Last month, Baltimore’s moratorium on facial recognition expired. Despite concerns about the effectiveness of the technology and research showing the technology has been linked to the over-policing of Black people, the Baltimore City Council allowed the moratorium, put in place in mid-2021, to end. 

“There isn’t political will to maintain a permanent ban,” said Kristerfer Burnett, Baltimore City councilperson. He tried and failed to get his colleagues to stop facial recognition software from ever being used in Baltimore. 

As the city eclipsed 300 homicides for the eighth consecutive year, arguing against the expansion of surveillance has become harder. According to Burnett, many on the council have bought into the idea that to address the city’s violent crime, Baltimore needs even more tools at its disposal. So Baltimore will now allow city residents and businesses to begin using the technology, broadening the digital dragnet already in place. 

“I have likened it to a virtual stop and frisk,” Burnett said.

This move comes despite strong evidence that facial recognition software does a poor job of recognizing the faces of Black and darker-complected people and studies showing that the use of biometric data in policing led to more arrests of Black people and fewer arrests of white people. And it comes on the heels of the Baltimore City Board of Estimates approving the $920,000 purchase to upgrade its cell phone tracking system. The portable system tricks cell phones within its range to connect to it like they would a cell tower. The cops can record the phone numbers and the location of the cell phones it connects with, as well as the numbers of incoming and outgoing calls and text messages. 

The sunsetting of the moratorium and the recent upgrade of a cell phone tracking system have also alarmed activists. They fear this data can and will be abused by the Baltimore Police Department. 

“The Baltimore Police Department is under a consent decree because they have shown a pattern of violating the constitutional rights of Black residents of Baltimore,” said Rob Ferrell, senior organizer with Organizing Black, a Baltimore grassroots organization. 

Yet a concerted push for more surveillance — part of an effort to give law enforcement more tools to fight crime — appears to be the play both locally and across the nation. In his State of the Union speech in March, President Joe Biden said, “The answer is not defund the police. It’s to fund the police.” His statement was applauded by Republicans and more conservative Democrats. And in the fall, the midterm elections served as a referendum on the economy and the perceived increase in crime. 

“If we are going to be incredibly specific, crime has been on a downward trend for 30 years,” said Samantha Master, communications manager for Organizing Black.“I’m actually tired of the high crime narrative and the ‘if it bleeds, it leads’ messaging from the media.”

Still, the narrative has been repeated enough that it has helped shape national ideas and policies toward law enforcement and public safety. That narrative has always driven local politics. 

Baltimore spends more per capita on policing than any city in the nation. As a result, the department has created a broad-reaching surveillance program. The agency contracted with a company that flew a spy plane over Baltimore until city officials ended the contract in February 2021, months before a judge ruled the plane’s use unconstitutional. A network of cameras on private properties connects to the CitiWatch network. And the police department regularly monitors social media accounts and even operates fake accounts to lure in suspects. 

“The technology, whether it is the spy plane, or the cell phone tracker, or facial recognition, is not set up to operate like a search and seizure of an individual. It’s more of a dragnet,” Ferrell said.

And it’s that broad capture that worries so many. 

“If you come in contact with these cameras, your face will be captured. It will be used. There’s nothing people can do about it,” Master said. “This is just investing in new toys. So more cops can feel like they have more things at their disposal to trip folks up.” 

The Baltimore Police Department pushed hard against the moratorium, even though the moratorium has never specifically applied to the organization. The agency lobbied hard for facial recognition software and other surveillance measures, claiming the moratorium stopped the agency from acquiring technology that it believes would help solve more crimes and clear more homicides. 

That’s a pretty bold claim for technology that has a hard time recognizing Black faces, especially Black women’s faces, and would be deployed in a city that is more than 60 percent Black. 

“I am not convinced these technologies, the stingray, facial recognition technology, the spy plane, and ShotSpotter, are making the city safer,” Burnett said. 

Ferrell and others have pushed hard for city leaders to shift resources away from police to social services, education, and job creation, which they say are more sound investments in making Baltimore safer. They backed Mayor Brandon Scott, who, as a candidate, pledged to cut funding to the police department and went as far as pushing through a police budget cut during his last year on the city council. Scott made an about-face in his first year as mayor, adding $28 million to the police budget in 2021.

Surveillance cameras came under fire after the death of George Floyd, as facial recognition was implicated in instances of racial profiling by police agencies. IBM stopped selling its facial recognition software to policing agencies amid concerns about abuses by law enforcement. 

For activists, the push for more surveillance in light of the potential for abuse and the lack of effectiveness of the technology speaks to how law enforcement is shifting its strategy in the face of political pushback to more obvious forms of tough-on-crime policing. 

“This is the natural reaction to continue to scale up policing in ways that feel less nefarious to the common person because you can’t see it,” Ferrell said. “It’s not a cop on a beat with a baton, it’s cameras that are literally tracking your every movement. It’s literally a massive web of entrapment.” 

Burnett, like the activist community, says he will continue to push the city to pour more resources into education, job programs, and alternatives outside of law enforcement that he and others believe lead to more durable public safety.  

“Solely investing as much as we do in policing and surveillance hasn’t panned out. The tech and the investment in tech by the department hasn’t worked,” Burnett said. “For me, it’s about finding other ways to make the city safer for people in our community.” 

The post Baltimore could see more surveillance as facial recognition technology moratorium ends appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

Baltimore has a math problem. And it’s not just how much money it spends on its police budget. With more than 14,000 vacant homes — and that’s the official city count, housing advocates estimate the number of vacant houses at closer to 40,000 — investing in a home in the city can be a dicey proposition. Making matters worse, according to one city councilman, is a set of arcane zoning regulations that make it hard to convert a single-family house into multiple units to be rented out or sold. 

Ryan Dorsey, who represents the city’s third district, doesn’t believe the math behind Baltimore’s housing market works. What’s the point, Dorsey has argued, in buying a large rowhouse with more space than a small family needs to live in if the space requires thousands of dollars in repairs. 

“There are houses that have no economically feasible way to become habitable as single-family houses,” Dorsey told Baltimore Beat. “Allowing for the conversion from single-family into multifamily is a vital part of blight elimination that we are stifling at present by requiring the city council to pass an ordinance for each individual one.” 

In late September, Dorsey, whose City Council district is made up largely of single-family homes, pushed a plan to do away with single-family zoning in certain sections of the city and ease restrictions on homeowners wishing to convert their single-family homes to multi-unit dwellings. Dorsey is a consistent critic of car-focused development, and the bill, in some cases, eliminates off-street parking requirements tied to residential development.

Dorsey believes a denser, more compact city will attract homeowners and investors who will convert large homes, currently restricted to single-family occupancy, to apartments. This density will help revitalize neighborhoods, attract businesses looking for locations in walkable communities, and allow transit planners to accommodate a workforce living in more densely populated neighborhoods. 

“Businesses run on people, not cars. Building population within walking distance to businesses is good for those businesses,” Dorsey said, “and it doesn’t limit your business to the amount of support so they can be fit by how many cars you can park on the street in front of it.”

This plan, called upzoning, isn’t new. New York City made a similar zoning change in the early 2000s. Upzoning has become a fashionable policy proposal in recent years. Minneapolis and Seattle have adopted the policy to combat high home prices and reverse the damage done by zoning regulations, most of which are rooted in historical and institutional racism. Dorsey knows this history well, and his plan to upzone large swaths of Baltimore are informed by his understanding of how market forces and race inform the price and availability of quality housing. 

