Child shootings, murder victims surge In Baltimore as Council questions police strategy

BALTIMORE - This year has been a violent one in Baltimore.

At least 665 people have been shot and survived, and there have been 318 homicides as of Thursday afternoon, which is one more than at this point in 2021.

Baltimore City Council members questioned top public safety officials about their plans for reducing violence and whether their Group Violence Reduction Strategy, a more holistic approach to tackling crime, has pushed violence from the Western District where it is being piloted to other parts of the city. 

"The past two weeks have been especially tough, certainly in my district following the murder of a young woman, a 19-year-old who was pregnant, Jaymyra Burrell. And there have been a number of other issues that I've seen throughout the city," said the council's Public Safety Committee chair Mark Conway. 

Clearance rates for major crimes remain below national averages with fewer than one in four homicides solved this year. 

Only about 2 in 10 non-fatal shootings have been solved. 

WJZ investigated unsolved homicides earlier this year in our series "Crime Without Punishment" in partnership with CBS News. 

There has also been a spike in violence among those under the age of 18. 

Fifteen minors have been killed, a 115 percent increase over last year, according to a BPD presentation to the council.  

Also, 56 minors have been shot and survived. That is a 65 percent increase. 

The police force is shrinking, but BPD Commissioner Michael Harrison told council members that gun arrests were up. 

"The men and women of the Baltimore Police Department got more guns off the street this year than when we had 600 more officers in 2014," Commissioner Harrison said. "…We took an exponentially higher number of guns off the street and made more arrests for those guns than we did when we actually had 600 more cops to do the same work. I could not be more proud of that effort. Why is it not translating into some other reduction? Well, that's a long conversation to have on another day."

Council members questioned Harrison about a new labor-intensive, holistic violence reduction strategy that has sharply reduced shootings in West Baltimore—and whether it is leading to more violence elsewhere. 

"There aren't any instances that you know of where someone is saying, 'Oh my god, there's so many people in the Western District, they're all over us, they aren't letting us do our thing so we're going to move up to someplace where they're not doing it?'" asked council member Odette Ramos. 

"I would say the likelihood of individuals saying let's just take our activity and we will move from Western to Northeastern, that doesn't happen," Harrison said. 

Homicides have more than doubled in Northeast Baltimore during that same period. 

So far in 2022, 634 people have been carjacked in Baltimore City—up 20 percent. That includes Uber and Lyft drivers and their customers being targeted. 

Police said juvenile, repeat offenders are often the suspects. 

"I don't think there's a satisfactory response until folks are safe," council member Kristerfer Burnett told WJZ Investigator Mike Hellgren.

Burnett raised the issue with police at the meeting calling the incidents "frankly, very disturbing."