By Monet A. Stevens
Baltimore Watchdog Staff Writer
The Baltimore Police Department has teamed up with John’s Hopkins University to reduce crime in Baltimore, according to a video statement released by the university last month.
The new plan – titled The Johns Hopkins-Baltimore Collaborative for Violence Reduction – will apply scientific research to the police tactics that the department already has in place and suggest new ways to make them more effective, the statement said.
“Collaboration is the key for us to collectively move Baltimore forward,” said Baltimore Police Commissioner Kevin Davis, who is also a former student at Johns Hopkins. “We’ve been doing it long enough that we know we can really benefit from a perspective of research and data to make it even better.”
According to the video statement, the collaborative focuses on six areas that the department has decided need the most improvement. These include the banning of illegal guns, removing the most violent criminals from the streets using foot patrols, executing the BFED and War Room homicide task forces, recruiting locally for police, conducting district commander summits, and the increasing the value of crime tip rewards.
The collaborative urges the Baltimore police department to take a more people-centered approach to policing and seeks to build the department’s relationship with the community.
“We’re the only police department in the nation that now has an academic curriculum that teaches our parole officers a 40-hour block of instruction in our academy on community foot-parole, and the first class to receive that training graduates later this week,” Davis said during a press conference that was released as part of the university’s video statement.
Johns Hopkins University researchers hope to provide an unbiased report of how effectively the department implements these plans but also come up with more useful ideas as the project progresses.
“Really I think the vision that we have here is not simply to evaluate something, but actually to innovate overtime,” Daniel Webster, the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, said as part of the video statement. “We will always give the most objective, scientifically rigorous analysis to any question that is posed to us regardless of how that may reflect on the department itself.”
The Baltimore Police Department has agreed to be open to whatever changes the university suggests, Davis said.
“I was very reassured and very pleased when, sort of going over the ground rules, that we had complete buy in for that transparency, that objectivity from Commissioner Davis,” Webster said. “I think that is to be commended.”
Some Baltimore residents agree that an intervention is needed and are also welcome to the changes.
“Things were pretty bad,” Marcus “Strider” Dent, the regional director of the Baltimore Chapter of the Guardian Angels, said in a telephone interview. “Last year we ended with 344 homicides, and that was just unbelievable. We had some months where we had 30 or 40 people dead.”
Dent said the community is pleased with the Baltimore Police Department’s efforts to eradicate crime in the city and that they have already begun to see changes.
“The police department is starting to take the initiative now to pull the communities in, but to also go out into the communities and knock on the doors and talk to people, and get to know them and get them involved,” Dent said. “You can see with the police programs called the Wanted Wednesday’s and the initiates they’re taking to pull the community in. I think things are getting better on that end.”
“Baltimore needs this,” Dent said.