But Dorsey’s sweeping policy fix has found opposition from the same folks he insists would stand to gain from upzoning. Councilperson James Torrence, whose district in West Baltimore could be ground zero for single family home conversions, has come out against Dorsey’s proposal. Torrence sees a different math problem — the way a free market solution like the one proposed by Dorsey can have unexpected consequences. 

“The market will destroy Black wealth,” Torrence said. 

He points to other cities which, through upzoning, unleashed market forces on neighborhoods, to devastating effect. Take New York City. When Johns Hopkins alumnus Michael Bloomberg became mayor in 2002, his administration began a massive zoning overhaul which led to 6,000 city blocks being upzoned in six years. This signaled to developers that blocks previously protected from large development were open for new construction of denser high-rise apartments. Capacity was added, with an additional 180,000 new units in those first six years. But rental prices didn’t fall. They went up. 

“Just because you create more housing doesn’t make it affordable,” Carol Ott, tenant advocacy director at Fair Housing Action Center of Maryland. “You have to be intentional and you have to make sure the housing stays affordable over time.” 

What appeared to be a major overhaul of the zoning regulations in New York City was actually quite small and targeted. Affluent neighborhoods were left alone, and in some cases zoning became even more restrictive, prohibiting the construction of anything but a single-family home. Upzoning was aimed mostly at low-income Black and Latino communities, and developers looking to get the most for their dollar constructed luxury apartments instead of affordable housing.

Dorsey’s plan doesn’t cover the entire city, and that’s what worries Torrence.

But Torrence also cautions it may not work at all. Developers could come in with an eye toward converting row homes into condominiums priced out of the range of the current residents. Or they might not, as was the case in Chicago from 2013 to 2015, when upzoning in Black neighborhoods did little to attract new development, according to MIT urban planning professor Yonah Freemark, who studied upzoning in the nation’s third largest city. 

“If we do this broadly,” Torrence said about upzoning across the city, “it may work.”

But considering how closely wealthy neighborhoods border impoverished communities throughout the city, Torrence worries that this piecemeal approach from City Hall could wreak havoc on the market. Neighborhoods spared from upzoning could retain and even gain in value, while those where single-family zoning is banned could be subject to increased density that makes them less attractive to homebuyers. 

“It may create a void where wealth is diminished along neighborhoods on the border,” Torrence added.

Many of the homes that would be eligible for conversion under Dorsey’s plans are owned by older Baltimoreans on fixed incomes. To housing advocates like Ott, allowing for conversion  from single-family to multi-unit housing would enable extended families to live in different apartments but in the same house. 

“It would allow for multigenerational households to have a place for grandma,” Ott said. “When I hear people talk about generational wealth, what I think about isn’t just money, it’s a stable place for a family to live in for generations.” 

Torrence agrees with that sentiment, but says a sweeping policy is not what’s needed to help the elderly age in place. What is needed is more direct resources for older people to fix their homes, and request the conversions when needed. 

However, those conversions have been few and far between. In the last decade, the city has only converted a few dozen single-family residences to multi-unit dwellings. And, due to a loophole in Baltimore’s zoning regulations — one that failed to garner enough support to fix in October — when a previously single-family unit which has been converted to multi-family has sat idle for more than a year, the property reverts back to its original zoning designation. They can’t be used for anything but a single-family dwelling, but are too large to efficiently house a typical family unit. This practice cuts off people in part of the city from neighborhoods with full-service grocery stores and easy access to transit.

“Some of the folks who are struggling to find affordable, quality housing are resorting to the only places that they can afford, which are in the farthest out regions of East Baltimore and the most concentrated blight of West Baltimore,” Dorsey said.  

This most recent zoning fight underscores a battle over place and property deeply rooted in Baltimore history. While the first zoning maps were drawn in New York City in 2016 in a not-so-perfect attempt to separate industrial properties from residential, Baltimore and other cities in the mid-Atlantic and upper South used zoning to segregate Black and white residents. 

When Baltimore politicians talk about Baltimore being the birthplace of redlining, they are talking about zoning regulations. In 1917, the Supreme Court deemed the practice of using zoning regulations to prohibit people from certain races from living on certain blocks unconstitutional. Cities began using density regulations to keep multi-unit dwellings separate from single-family homes. This, in turn, kept lower-income folks from mixing with more affluent residents, which had a disproportionate impact on Black families, whose incomes were and still are typically lower than white families. 

“Explicitly racist practices in zoning or in mortgage lending were deemed unconstitutional,” Dorsey said, “so we transitioned from those devices to measured, constitutionally acceptable, race-neutral language being written into zoning codes.” 

Although Dorsey’s plan attempts to dismantle this system, the very neighborhoods which are living testament to exclusionary zoning won’t be included in his proposal. 

Roland Park and Guilford won’t be upzoned under Dorsey’s proposal. The deeds to the homes in those neighborhoods are tied up in covenant restrictions that don’t allow them to be rented or, in some cases, divided into multiple units. Torrence is open to the idea of challenging these restrictions in court. 

“We have to really look at what we can do that may infringe on the covenants that are legal,” he said. 

And while he is not completely opposed to the idea of changing zoning regulations to combat blight and create more dense and walkable communities, Torrence would like that process brought down to the neighborhood level where residents can decide whether their block or community should or shouldn’t be upzoned. He has also been a supporter of City Councilperson Odette Ramos’ inclusionary housing bill. This legislation would extend the already sunsetted inclusionary housing law from 2007, which created a meager 37 affordable housing units in 15 years. Ramos wants to make it harder for developers to get waivers relieving them of their obligation to build affordable housing.  

The fight over zoning is only beginning, and it’s not clear whether Dorsey’s bill has enough support to pass the council. But political leaders and housing advocates are desperate to do something to make more affordable housing in Baltimore and address blight. But, as Ott told Baltimore Beat, something needs to be done to “make the math work.”  

The post Baltimore’s math equation: housing in the city is a numbers game appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

In early October, Maryland gubernatorial candidate Wes Moore appeared at a panel discussion at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum in Baltimore. In a crisp blue suit, Moore directly addressed the problems Baltimore faced. 

“What we’re seeing in the city of Baltimore, what we are watching is an intentional neglect that has led to generational impacts,” Moore said. “And in the time that you have had a generational pullback, the only way that you can address that is a generational buildup.”

But the biggest response came when Moore went on to tell the story he often recalls on the stump. The story is detailed in his book “The Other Wes Moore,” which focused on his single mother’s struggle to raise him. In it, he talks about his brushes with trouble as a young person, and his redemption as a teenager. Some have called the book exploitative for its inclusion of another Baltimore man named Wes Moore, who didn’t overcome the obstacles set in his path. The book gave some the impression the Democratic nominee is from Baltimore, which he is not. However, the story he tells is compelling to many, and when he told it at the panel discussion, four older Black women sat in the front row listening attentively.   

Watching Moore, they smiled broadly, and vigorously applauded. Judith Thomas was one of those women. She had come from Howard County to see Wes Moore. “I was impressed by his humbleness, his engagement to the audience,” she said. “I was a single mother, the support you need as a single mother is significant.”

Moore has this effect on so many he encounters. In public he can keep an audience rapt. And, one on one, he has the same effect with the other politicians who have rallied behind him to elect the state’s first Black governor and return the Governor’s Mansion to the Democratic Party.

In the fall of September 2015, Wes Moore sat at a table inside Forno, an Italian restaurant on Eutaw Street, with a decision to make.

It had been months since the death of Freddie Gray ignited an uprising. 

The Baltimore Police Department was under investigation by the Justice Department; the homicide rate had spiked in May and again in July and was pushing the annual tally above 300 for the first time in almost 20 years. Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, the incumbent mayor, decided not to run for a second term. 

