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Cover Story
Way of the Gun
BY BRIAN HICKEY His name was Demitrius Smith, but history will record him as No. 4. Some might say fate brought him to the Benedict Laundromat in East Baltimore--that city's answer to the Badlands--a few weeks back. Others might say drugs. Both could be right--assuming fate has the guts to visit these bloodstained streets. Take a look at the police report that records the end of Demitrius Smith's life. The one that offers little detail about his 23 years and a scant bit more about his final day. Involved in a verbal confrontation outside 2602 Monument St. Suffered multiple gunshot wounds. Declared dead at Johns Hopkins Hospital at 1:16 p.m., Jan. 9. Suspect unknown. Motive un-known. Investigation continuing. Talk to the woman who witnessed the last seconds of Demitrius Smith's life. It will shed a little light. There was some noise outside. Loud yelling and screaming. She didn't pay much attention. It was nothing new really, that sort of thing. But then came shots. Quickly, she ducked behind the counter and a thick window with a tiny scribbled sign that read "No! Selling Drug Keep Out." When the commotion died down, after several customers had scattered, she stood up and peeked through the glass that served as her last line of protection. "That's where he was," the shopkeeper who gives her name as Bellen says, pointing to the floor just feet from the side entrance. "He was laid out on the floor bleeding. Blood all over the floor. These people are dangerous." Bellen didn't know the man's name was Demitrius Smith when she frantically dialed 911. She knew him only as somebody who she thought sold and bought heroin and crack near the business she's owned for 15 years, one of the few left that's not a liquor store. During the summer, she says, the dealers and users stay outside. But when the temperatures drop, their office moves into her building. Bellen tells them to get out. They don't listen. Instead, they "sit on the washers smoking their reefer." What's most striking about this middle-aged woman is that the day's events don't seem to leave her all that shaken. Six hours later, there is nothing left in the Benedict Laundromat that would indicate Demitrius Smith's life ended there. No crime scene tape, fingerprint dust or bullet holes. No grieving relatives, makeshift memorials or curious onlookers. Not a speck of blood on the dingy floor. Just a ghetto-hardened immigrant listening to a pair of police officers promise to keep a close watch on the store in the coming days. The distant look in her eyes as she closes for the evening says she's heard it all before. Perhaps she's wondering if she'll witness another yet-to-be-scripted demise, or worse, if she'll become Baltimore's fifth homicide victim of the year. "You worry that after the police are gone, they're going to get you," she says before locking the side door to her business and making the anxious 50-yard trip to her house. "I don't feel safe, but this is the only way we can make money." The officers, who complain that they haven't had a chance to grab dinner yet, wait to make sure she makes it safely across the street.
When seven people are executed in a Philadelphia rowhouse, the story draws attention, if only for the number of deaths. When a small-time drug user like Demitrius Smith stops breathing, it may not even elicit a blurb in the newspaper. It's just a fact of urban life these days. But when the numbers start adding up, the attention returns. It gives people a sense of just how safe they are walking their hometown streets. About 90 miles south of Philadelphia, Baltimore's residents started feeling a little better about their streets on New Year's, when police announced that the number of people killed there had dropped to its lowest level in years. While Baltimore made a dent in its homicide rate by targeting drug gangs, law enforcement officials in Philadelphia were forced to concede that it wouldn't be as easy to match that success here, for in the Keystone State, getting a gun is as easy as catching a bus. Long the second highest of America's 30 largest cities (behind Gary, Ind.), Baltimore's violent crime rate had nowhere to go but down. While most of the country saw its crime rate plummet during the last decade, East Baltimore--the city's most violent section--had a murder rate five times higher than New York's and seven times higher than the national average. Though Baltimore has less than half Philadelphia's population--roughly 650,000--there were nine more homicides in Baltimore in 1999. Making matters worse, the police department squad that handles those cases--the one chronicled in a TV series and the book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets--solved just 166 of 305 slayings. It would have been easy to give up and turn the drug-infested streets over to the criminals who already seemed to be winning the battle. But Martin O'Malley, the city's new Democratic mayor, had a different idea. That idea evolved into a plan that has since made Baltimore a leader in the war against murder. "The thing that's important to understand is that it got really bad here," says O'Malley, 38, who moved up from City Council to mayor in December 1999. "We got numb to it. The police were told there was nothing they could do about it, that they couldn't make a difference. When you're told there's nothing you can do, that's exactly what you do." In classic law-and-order fashion, O'Malley's message to