BALTIMORE — Baltimore Police have received about as many tips with information about the mass shooting in Brooklyn at the beginning of the month as there were people shot that night, a department official said Thursday.
Two people died and 28 others were wounded by gunfire when a well-advertised block party at the Brooklyn Homes public housing community devolved into a series of shootings shortly after midnight July 2.
Police have received 30 tips, Kevin Jones, the department’s chief of patrol, said Thursday night in response to city council criticism about police’s relationship with the community. The concerns were raised at a hearing convened to examine the city shortcomings leading up to the bloodshed. Jones said the tips were proof that the department has regained trust among residents.
“That’s how when you see the trust, that’s how it corresponds,” Jones said. “The trust is there. We’re still building on it.”
“It needs to be proactive,” responded Councilman Zeke Cohen, who represents part of Southeast Baltimore. “Right now it feels reactive to the community. For me, it’s having the relationship where before the event we could have said, ‘This is going to escalate. We need to have a presence there.’”
In Brooklyn, some residents echoed Cohen’s concerns, saying police have fallen short.
While experts cautioned against drawing conclusions from one incident, they said counting the number of tips received by police about a tragedy was not a great measure of the community’s trust.
Acting Police Commissioner Richard Worley admitted his department failed to learn of this year’s rendition of the annual party in advance and neglected to deploy additional resources once the party was discovered. On the job for about a month, he described the consequential blunder as a failure of intelligence and of communication.
At the council hearing, Cohen suggested Worley should add community policing to the department’s list of shortcomings exposed by the shooting — likely Baltimore’s biggest ever. He said the federal consent decree guiding Baltimore Police, implemented to correct decades of unconstitutional policing in the city, “is just the paper it’s written on” unless citizens trust the police.
The consent decree mandated that city police emphasize community policing, the practice of assigning officers to specific areas where they’re encouraged to develop relationships with residents to combat crime and solve other problems.
“The connection with the police, it’s been off for quite a while now,” said Justin Field, a five-year resident of the Brooklyn Homes community.
Field, 29, didn’t attend the block party this year, but said he would have expected police would get more tips based on the size of the crowd, which some estimated at up to 1,000 attendees. He also said he has noticed increased patrols and more officers knocking on residents’ doors since July 2.
“It shouldn’t take a tragedy for them to start doing their jobs,” Field said.
A 2020 survey of more than 600 Baltimore City residents conducted as part of the consent decree found most who said they were dissatisfied with the department’s performance similarly wanted police to “do their jobs.” Although the majority of those surveyed lacked trust in BPD, they also reported that they wanted to build relationships with officers.
At the council hearing, police officials described the department’s progress on community policing while emphasizing the department is short officers.
Jones said each police district has a neighborhood coordinating officer and supervisor “who consistently go out in that community to try to build those relationships we have broken and to create new relationships.”
Worley described the neighborhood coordinating sergeant in Brooklyn as “one of the best in the city,” and said that the officer he had in mind was just one of “numerous officers that frequent the area.” He said he wants to find out why the department wasn’t aware that Brooklyn Day was happening despite its efforts in the community.
Longtime Brooklyn Homes resident Yulanda Smallwood said there were frequent Baltimore Police patrols in the complex before the pandemic, but since 2020, the police presence had lessened.
If police were present in the community, people might trust them more, Field said. He believes residents at Brooklyn Homes who might have useful information are both disillusioned with Baltimore Police and afraid of retaliation.
Other residents don’t understand their neighbors’ reluctance to participate in a police investigation.
Mimi Howard, who recently moved to the housing complex, said she doesn’t know why residents aren’t more willing to talk to police. “If my child had been there, I would say something,” Howard said Friday.
“As a general principle, there’s a direct proportion between the level of trust a community has in its police department and the level of cooperation police receive when doing investigations,” said Ashley Heiberger, a policing expert who retired as a captain from a department in Pennsylvania.
However, “the number of tips received in a particular investigation isn’t particularly helpful without [a] baseline to which we can compare it, such as less high profile investigations.”
Baltimore Police did not respond to a question about how many tips they receive on average after homicides or nonfatal shootings.
Michael Berlin, an associate professor of criminal justice at Coppin State University, said he’s been impressed by the police presence at community meetings in the Northern Police District, where he lives. A former city officer, he generally applauded the department’s efforts on community policing.
But touting 30 tips as an indicator of community trust “falls a little flat” considering the department failed to recognize the event and prepare for it, Berlin said. He added that he hoped the “after-action review” announced by Worley would provide more detailed accounts of what went wrong with regard to community engagement and intelligence.
“It seems to me there are elements of both,” Berlin said. “How are police not aware of this big community event that happens every year? What was the intelligence about the incident, people being armed, or any specific intelligence to the actors that were there?”
Smallwood, who grew up in the Brooklyn Homes community and is raising her children there, said she was unsurprised that police had received as many tips as shooting victims.
“Most people don’t talk,” she said.