Moore, the CEO of Robin Hood, a nonprofit formed to address poverty, had arranged dinner with two powerful Maryland politicians — state Delegate Maggie McIntosh and state Senator Bill Fergsuon. Moore wanted to talk about a run for mayor of Baltimore.  

McIntosh, who had  served more than 20 years in the House of Delegates, came to the meeting knowing little about Moore. She had seen his 2 minute, 30 second speech at the 2008 Democratic National Convention, where he was billed as Captain Wes Moore, and talked up his military credentials in support of Barack Obama’s first run for the White House. She knew about his book, “The Other Wes Moore,” where he compares his own fate to another young man living in Baltimore. 

But McIntosh had never met Moore in person, or been able to quiz him on politics. What was going to be a chance to quiz the political hopeful quickly turned into McIntosh trying to sell Moore on running. The smart, inquisitive, and charismatic nonprofit executive seemed like the perfect candidate for a race with no clear front-runner and a crowded field. But Moore had some reservations, McIntosh recalled.  

“His family was very young, and at the time he was still growing his nonprofit Robin Hood,” McIntosh said. “He was very conflicted about it.” 

She left the restaurant crestfallen.

Ultimately, he decided not to run. 

“I was sad he didn’t run for mayor,” she said. 

But she had a gut feeling that she would see Moore again. He had a political future. What  it would look like was anyone’s guess, but McIntosh knew she hadn’t seen the last of Moore. 

“I walked away having met and having talked with him and came away with a lot of confidence in his ability,” McIntosh said. But not with a clear idea of what a nonprofit executive would do to operate a city trapped between the violence of the streets and the violence of the police.

As Election Day draws near, Moore’s rise to the governor’s office looks inevitable to many. He is leading his opponent, the Donald Trump-backed Republican Dan Cox, by more than 30 points in at least one poll. Moore has raised millions of dollars and can spend freely on ads. He has powerful endorsements from President Joe Biden, Representative Steny Hoyer, Representative Kweisi Mfume, former President Barack Obama, and former Senator and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. 

But, while it looks likely that Maryland Democrats are close to electing the state’s first Black governor, no one can be sure what a Moore administration would bring. His politics sometimes seem as much of a mystery today as they were to McIntosh seven years ago, a mixed bag of economic progressivism and social and civic pragmatism. On one hand, he wants to close the racial wealth gap between more affluent white families and the scores of financially strapped Black and Latino families. He also has the endorsement of the Fraternal Order of Police, a political endorsement which is elusive, and perhaps toxic, for young Democrats. 

But maybe the best thing he could do is to get the state back to running efficiently. Not the sexiest style of leadership, but one that veteran political leaders agree Moore must demonstrate if he gets into office. 

“I told Wes, you are responsible for state agencies that deal with housing economic development, safety, and health. It’s not exciting, but if you can make those agencies work, people can feel the results,” former Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon told Baltimore Beat. “That’s where the focus needs to be, to get those agencies to be functional where you can see results in Baltimore and the rest of the state.” 

But that might not satisfy parts of his base hungry for quick change. Maryland is a relatively wealthy state. However, large pockets of deep poverty exist in the state, and in its largest city, Baltimore. Moore has proposed issuing baby bonds to address poverty and the wealth gap. The state would spend $3,200 on each child born to a family living near or below the poverty line. The price tag for Moore’s program is about $92 million per year. He plans to pay for this by using a $2 billion surplus in the state budget. Such a proposal could be dead on arrival even in a Democratically controlled legislature. For one, the surplus is due to a massive infusion of federal money from the COVID-19 pandemic, and taxes collected on the state’s wealthiest residents. Transferring that wealth to impoverished families could get significant blowback from the state’s more conservative lawmakers. 

But McIntosh, who is leaving office in November, believes Annapolis is on the cusp of a dramatic change in political culture. Of the 96 members of the Democratic caucus in the House of Delegates, 80 of them have served two terms or less. The days of old entrenched politicians in the state Capitol are becoming a thing of the past. 

“You are walking into two very recently elected officials, with the senate president and speaker of the house,” McIntosh said. “What you are going to see in Annapolis will be a desire to work with him.”

Moore has the endorsement of Speaker of the Maryland House of Delegates Adrienne Jones and Senate President Bill Ferguson, who was with McIntosh when she met with Moore. Ferguson did not respond to a request for comment made by Baltimore Beat.  

Still, Moore’s close relationship with law enforcement can make some, especially in Baltimore, suspicious. But with Cox’s own record, Moore’s position on law enforcement might not matter with progressives. Cox organized a bus caravan to transport people to the January 6, 2021, “Stop the Steal” rally, where violent rioters breached the U.S. Capitol to stop Congress from certifying the results of the 2020 presidential election. 

Kweisi Mfume was on the Wes Moore train early. Mfume is currently serving in Congress, but cut his teeth in politics on the Baltimore City Council in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Moore and Mfume became acquainted almost a decade ago, when Moore was initiated into the Baltimore chapter of the Grand Boule of Sigma Pi Phi, the elite Black fraternal organization. Mfume, like McIntosh, noted Moore’s presentation as a clean-cut, well dressed family man. They weren’t really close, but over the next few years, Mfume and Moore talked — politics, policy, and how to deal with the deep poverty impacting Baltimore and its Black residents. 

“I always thought of Wes as a complete package. He’s a family man, a man of faith, he’s a patriot,” Mfume said. “I was impressed by his work as a CEO at Robin Hood.” 

But when Mfume talks about a Moore administration, he turns to style over substance, saying that Moore could change the narrative around Baltimore. The city is the largest in the state, and also an economic hub. As goes Baltimore, Mfume said, so goes Maryland. The image of the city as crime-ridden isn’t a complete portrayal of Charm City. Moore could change that. “He can paint a more accurate picture,” Mfume said. 

Of course, Baltimore politicians have been talking about “changing the narrative” for decades — usually when they don’t have anything else to say. And when the 74-year-old politician gets specific, he talks about how Moore will need to address public safety in terms that sound a lot like “changing the narrative” around policing in Baltimore by once again giving more resources for law enforcement. 

“We know that community policing works. We know officer friendly works,” Mfume told Baltimore Beat. “We know that reaching out in elementary kids where people shape their initial views on policing works.”  

Moore himself has been clear about some of the ways he hopes his administration can increase the reach of law enforcement. During his debate with Cox, Moore vowed to invest more into parole and probation enforcement by hiring more people to do the work of tracking those coming home from prison. He believes doing so will curb violent crime. 

“We consider a third of all violent offenders are in violation of parole or probation,” Moore said. “That is a state function and right now it is understaffed.” 

In other words, Moore believes something akin to the “broken windows” theory of policing: If we enforce probation and parole violations, the people who are then re-incarcerated will not commit violent crimes. 

Moore added that, like basically every other politician, he wants to work with federal and state-level law enforcement to help cities like Baltimore reduce violent crime and gun deaths. 

This message can ring a bit hollow in certain corners of Baltimore, a city which spends more than $570 million on its police department. But Moore supporters believe that Baltimore must invest in an agency currently under federal oversight if the city is to properly address public safety. 

But as Election Day nears, the focus for many is not on how he will operate in Annapolis, if he doesn’t blow a 30-plus point polling lead. Instead many are focused on the historic nature of the race. Maryland, the slave state, the place where Conferederate sympathizers clashed with Union troops, the place with the highest incarceration rate for Black men, could elect a Black man as governor, breaking the stranglehold white men have had on the office.

“The candidacy of Wes Moore represents a historic milestone for Maryland and for the African American community,” Mfume said. “It is historic and significant for Black people in the state.” 