Baltimore was that something could be done. And that he was the man to do it. Knowing he would be judged by the anti-crime fervor that propelled him into office, O'Malley moved quickly. He hired a pair of NYPD crime-mapping consultants to develop an attack plan that included COMSTAT--a system that analyzes crime data and quickly disseminates it to cops on the street (Philadelphia implemented the system in 1998). And he hired Edward Norris, a New York Police deputy commissioner who had worked with current Philadelphia Police Commissioner John Timoney, to lead the 3,146-member Baltimore force. It didn't take Norris long to figure out that drugs were behind a majority of the city's killings, and he used that information to guide his changes to department policy. Norris ended the department's practice of shipping homicide detectives out of the unit after three-year stints. He hoped longer tours in the same unit would bring continuity to a group that had seen its success rate hit rock bottom by the end of the '90s. Then, despite being strapped for cash, the city offered police officers 7-, 8- and 9-percent raises to prevent them from defecting to safer gigs in the suburbs. In 1995, a first-year Baltimore police officer earned $25,496. Now a rookie out of the academy makes $31,000, the same as a first-year Philadelphia officer. (Concerned about the city's lack of funds, several street-level cops in Baltimore's Eastern District privately wondered whether they'd ever actually see the raises, but the state pitched in to help defray the huge expense). Though he had studied the issue prior to his election, Mayor O'Malley depended on Commissioner Norris--hired for his role in reducing New York's homicide rate from 2,245 in 1990 to 671 nine years later--to implement the nuts and bolts of the plan. Having determined that most violence in Baltimore was drug-related, the city's police went after open-air drug markets. They even started using wires and other investigative technology, a practice their predecessors had eschewed. "Now we have more wires than at any other time in the city's history," says Norris. Just four Baltimore police officers were assigned to the department's warrant squad in the late '90s; now 75 spend their days tracking down violent offenders. As a result, the number of suspects nabbed on murder warrants has shot from 16 to 118. "They're out there kicking in the right doors at three in the morning," says a proud O'Malley of his city's finest. "We had a small core of crooks causing all sorts of grief," says Norris. "Now we're getting to them." Internally, the Baltimore Police Department beefed up their in-house investigations to rebuild public trust. Externally, they sent more than 100 additional officers into the violence-plagued Eastern District. Quite simply, they reinvented the way they policed the city. But not everyone was immediately convinced. "People didn't really want a commissioner from New York," says Norris. "The criticism was that this was going to be Norris' Vietnam. That no good was going to come out of it and that people were going to get hurt." Mayor O'Malley faced similar charges. During the election, former Mayor Kurt Schmoke used his challenger's tough stance to raise the specter of fear. "They said I wanted to make it a police state," O'Malley recalls. In the end, though, Schmoke--and his position that drugs were more of a medical issue and less about law enforcement--were defeated. And that, according to the new mayor's supporters, is how Baltimore began to get a handle on its crime problem. Though there was fear in some quarters of a police state, there was no jump in the total number of arrests in Baltimore, only in the number of people caught committing violent crimes. O'Malley uses this statistic to try to disprove any allegation of neo-fascism, saying the department targeted the right people without trampling on citizens' rights. "All I said during the campaign was that we can dramatically reduce crime," the mayor says in his office adorned with Irish bric-a-brac. "Now we have better management, better coordination and higher expectations. We're solving more violent cases and locking up more violent offenders. That's what we're doing better." Hospitals in Baltimore are also noticing the reduced crime rate. Dr. Edward Cornwell, who runs the trauma unit at Baltimore's Johns Hopkins Hospital, says the number of people treated for gunshot wounds at his hospital dropped from 387 to 270 last year--though, he adds, "the difference between dead and alive is dumb luck really." Cornwell says the drop is noteworthy considering the hospital treated an average of 366 gunshot victims each year since 1995. Baltimore made national headlines early this month when the police department announced that the 262 murders it recorded last year marked the first time in a decade the annual tally had dropped below 300. Yet few stories mentioned the even more important news: The Homicide Unit's clearance (solved) rate jumped from 54 percent to 78 percent. The news could increase property values at a time when Mayor O'Malley is attempting to persuade businesses to return to a city losing population as rapidly as Philadelphia. And O'Malley plans to make good on another campaign promise: that the city's homicide rate will drop to 175 by 2004. "I believe we can do it--I've seen this work before," says Norris. If the pattern of nine homicides through Jan. 18 continues at this rate, just 182 people will die at the hands of another in Baltimore this year.
