Jeannette Belliveau
1.6K posts

Jeannette Belliveau
@JBelliveau17
Author of "Fleeing Baltimore," https://t.co/jMYIVqdkK5


"Blue cities are radical hellscapes that can't fix crime." Counterpoint: Baltimore. Baltimore had 334 murders in 2022. Last year it had 133, the lowest since 1977. The turning point was that voters defenestrated a Soros-backed prosecutor Marilyn Mosby who averaged 333 homicides a year across eight years and declined to use mandatory minimum sentences. (She was later convicted of mortgage fraud, so there's that too.) Her replacement, Ivan Bates, ran on the Democratic ticket with a simple message: repeat violent offenders belong in prison. Maryland law already allowed five years with no parole for convicted felons caught carrying a gun, but Mosby never used it. Bates used it a lot. In just two years, his office sent more than 2K repeat violent offenders to prison, double his predecessor's TOTAL. The city paired that with a precision intervention program that identified the small number of people driving most of the violence, which led to 631 arrests (94% haven't reoffended). Police also seized 2,480 firearms last year alone, including hundreds of ghost guns, while maintaining a 64% homicide clearance rate. When shooters know they'll get caught and actually prosecuted, behavior changes. Sandtown-Winchester, once the most violent neighborhoods in the city, just went a year without a killing! Carjackings (-51%) and robberies (-24%) are also down. Baltimore didn't change demographics, or its culture, its rules, or much of anything else in those years. It simply voted in a new Democratic prosecutor, who decided the city needed to finally put violent criminals in prison.

More "LEAVING Maryland" emails: Is this one too harsh, or fair? "I know of 10 people looking to get out of Maryland in next year or 2. It's becoming an expensive dump to live in. Not safe, not beautiful, many crappy schools, and the leadership is fiscally irresponsible."






































