small area, they also had high densities of atmospheric lead during the postwar era. But as lead levels in gasoline decreased, the differences between big and small cities largely went away. And guess what? The difference in murder rates went away too. Today, homicide rates are similar in cities of all sizes. It may be that violent crime isn't an inevitable consequence of being a big city after all.
The gasoline lead story has another virtue too: It's the only hypothesis that persuasively explains both the rise of crime in the '60s and '70s and its fall beginning in the '90s. Two other theories—the baby boom demographic bulge and the drug explosion of the '60s—at least have the potential to explain both, but neither one fully fits the known data. Only gasoline lead, with its dramatic rise and fall following World War II, can explain the equally dramatic rise and fall in violent crime.
So, if we're serious about fighting crime in this country, there is no need to implement the "zero tolerance" policies championed by Mr. O'Malley when he was Mayor of Baltimore. Instead, the way to fight crime is to get lead and other such pollutants out of our air and out of our buildings and houses.
Obviously, not all of us who grew up before the government phased out lead became criminals. And crime happened well before the industrial revolution, meaning that it is not the only factor. However, the data shows that lead is a significant predictive factor in whether a substantial number of kids grow up to become criminals. Given what we know, the fact that a kid was exposed to lead as a child could have been enough to push them over the edge given all the other factors in their development.
The death of Freddie Gray is not an isolated incident; the City of Baltimore and its residents have been clashing for years over police brutality. In 2013, the police beat one man, Tyrone West, so badly that he had to have a closed casket funeral. Nonetheless, the authorities whitewashed his death by claiming that it was due to natural causes. And the city has had to pay out millions of dollars in damages due to wrongful death lawsuits. As a Presidential candidate, Martin O'Malley should have to explain to the American people how his policies will make people safer and improve public confidence in law enforcement given his poor track record in Baltimore. And he should have to explain how he intends to make police officers accountable for their actions.
Update:
To be fair, O'Malley gets it that things have to change in police-community relations. After this diary was written, O'Malley had this to say to CNN following his speech at the South Carolina Democratic Convention last night:
"There's probably very few issues quite as intertwined to the really painful racial legacy in our country than the issue of law enforcement and public safety," he said. "We have to be able to talk to one another, we have to be able to acknowledge our fears and our shortcomings, and we have to make all of our institutions, including our police departments, more open and transparent."