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Dec 30, 2005 7:47 am US/Eastern
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Officials Tackle Baltimore's Murder Rate
by Kimberly Houk
BALTIMORE, Md. (WJZ/AP) ―
With a few days left in the year, the murder total for Baltimore is 267. That's five fewer than last year.
But earlier this week, officials saw one of the city's deadliest 24-hour periods of the year. Since Tuesday, four people were gunned down on Baltimore streets, including an elderly man and a teenage boy.
Crime statistic reports have ranked Baltimore the second deadliest city in America--a stark problem Mayor Martin O'Malley has tackled his last six years in office.
"Five years ago, we started investing more in drug treatment and we started supporting our police officers to do the job of reclaiming our neighborhoods from 24/7 drug dealer occupation," O'Malley tells
Eyewitness News. "It's really the police officers and the neighbors that have made the city a safer place."
Baltimore City police say they have seen a dramatic decrease in crime after more than 100 surveillance cameras were erected in troubled neighborhoods. O'Malley credits the departments zero-tolerance policy with brining the homicide numbers below 300 every year, despite the harsh criticism of the thousands of minor, so-called quality-of-life arrests that are reported
The lowest murder total in the city in recent years was 253 in 2002. In each of the six years of the O'Malley administration, the city's homicide count has been lower than it was anytime during the decade before he took office.More than 80 percent of this year's murder victims had criminal records, and the victims had been arrested on drug charges an average of 3.5 times.
(© 2005 CBS Worldwide Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)