His name was Timon Hagelin, but history will record him merely as No. 319. Where Demitrius Smith may be a handy metaphor for drug-related slayings in East Baltimore, the New Year's Eve killing of this 31-year-old man from Parkdale Road in the Far Northeast after an argument outside his home helps illustrate Philadelphia's ills. Here, though, the problem is not solely about the narcotics trade. It's about access to guns. While Baltimore is recording a substantial drop in homicides, Philadelphia's murder rate has increased 8 percent from 1999's decade-low tally of 295. And Police Commissioner Timoney still sees fundamental problems that will keep the city's homicide rate steady even as other cities' rates continue to drop. Referring to the easy access of Philadelphians to firearms, Timoney says, "Psychologically, it's a lot easier to shoot someone than to beat them to death, or strangle them, or plunge a knife into their chest. It takes a lot more guts to do those things." With Pennsylvania's gun laws as relaxed as those of Southern states--Maryland not included--illegal access to guns on Philadelphia's streets is easier than in most other big cities. More than 80 percent of all Philadelphia homicides are shootings, a figure much higher than in other cities. (Coincidentally, Baltimore isn't far behind at 78 percent, while New York comes in at about 60 percent). With his own law-enforcement roots in New York, Timoney draws parallels to that city often. One of his analogies puts the gun-access dilemma in perspective. In 1990, a year when New York recorded record-high homicide levels--some 2,300 slayings--police seized 18,000 guns. In 1999, the year Philly recorded its fewest homicides in a decade, police got about 5,000 guns off the streets--a figure that would translate to about 25,000 in New York. Timoney says that in the age group with the highest murder rate--16-to-24-year-olds--roughly 90 percent of the killings involve firearms. "In our best year, there were more guns here than in New York City's worst year," Timoney says. Ninety to 95 percent of the guns in New York City come from Southern states with weaker laws. Eighty to 85 percent of the guns in Philadelphia are from Pennsylvania. "We have nobody to blame but ourselves. This is a homegrown problem. It's just easy to get guns here." Gun-control advocates cite the well-known gun-show loophole, saying those who buy weapons from dealers' "private collections" often face weaker, if any, background checks. And agents with the federal ATF field office here say they've also found that guns purchased legally in city gun stores can quickly make their way into the wrong hands. People with clean records, known in ATF lingo as "straw purchasers," can buy a gun legally and sell it on the black market for a quick, easy profit. In a telling example, more than 300 weapons were traced to a group of roughly 25 such buyers from Germantown last summer. Sometimes it's not as easy, like in the recent case of three men sentenced for making their own machine guns in a West Philly home. "They're often friends with people involved in the drug trade--or they're involved in it themselves," says Mark Chait, assistant special agent in charge with the local ATF. "Someone will pay them $100 or give them drugs in exchange for buying the guns." Those are often among the weapons that Philadelphia's 7,000-member police force later turn over to the ATF for tracing. They send a suspect weapon to the National Tracing Center in West Virginia where investigators then pinpoint its manufacturer, dealer and any listed purchasers. From there, they try to determine how the gun got from the legitimate buyer to the alleged shooter. If they're lucky, they can pin a charge on someone for an illegal firearm sale. But that's not always easy to prove. "Whatever you can think of, we've heard," says ATF spokesman, Special Agent Darrell O'Connor, of straw purchasers' excuses for not possessing the guns they're listed as having purchased. "I don't know if we've ever gotten someone claiming their dog ate it like their homework, but we've heard they just threw it in the trash. We've heard it all." Since the agency is responsible for issuing licenses to firearms dealers, the ATF also takes keen interest in which guns come from which stores, and how long it takes them to wind up at crime scenes. Of the weapons traced in 1999, the city's quickest time-to-crime gun shop was South Philly Archery on the 800 block of Ellsworth Street, where the average time for 77 weapons was just 16 months. Not far behind was Lou's Loans in Upper Darby, where it took an additional four months, according to ATF records. "It reminds me of being in New York when the drinking age was 18," Commissioner Timoney deadpans. "When we were 17, we could pay someone to go in and get us six cans of beer. But then it turns into a case of someone else wants something too and someone else wants something else." "People on the street know where they can go to get a gun," the ATF's Chait says. "The common public wouldn't know it, but it's common knowledge out there."