Still, some older Black leaders are skeptical of Moore’s charm and are waiting to see what he does once he is in office. “People only look at things at surface level. A person looks good, sounds good. It’s like looking at a movie star,” Dixon said. “But he hasn’t been in government, …with someone like Martin O’Malley, for example, he had a history of dealing with those state agencies. He’s going to have to learn how to deal with those state agencies.”

*An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified Steny Hoyer’s title. He is a member of the House of Representatives. The Baltimore Beat regrets the error.

The post The Wild Card: What Wes Moore could mean to state politics. appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

The last time Sterling Thomas saw his teammate Jeremiah Brogden alive was in the hallway at Mergenthaler Vocational High School just before the football team’s first game of the season on September 2.

The two varsity players met briefly, when Thomas was on his way to the multipurpose room at Mergenthaler — or Mervo— for the team meal. Brogden was supposed to be doing the same, but told Thomas, who is the team captain and middle linebacker, he needed to attend to a personal matter in the parking lot behind the school.

Thomas told Jeremiah Brogden to be mindful of the time and not be late to the team meal. “You’ve got to 2:50 to get down this hallway,” Thomas said before the two parted ways.

The Mervo coaches had pizza delivered before the game against Edmondson-Westside High School. It was a pre-game ritual repeated each Friday from September to November at Mervo; the players ate before descending into the locker room to dress  for the game. The meal corralled all the players in one place so the coaches could make any last-minute adjustments and keep the players’ attention squarely on football. It worked. Thomas got so wrapped up in the game to come, he didn’t notice his cell phone ringing during the meal.

“I was just eating pizza and thinking about the game,” he said.

Mervo was about to begin its defense of a state title captured nine months prior, and the game would be the first time Mervo head coach Pat Nixon got to see just how much talent he truly had. Sure, they had lost a few players, but more than half the state championship team had returned. And they had a new crop of players who had moved up from the junior varsity team who captured a city title in 2021. Among those new players was Jeremiah Brogden, who made the game-saving tackle in the junior varsity championship game.

At the same pre-game meal, Nixon assigned jersey numbers to each player. “These numbers are distractions, so we wait until before the game to hand them out, otherwise they are arguing on who gets to wear number one,” Nixon told Baltimore Beat.

Thomas got number 4. Brogden was going to be assigned number 30, but he still wasn’t at the team meal. Thomas’ cell phone buzzed again, and then again. Two more incoming phone calls, but still he didn’t answer his phone. He’d spent weeks learning the defensive alignments. Now, all he could think about was donning his blue and yellow jersey and busting through the banner the cheerleaders stretched across the south end zone, as he and the team stormed the field for the first game.

Thomas kept ignoring his phone, but another player on the team answered his as it rang. A student, maybe a football player, had been hurt in the parking lot behind school. Around the same time, Nixon saw an adult, another staff member, walk into the all-purpose room where the team was holed up.

“He’s not moving,” she told Nixon, who, for a moment, thought there must have been a  fist fight and someone was knocked unconscious.

He sprinted out of the room and past his players.

When Nixon arrived in the parking lot, Jeremiah Brogden was lying on the ground, shot. He appeared to have already succumbed to his injuries. Nixon paused, and turned around to find half of the Mervo team right behind them, staring at the lifeless body of the guy they called “Jerms.”

“I turned around and I could see my players behind me and I saw their faces,” Nixon said, “and it killed me.”

Soon after the shooting, a story began to emerge. Jeremiah Brogden was trading words with a teenager from another school. The other boy, whose name is not being released because he is a minor, is suspected of pulling out a gun and shooting Brogden. The shots rang out so loud that several teachers reported hearing them.

Word of the shooting spread quickly across the city. It was broadcast across emergency dispatch channels, which is how a close friend of Thomas’ family found out. He was the person calling Thomas’ phone — calls the Mervo senior didn’t answer. Charmaine Brown, Thomas’ mother, got word from the same family friend, and called her son. He finally picked up the phone.

“My man is on the ground, he’s not moving,” Brown remembers her son yelling into the phone.

Thomas began to cry, his voice cracked, and he frantically paced back and forth in the parking lot behind Mervo, confused about how and why one of his teammates was dying on the pavement. Brown tried to assure her son it was going to be okay. She asked him to walk away from the scene.

“You don’t need to be there,” she remembered saying into the phone.

Thomas refused her advice.

“My man is lying there, I can’t leave,” the 17-year-old senior told his mother. “Why would someone come up and do this?”

Still in tears, he hung up the phone. Jeremiah Brogden was dead. It was 2:54 p.m.

Soon, they learned that the alleged shooter was captured blocks away from the school. The game with Edmondson-Westside was canceled.

“I was on my way to the game when I heard someone had been shot at the school,” Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott said.

He was wearing his blue and yellow sneakers, and, on his right hand, a blue state championship ring. Scott graduated from Mervo, and is a fixture along the sidelines during football season.

What was supposed to be a chance for Scott to celebrate with boys from his alma mater quickly became a routine he was all too familiar with. Talking about yet another murder in Baltimore, a city that has recorded more than 300 murders in seven years, and appears on pace to eclipse that number again.

“I’m often the person who has to deliver bad news, but this was different,” Scott said. “Death is tough, but the death of a young person is something we should never have to talk about.”

Shortly after Scott arrived, Nixon dismissed the team, not sure if they would play a season. The coach, in his 13th season leading the Mervo Mustangs, was conflicted. Would it be better to cancel the season and let the boys grieve? What about the pressure placed on the boys to defend a state title? Was football even important, right now? Questions swirled through Nixon’s head. His assistants assured the head coach the boys would be fine. Mervo players, they told him, are tough.

“One of the coaches told me ‘our kids are going to be okay, they’re resilient,’” Nixon told Baltimore Beat. “That’s kind of sad, because it means they’re used to this. They have seen people murdered. This is not uncommon, whether it’s a family member, an uncle or another friend. They have seen this before.”

On Labor Day, three days after the shooting, the team convened on Zoom to make a decision.

“As a team, and as players, we came together with an agreement that we were ready,” Thomas said. The Mervo boys would play.

Mervo had been here before, and recently. Jeremiah Brogden’s death came 10 months and 22 days after Mervo wide receiver Elijah Gorham died after suffering a traumatic brain injury when he fell to the turf in a game against archrival Paul Laurence Dunbar High School.

Mervo had unveiled a mural dedicated to Elijah Gorham on a wall between the locker room and the football field only a week before Jeremiah Brogden’s murder. The Mervo players can’t escape death and tragedy. They stare at a reminder of both when they walk past the mural to take the field for practice and games. They remind themselves in huddles when Thomas barks out the jersey numbers worn by their fallen teammates. And they wear reminders of death and tragedy in the yellow wristbands made to honor Elijah Gorham. And yet, the boys on the Mervo team told themselves and anyone who would listen, they were ready to move on, to play again. And to defend their state title.

“I think these kids are numb, especially when they can bounce back and keep moving,” Brown said.

Maybe this was how they grieved. Maybe the field was just an escape, a place to hide out from the trauma of losing two teammates in such a short span.

When Mervo finally took the field for their delayed opener on September 9, against Baltimore City College, the players were a bit too excited, and it was hot. Brandon Williams, a senior offensive guard who stands 6 feet, 3 inches and weighs north of 270 pounds, got a good sweat during warmups, and then he cramped up during the first half and was temporarily pulled from the game. “I got a bit too hyped and didn’t get enough water in me,” he said.

While the training staff worked to get him hydrated, a 5’1” women with a number 7 Mervo hat held Williams’ arm in one hand and reached her other hand under his shoulder pads to work out the cramp.

Shantres Shaw is Mervo’s team mother. She walks the sideline encouraging players, often lifting their spirits after they have heard an earful from a coach yelling about a missed block or tackle. And, on occasion, she delivers speeches the night before big games. “That’s the type of energy I put in my son, and that’s the type of energy I give them,” Shaw told Baltimore Beat.

Her son was Elijah Gorham. He wore number 7 on the 2021 Mervo team. And at a Mervo game it’s common to see number 7 Mervo hats, the yellow wristbands that read 7STRONG on one side and 7VNSHOTS on the other. Elijah Gorham wore the number 7 on the 2021 Mervo team. He was also a photographer, and 7VNSHOTS was his photography brand.

When Thomas came to the sidelines after the defense stopped a Baltimore City College drive, he called to “Mama-E,” as the team calls her, and asked if she’s okay. In the week since Jeremiah Brogden’s death, the team and those close to the Mervo Mustangs were still leaning on each other for support. Jeremiah Brogden’s death stirred up memories of Elijah Gorham’s death in 2021. And at the first game against Baltimore City College the weight of both deaths weighed heavily on the team.

“They carried my son with them all last year, and it inspired them to play hard and win a state title,” Shaw said. “Now they are carrying Jeremiah with them too.”

Near the end of the second quarter, Baltimore City College punted the ball. The Mervo punt returner made a few City College players miss and was sprinting down the sideline toward the end zone. Thomas was jogging down the field, waving on the returner. The team celebrated in the end zone. Shaw looked at the scoreboard. It read 37-0. “Thirty was Jeremiah’s number and seven was Elijah’s number, so I figured it was a good time to go,” she later said, explaining why she left at halftime.

When the horn blew at the end of the contest, the scoreboard still read 37-0, a shutout in the season opener. Coach Nixon pulled off his visor and wiped the sweat from his bald head.

As Nixon addressed the media, he admitted he missed one small detail on the scoreboard in the west end zone of George Petrides Stadium. Where Mervo would have been written in lights, it read JB30 instead. JB for Jeremiah Brogden, and 30, his jersey number.

Nixon walked away from the press who gathered in the field and took out his cell phone. “I have to get a picture of that,” he said. The coach stood in the end zone, and snapped pictures of the tribute to his fallen player.

Sterling Thomas is built like a Post Office mailbox with arms and legs. He can outrun most kids in this city and he has a chip on his shoulder, a slight edge just underneath the boyish smile. His response to every adult male is “yes sir” and “no sir,” but when he puts on a helmet he will take any opportunity to land a big hit on his opponents. That’s Thomas as a middle linebacker, the boy who during youth football they called Baby Ray, after Baltimore Raven great Ray Lewis. But he’s also the team captain, an extension of coach Nixon’s demand that they play hard each down and not make mistakes.

As the team prepared for their first home game, Thomas barked out commands, moving the team from one drill to the next. “Sterling [Thomas] is starting to bring a certain level of leadership. For us to have the challenges we had last week with a player being killed and them to perform the way they did was impressive,” said Alan Harvey, who has coached for more than 25 years, and is on his second stint tutoring defensive lineman at Mervo.

The impulse to lead, to demand the best from his teammates, has always been inside Thomas, according to his mother Chamaine Brown. She works at the William C. Brown Funeral Home, and her son is her most trusted assistant. “I can send Sterling [Thomas] to set up a body for a funeral and not worry that it’s going to be done right,” she said.

Brown said her son has never shied away from responsibility, but he has always been reserved. The vocal leader he became, the one Mervo players look to, developed out of  tragedy. Thomas and Elijah Gorham were inseparable during youth football. Elijah Gorham had his own nickname, Terrell Suggs, taken from the Baltimore Raven great and given to the young football player who even during flag football was determined to dole out hard hits. Even when they weren’t on the same team — Elijah Gorham was a year older — Thomas was on the sidelines cheering on his friend.

By 2021, Elijah Gorham was a talented senior wide receiver on a squad loaded with stars. Thomas was a backup linebacker who showed flashes of brilliant play on the field, mixed with moments where that edge, that chip he plays with, caused him to lose control. In that year’s season opener against Baltimore Polytechnic High School, Thomas came to the aid of a teammate and got into a scuffle with a Poly player. He was ejected and by rule couldn’t even be on the field for the following game against Dunbar. Instead he worked a funeral with his mother, and checked in on the game on livestream.

The 2021 Mervo-Dunbar game is widely considered one of the best high school games in recent Baltimore history. Dunbar edged past Mervo 48-46 in overtime. And Elijah Gorham turned in a spectacular performance, which included a kickoff return to put Mervo in the lead. But he fell to the turf hard. Thomas saw the impact on the livestream and could tell his close friend wasn’t moving. “I had to tell Sterling, ‘don’t assume the worst,’” Brown said.

Elijah Gorham was taken by ambulance to the hospital. Nixon believed he would recover. Elijah Gorham’s mother, Shantres Shaw, had been visited by enough tragedy in 2020. Surely, she wasn’t going to lose her son.

“My [other] son got shot on March the 26th of 2020, my brother got shot on May the 4th on Greenmount Avenue, he got robbed. And I had my stroke on May 31st,” Shaw said, sitting in her kitchen. “I was taking care of both my son Danta and my brother, when I had my stroke.”

All three recovered. So, when Elijah Gorham went to the hospital, Shaw believed he was coming home, and she prepared her house and his room. Shaw put up posters outside her house. She placed plush pillows in Mervo school colors at the head of his bed.

“It was to remind him he was still in the game and you will be back,” Shaw said. “It was all there to be a little pickup.”

Elijah Gorham never came home. He died on October 11, 2021. Shaw never took down the yard signs. The pillows still adorn the bed, as does a Bowie State football jersey signed by the team. Inside a glass case are the custom Nike cleats he wore the day he fell. Elijah Gorham’s ashes are in an urn in the room.

“I never took any of this down,” Shaw said. “I just added to it, to add to who he was and his legacy as a football player.”

Elijah Gorham’s death hit his best friend Sterling Thomas hard.

“Sterling felt guilty because he couldn’t be at the game, because he was ejected,” Brown said. “He thought he should have been there with [Elijah] at the time of the injury.”

When he returned to practice, the coaches noticed he was more vocal, he was a bit more serious about practice. And his play improved. Thomas started playing a bit more, and Mervo went on a tear. After losing in overtime to Dunbar, the team wouldn’t lose again, and captured the first state championship in Mervo’s history. The death of Elijah Gorham became a catalyst for their success.

When Jeremiah Brogden was killed, Thomas looked to his teammates and told them to use their teammates’ death as motivation to work harder. He told the Mervo players that Jeremiah Brogden’s death meant they were playing for more than just a school or another championship ring, they were playing to honor their dead teammate — again.

The team has practiced harder since Jeremiah Brogden’s murder, which reminds some on the coaching staff of how hard they played after Elijah Gorham died. The two deaths might be inspiring, but even that is bittersweet.

“I just wish we didn’t have to lose so much to motivate the kids,” Harvey said.

When the national anthem played over the public address system at Mervo at their first home game against Forest Park on September 16, Sterling Thomas was fidgeting with his gloves, pulling them tight. It was a last-second ritual before kickoff. He pulled the gloves on, banged his fists together, and pulled his helmet over his head. The guy who carried the weight of losing both his friends got lost in a game he loves. He let out a loud yell and ran onto the field. “I didn’t think about anything else but football today,” Thomas said after the game.

The scoreboard showed a dominant win — Mervo 44, Forest Park 0.

But Nixon wasn’t happy. Again too many penalties, too many mistakes, just like the week prior. And Nixon knew why. “The funeral hung over their heads, all of us could see it, me and the assistant coaches,” Nixon said. “It felt like they were going through the motions.”