It doesn't take much street smarts to learn that drugs and guns are easy to procure in the city's Kensington and Fairhill sections. That's why, two years before similar efforts in Baltimore, Timoney flooded those neighborhoods with cops and other city agency personnel in the highly publicized "Operation Sunrise." Police coordinated with other city and federal agencies to physically clean up those areas while helping addicts get treatment. In 1998, the operation's first year, the Narcotics Unit arrested 4,500 people while seizing $4 million worth of drugs and 139 guns. In the months since, Temple University Hospital has reported a downward trend in the number of gunshot-wound victims they've treated. "It was trench warfare over there, but in our first year we got our bang for the buck," says Timoney, adding that the local COMSTAT efforts have enabled police leaders to more effectively track and attack problem areas in the city. "Everyone was involved in it. It was a neighborhood abandoned by police and politicians for more than 20 years. Drug dealers didn't just take over corners, they took over whole blocks." Promising not to leave a neighborhood until it's been stabilized, the operation wound its way through two other neighborhoods before landing in the area near 9th and Indiana in November. Already, the operation has decreased the area's homicide rate by 42 percent. But despite that success, the total number of people killed in Philly didn't drop as dramatically as it did in Baltimore. Which further bolsters the argument that it's harder to improve Philadelphia's gun violence statistics. One tricky side effect of both cities' crime-fighting initia-tives are logjams in the courts. The problem leads prosecutors to dismiss many cases early in their progress through the legal system. In Baltimore, the district attorney's office assigns a prosecutor at the city's central-booking headquarters to decide whether to pursue a case before the suspect even enters a cell. When the results of a comprehensive study of Philadelphia homicides is released next month, city police plan to stress the effects of quick dismissals. Probing each Philadelphia slaying that occurred in the past four years, the study will break down profiles of suspects and killers, and look at both the deadliest neighborhoods and the weapons used in crimes. Most of the information gleaned so far comes as no surprise to police, but it could eventually raise public awareness about who's killing whom and why.
His name is Perry Bowles, and history almost recorded him as No. 5. As he sat inside a 1995 GMC Yukon in front of his East Baltimore home, two men in their late teens ambushed the 23-year-old Bowles, unloading a flurry of bullets that left nine holes in the driver's side window, one in his arm and a couple in his stomach. The shooting brought police officers Stan Premick and Natasha Younger to the same neighborhood where just the day before, they assured the Laundromat owner she'd be safe. "Life just goes on," says Premick, who quit an undependable electronics job to don a uniform. "It just continues." In his three years on the job, he's seen more than his share of drug-related homicides. He's found stashes and cultivated a cat-and-mouse relationship with the pimps, pushers and prostitutes in his district. So has Officer Younger, who's married to a Maryland state trooper who tells her he doesn't mind the danger she faces because he has faith in her co-workers. She glides through stories about her work with a group that helps young witnesses cope with what they've seen as easily as she glides through tales of the nights she's spent posing as a prostitute. As their car passes boarded-up homes and businesses with graffiti tributes reading "RIP Rock 6-20-97" and "RIP Dre, The Good Die Young," they can't help but laugh at two people who take their time getting out of the speeding cruiser's path. The pedestrians summon their best dirty looks. There's little civility between the two sides in these parts. To tell the police of Baltimore's Eastern District that things have improved just doesn't feel right. The Demitrius Smiths continue to die on their watch and the Perry Bowleses keep getting shot. Are there fewer problems now? Sure, that's what the stat sheets say, but who can realistically promise there won't be 600 murders here in 2001? It's a question they wonder after Baltimore ambulance No. 20 pulls away from Bartlett Street with Bowles inside. His family's left behind to deal with probing detectives. But the dozen police cars depart as quickly as they arrive, leaving behind index cards to mark the bullets on the sidewalk. Also gone within minutes is the crime-scene tape, the same tape that was nowhere to be seen in the Benedict Laundromat. Bowles, though, will live to see another day, leaving investigators wondering when the next retaliation shooting will occur. Back in their police cruiser, Premick's and Younger's thoughts have turned to more pressing matters. Dinner had already been pushed back by a pit bull call and the Bowles shooting. But what to get? "Something quick, I guess," Younger says. "Something quick, before it hits the fan. I'm tired of greasy burgers, though." "This is East Baltimore," Premick says. "What else is there?" Neither has an answer. Brian Hickey (bhickey@philadelphiaweekly.com) last wrote about Christie Whitman's EPA appointment.
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