Maybe they were. The team had to go to Jeremiah Brogden’s funeral the next day.

The line stretched out the door at Empowerment Temple AME Church in Northwest Baltimore. Jeremiah Brogden laid in the open casket dressed in his white number 30 Mervo jersey, and his family sat feet away. Much of the front row was reserved for his family and teammates, who inched past the casket, getting one last look at “Jerm.”

Coach Nixon sat just behind his players. His aviator glasses hid his eyes, but the tears rolled down his cheeks. He left it up to junior varsity coach Champ Forbes to speak on behalf of the football program.

“No two people grieve the same… some people need a crowd, some people need to be alone. Some people just need a hug,” Forbes said to the more than 500 people who came to the funeral. “No form is incorrect… but we cannot pretend to be okay. We cannot pretend that this does not hurt on a deep level.”

Outside the church, as the pallbearers loaded the casket into the hearse, Nixon took off his sunglasses. His eyes were red from crying.

“I still haven’t processed all this, losing another player,” Nixon said outside the church. “But this was therapeutic in a way. We can at least say goodbye.”

Thomas didn’t attend the funeral. His mother said he got up that morning and said he was exhausted. The kid who helped his mother prepare bodies for viewings and was comfortable around death couldn’t bear to see another teammate in a casket.

“He needed to take care of himself, so I said he didn’t need to go,” she said.

By the fourth quarter of Mervo’s next game, against Patterson High School on September 23, most of the Mervo starters were on the sideline. It was the third blowout win of the season. Thomas got a hold of one of the coaches’ headsets. He bent down some so the coaches wouldn’t notice, and put the headset on. Thomas began mocking Nixon and the coaching staff by pretending to send in plays from the sideline. The Mervo players laughed as their team captain waved his arms up and down like he was signaling plays into the second strong from the sideline. For a team which had been through so much, Thomas’ antics were a welcome reprieve, a moment of cheer in what had been a month filled with so much grief.

“I was just having some fun with my teammates, I just want to keep it loose and remember that football is supposed to be fun,” Thomas said.

Mervo was 3-0, and had only given up six points all year. Now they were headed into the biggest game of the regular season. Dunbar was next.

The Dunbar-Mervo game has the energy of a heavyweight boxing title fight. The two best teams in the city draw a crowd of passionate alumni and fans too large for either high school, so they play at a neutral site. This year the game was held at Hughes Stadium at Morgan State University on September 29. Kickoff was at 6 p.m. More than 6,000 people packed both grandstands — Dunbar fans in burgundy and gold on one side, Mervo fans in blue and gold on the opposite side.

“It’s not just another game,” Nixon said. There are the bragging rights that come with beating a team in the same city, beating players you have known since elementary school.

When Dunbar running back Tristen Kenan broke through the Mervo defense late in the fourth quarter to score his second touchdown, a two-point lead grew to 10. At 24-14, and less than five minutes left, a comeback was unlikely. Thomas sat on the bench, and leaned over to one of his teammates. “Good game, you played a good game,” he said. Mervo took the field with about a minute left and drove the field, scoring one last touchdown as the final seconds ticked away. The last score didn’t change the outcome of the game, but the boys from Mervo fought to the end.

After the post-game handshake between the two teams, the Mervo players headed to the bus idling just outside the stadium. Thomas was one of the last players to leave the field. He walked slowly, his gait labored. He had a slight limp. His teammates patted him on the back and one coach told him he played a great game. He said nothing. He kept his helmet on. The Dunbar game stirred so many emotions in him. And he didn’t want anyone to see what he was feeling.

After the loss to Dunbar, the team returned to their locker room at Mervo.

Coach Nixon sat on a Gatorade bucket collecting jerseys. He looked exhausted. The loss stung. But Nixon was proud of how his team fought to the end. “There’s been years where we would have hung our heads and quit, but this team is not like that,” he said.

Mervo lost, but Nixon was a bit relieved. September had been one of the toughest months in his coaching career. He had to attend the funeral of one of his players for the second year in a row. He had to console his players, all teenage boys, all of whom had lost two teammates, two close friends in less than a year. And he had to prepare them for the biggest game of their lives and the letdown of falling short. Now it was behind them.

“It’s over, we get to breathe,” Nixon said. “We are back to just managing football.”

Thomas was one of the last players to walk up the driveway toward the locker room at Mervo. His helmet now off, he yelled to his teammates they needed to be at practice on time and ready to work. There were four more games left in the regular season, and then the playoffs. He stopped briefly to unstrap his shoulder pads.

“My emotions were all over the place, this game was real personal for me,” he said.

He had just played against the same team Elijah Gorham lost his life playing, an opponent Thomas couldn’t play because he was suspended. Thomas hoped to make it up to Elijah Gorham this year, and to honor Jeremiah Brogden. All that weight was on the Mervo team, all that was on the shoulders of a 17-year-old.

“It was bigger than football for me,” Thomas said.

Then he limped into the locker room.

The post Picking Up the Pieces: A Baltimore high school football team learns from loss appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

It’s an annual tradition in Baltimore. Each summer, the district hemorrhages hundreds of teachers and scrambles to fill vacancies, just before welcoming more than 77,000 children back to school in late August. 

“Baltimore is a high turnover district,” Cristina Duncan Evans, teacher chapter chair of the Baltimore Teachers Union, told Baltimore Beat. Roughly 600 teachers leave each year; some retire, others move to suburban districts, some give up teaching altogether.

Under normal conditions, the district is able to deal with this annual migration by finding teacher applicants, interviewing them, and filling the vacancies. By the first day of school, many of those new teachers are at the whiteboard drawing up lessons. But this isn’t a normal year. The COVID-19 pandemic added additional strain to a profession that already demanded long hours for little pay. 

Baltimore City Schools officials reported they were still short 220 teachers on the opening day of school on August 29 — a figure disputed by union officials, some of whom believe the district could be short many more educators. Duncan Evans told Baltimore Beat, for example, that she doubted how reliable numbers supplied by City Schools could be, because officials have been slow to send the union reports on staffing.

For parents and children, the shortage meant a district charged with closing the achievement gap was, and still is, ill-prepared to do so. 

“Our CEO talks a whole lot about equity, [but] there’s really no equity across the board when you look at it because you can be in one area in one neighborhood and there may be 28 to 32 kids in the classroom,” said Tyrone Barnwell, a parent and education advocate. “But then, you know, just across the bridge, across the way, you’re looking at about 38 to 42 kids in one classroom, and maybe one class has an aide and then the rest of the classes don’t have an aide. It looks different all across the board.”

The shortage has been a slow-rolling crisis, which has played out over years. But throw in a pandemic, a national teacher shortage, and increased demand for classroom teachers to fill vacancies and help districts close the achievement gap, and Baltimore City Public Schools faced an unprecedented personnel crisis. 

At the end of the 2021-22 school year, Baltimore City Public Schools had about 1,300 vacancies to fill — nearly double the average gap the school district needs to fill each year, according to Sarah Diehl, executive director of recruitment and staffing services. Some of the vacancies were due to retirements and attrition. But the number was especially high this year because new positions were created to close the achievement gap between Black and Latinx students and their white peers. According to data collected by the state, white children in fourth grade are more than twice as likely to read at grade level than Black and Latinx students. Blueprint for Maryland’s Future, which lawmakers passed to address racial disparities in funding and education outcomes across the state, increased the amount of money the state sent to schools, and in Baltimore it meant the district could hire more educators to address educational disparities.

Lawmakers hoped the funding would help, and agreed to spend $3.8 billion each year over the next 10 years. This money has already shown up in the Baltimore City Public Schools budget and prompted the district to begin hiring teachers earlier to fill even more vacancies. By July, Baltimore city schools hired 700 educators. 

But even though Baltimore City Public Schools started its search for teachers earlier than in previous years and had more money for hiring, the district found itself with 600 vacancies, with less than a month before school opened in late August. 

“Schools have been adjusting and adapting their staffing to prioritize their remaining vacancies, and so we knew we knew that 600 vacancies did not mean that 600 classrooms of students were going to be without teachers,” Diehl said.

There were just fewer teachers to pick from, Diehl said, pointing to statistics that found there are fewer people enrolling in and completing teacher preparation programs. And the money sent to Baltimore City Schools to help hire more teachers? Well, that money was spread to schools across the state, in other districts with high concentrations of poor and minority students. In short, other school districts were also on a hiring spree, and so officials here had to compete for teachers. 

Then there was the Great Resignation’s impact on teaching. Maryland lost more than 5,600 teachers at the end of the school year, according to the State Board of Education. The COVID-19 pandemic was at least partially to blame for pushing some veteran teachers out of the classroom. Baltimore teachers have expressed frustrations about the district’s own COVID-19 policy, which kept school doors open during the omicron variant surge in late 2021. Teacher shortages, like the ones in Baltimore and Maryland have played out across the country. School officials in Florida estimate the state is short 8,000 educators. Meanwhile, nearly one in five classes in California were taught by someone lacking the proper credentials.

“Education personnel in America are leaving their jobs at almost double the rate of other occupations, and this crisis is particularly acute in schools serving majorities of students of color and students living in poverty which experience the highest teacher turnover rates,” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, told board members at the board’s September 13 meeting.

“Children’s learning conditions are also educators’ working conditions, and they are often in trouble,” Weingarten said.

For new teachers, even some veteran educators, Baltimore City seemed like a far less attractive place to make a career. The district has lagged behind school systems elsewhere in the state in keeping up with building maintenance and construction. As recently as 2017, Baltimore City schools spent less than half the amount spent by Anne Arundel County on facilities. Both districts received more than $40 million from the state to help with school construction. But Anne Arundel County could afford to add another $100 million in local money to help pay for facilities. 

“On a material level we have the oldest facilities in the state. We have brand new 21st century schools that have pest rodents, mold, building design issues,” Duncan Evans said. “Some of our 21st century buildings have teachers floating from class to class because we don’t have enough classrooms.”

The exodus across the state and the country was a problem Baltimore had known for decades. 

“The rest of the country is catching up with Baltimore,” Duncan Evans said.

With districts across the state short on teachers, and districts like Baltimore County moving fast to hire teachers, candidates in line for jobs in Baltimore City were quickly accepting offers in districts outside of the city, Duncan Evans told Baltimore Beat.

“Baltimore has always been one of the most challenging places to teach and support teachers in the state of Maryland. Baltimore City is competing with places with higher demand and better working conditions,” Duncan Evans said. 

Baltimore City School officials turned to substitute teachers, certified central office staff, and even paraeducators to fill the gaps before school opened. By late August, the district claimed it had reduced the hiring gap from 600 down to 220.

Across two school board meetings in late August and September, educators from across the district raised concerns about the shortage and the work conditions they believe are driving the crisis. Staff pleaded with school board officials and City Schools executives to do something —- fast. 

“Right now we are underpaid, we are overworked. Sometimes we do not get a lunch break,” said Valerie Taylor, a member of support staff at ConneXions: A Community Based Arts School. “And for the new teachers, we are that backbone. If we miss a day, that teacher has a hard way to go.”   

Baltimore City Schools cut spending as recently as 2021, and even with the additional money from the state to help close the achievement gap, district educators said their pay makes Baltimore less competitive with schools outside the city.  

“The board needs to face economic reality,” said Alan Rebar, who teaches at both Sinclair Lane Elementary and Barclay Elementary. “This school board must compete or the students will continue to suffer. This means paying educators and other staff the COVID bonus. In the case of salaries and other staff, a real raise is long overdue.”

For parents, the teacher shortage and the lack of communication by the district caught many families flat-footed and unprepared for what was to come when school opened. It meant sending their children off to school without a solid idea of that to expect when they arrived at their classrooms. 

“You know, from a parent’s perspective, how do I help prepare my child — and I don’t even know, you know, what they need to be prepared for,” Barnwell said. 

“So a lot of kids showed up to school the first day without even knowing their homeroom class, who their homeroom teacher was. That was a huge concern for the parents,” he added.  

The post Baltimore Can’t Fill Teacher Vacancies, Kids Suffer appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

The landmark decision in Brady v. Maryland required prosecutors for the last 59 years to disclose exculpatory evidence, or information which might assist the defendant in being found not guilty or reducing the sentence of those convicted in a crime. Courts call this exchange of evidence a “Brady disclosure,” after the Maryland man who fought for this right.

In the 59 years since Brady v. Maryland, prosecutors have continued to fail to hand over exculpatory evidence. The problem is so bad in New York, for example, that state lawmakers had to pass legislation setting a deadline for handing over evidence to the defense. On September 14, the courts were again reminded of why Brady matters. 

After 23 years, a hit podcast, and a cavalcade of calls demanding his release, Adnan Syed got a court hearing on Monday, September 19, to determine whether he should be set free. Syed was accused and convicted of killing his ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee in 1999. Her body was discovered in Leakin Park in Baltimore. 

Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marylin Mosby made the request on September 14 to vacate his conviction, claiming evidence that might have proven his innocence was not provided to his defense attorneys.

“The State’s Brady violations robbed the Defendant of information that would have bolstered his investigation and argument that someone else was responsible for the victim’s death,” wrote Becky Feldman, chief of the state’s attorney’s office’s Sentencing Review Unit, in the motion. 

Mosby, who is in court facing her own criminal charges for allegedly falsifying mortgage documents and illegally taking money from her state retirement account, is in her last few months in office. Her move to vacate the prosecution of Syed months before she leaves has been viewed with a heavy dose of cynicism. It was seen as good optics for a person facing the embarrassment of a criminal trial and still licking her wounds from a political defeat, especially given her actions related to another Maryland man, Keith Davis Jr., who has been tried for murder by prosecutors who have failed to disclose information the defense could use at trial.

In Davis’ second trial, the state’s attorney’s office failed to tell the jury, the defense, or the judge the complete background of a jailhouse informant used by the prosecution. The jury hung on the charges and the judge declared a mistrial.

Keith Davis Jr. won’t be back in court until 2023, the 60th anniversary of Brady. A new prosecutor will be in office. Hopefully, the Supreme Court and fairness guide the office, not just optics.  

— J. Brian Charles 

The post Brady matters appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

 People wanted to know whether their water was safe. And the reality of losing a basic, but crucial, service weighed heavily as the week dragged on. “How do you brush your teeth?” a woman riding by a makeshift water distribution site in West Baltimore asked as volunteers from Organizing Black, a grassroots activism group based in Baltimore, handed out cases of bottled water. “How do you shower?” another asked. 

Organizing Black was among several community groups who, along with the city, distributed bottled water for days to residents in West Baltimore. Even after the boil water order was lifted on Friday, September 9, demand remained high in West Baltimore. Cars wrapped the block around Harlem Park Elementary/Middle School, and another line of cars formed near the corner of Mount Street and Harlem Avenue. People would ask for one for themselves, and another for a neighbor who couldn’t come to pick up a case. 

“We always have to take care of ourselves,” said Ralihk Hayes, deputy director of Organizing Black. 

Doris Moody, 85, of West Baltimore has lived in her house for 45 years. On the morning the boil water order was lifted, her tap began to spit brown water. 

“The leadership is bad,” Moody said.  

Moody stopped to grab a canned water, still cold, from Union Brewery, the Baltimore beer company which provided canned water for those in the affected area. She rubbed it across her brow and took a long sip.

“The people who run the DPW need to be held accountable,” Moody said, “and it doesn’t seem like they are.” 

The post Water crisis appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

According to reports, the student whose name has not been released because he is a minor, allegedly pulled out a gun and shot Brogden. The suspect fled, pursued by Baltimore City School Police who apprehended a 17-year-old boy blocks away and located a firearm. Brogden died at Johns Hopkins Hospital. The 17-year-old junior was hours away from playing his first varsity football game of the season.   

Homicides have been on a record setting pace in Baltimore this year, with 242 through September 2. The epidemic has weighed heavily on the city’s children. Brogden became the 16th child murdered in Baltimore in 2022, and the 12th killed by gunfire, matching the total number of children killed in all of 2021. In fact, the first two homicides of the year took the lives of 17-year-old Bernard Thomas and 16-year-old Desmond Canada, the two boys killed shortly after midnight on January 1. 

Kids have been at the center of some high profile shootings in the city as well, including Brogden’s murder, the killing of Timothy Reynolds and the fatal shooting of Nykayla Strawder. 

This was supposed to be the year things began to turn around. Mayor Brandon Scott came to office promising to reimagine public safety. He vowed to take a public health approach to safety, pivoting away from the law enforcement focused strategies of prior mayoral administrations. The city, Scott promised, would provide help to those closest to the violence. City Hall would help nonprofit partners expand their operations and coordinate their efforts in slowing the pace of violence. 

But the rollout has been slow. The city didn’t release a coordinated gun violence reduction plan until the end of 2021. And while the gun violence reduction strategy is reporting some successes in the handful of neighborhoods where it’s being implemented, the program is not yet citywide. 

In the fall of 2021, following the nonfatal shooting of four children in East Baltimore, the city touted its investment in parks and after school programs to offer kids an enriching alternatives to violence and criminal behavior. Still, the bloodshed continues. 

 A week before the shooting on August 25, the Baltimore City Council held a meeting to address youth violence. Led by City Councilman Robert Stokes, the three-hour meeting included testimony from the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement, Baltimore police Commissioner Michael Harrison and members of the City Council. 

“Solutions to violence come with changing to conditions for people in their lives, the conditions that drive people to crime in the first place and create crime in the first place,” Baltimore police Commissioner Michael Harrison said. 

The city and the school district hashed out a deal to create a pilot program aimed at addressing youth violence. The plan includes peer-to-peer mediation, teaching students conflict resolutions skills and attempts to change the perception around violence. City leaders walked away confident that the plan could net results in Baltimore City Public Schools. Eight days later, Jeremiah Brogden was gunned down on campus.  

In an earlier version of this story, Baltimore Beat misidentified Baltimore City Councilperson Robert Stokes. We regret the error.

The post Baltimore teen killing highlights need for youth safety appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

Marilyn Mosby came back with the charges in short order. It had been a week since Timothy Reynolds, a 48-year-old white man, was shot and killed after confronting a group of squeegee kids while wielding a bat. And, within a few hours of his arrest, the 15-year-old Black boy accused of gunning down Reynolds was charged with first-degree murder.   

Reynolds’ killing, near Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, garnered national attention. Locally, the shooting picked at old wounds and became fodder for Mosby’s opponents in a tight three-way race for her job as Baltimore City State’s Attorney. 

So-called squeegee kids — children who clean windshields at city intersections for tips—had already become an issue in the campaign, with former Deputy Attorney General for Maryland Thiru Vignarajah and defense attorney Ivan Bates, promising to arrest the squeegee kids who don’t accept “help” and get off the corners.

“I don’t believe in locking up 12-year-olds that are merely on the corner trying to survive,” Mosby fired back in a press conference in mid-July. “Ultimately, the core of both of my opponents’ plans are to return to a time of mass incarceration and overpolicing of Black and Brown communities.”

Mosby, who had charged six police officers with the death of Freddie Gray in her first term and stopped prosecuting many drug crimes in her second, vowed to take a communal approach to helping the squeegee kids, and said they needed help and not punishment. 

But she also had to step in time with an angry base of residents worn down by the quickening pace of homicides in the city. Baltimore had recorded 179 by July 1, the halfway point of the calendar year. The city was on pace to break the all-time record for homicides. 

So, when Reynolds was killed at the intersection of Light and Conway streets, Mosby did what Maryland has long done to Black boys: She brought the harshest penalty possible in the case, a first-degree murder charge. The charge automatically sends the teen, who was 14 at the time of the killing, to adult court, and exposes him to the possibility of a life sentence. 

Autocharging is a policy in Maryland where children are automatically tried as adults if charged with certain crimes, such as first-degree murder. The practice drives the high number of children tried as adults in Maryland, a state which refers more children to adult court than California, which is six times its size. “What automatic means is once you are arrested and the age is statutorily eligible, you lose all your rights as a child,” said Marcy Mistrett, senior program manager with Impact Justice, a criminal justice reform advocacy group. “You go to an adult system, you get processed as an adult, and you do adult time.”

First-degree murder is premeditated homicide, meaning the person needs to have time to think about and plan the killing. In the incident in the Harbor, video shows a group of children being moved on by a man wielding a bat, and kids responding to a conflict where tempers ran hot, opening up questions as to whether premeditation would apply in such a situation. 

“I was perturbed by the state’s attorney decision to charge him with first degree murder,” Maryland state Senator Jill Carter told Baltimore Beat. “She was running for election, and she wanted to appease people who she wanted to vote for her.”

As Carter’s comments make clear, Mosby had a few choices. She could have charged the boy with second-degree murder, which, under Maryland law, would have meant he would be tried as a minor — and, if convicted, would have been home by the time he turned 21. 

 Mosby, who declined to comment for this story, could have initially charged the boy as a minor and argued in front of a judge that his crimes should be adjudicated in adult court instead. This option would have allowed the boy’s attorney a chance to counter and argue his legal proceedings should remain in juvenile court. But the first-degree murder charge preempts all this. It is likely the boy will end up on trial as an adult facing a life sentence before he is old enough to get a driver’s license.

As a result of this charging decision, the boy, who turned 15 days after Reynolds was killed, will join the more than 1,900 Baltimore City children referred to adult court in the last 10 years. Like the boy, whose name we are not using because he is a minor, more than 80 percent of those children were Black, and the vast majority of them found themselves in adult court on so-called autocharges. And while the vast majority of the children charged as adults are not convicted on those charges, the process cuts those kids off from programs designed explicitly to help teenagers who find themselves in trouble.  

“A progressive prosecutor,” Carter said, “wouldn’t charge children as adults.”  

Prosecutors like Mosby bear plenty of responsibility for sending children, most of them Black, into the adult criminal justice system. State’s attorneys, as elected officials, are subject to the often fickle whims of an electorate sensitive to any fluctuation in crime, real or perceived. And our court system incentivizes bringing the harshest charge one can against a defendant. “Prosecutors charge the highest charge they can, as a way to negotiate down to a plea,” Mistrett said. Pushing a defendant into a plea agreement saves prosecutors and their staff time at trial, even if it is at the expense of a teenager who is sentenced to a longer term in prison. 

But prosecutors aren’t the only ones to blame. Charging the 15-year-old child as an adult keeps with legal traditions dating back more than 100 years in Maryland. The state has long meted out harsh consequences for Black children, and favored punishment instead of rehabilitation. Lawmakers in Annapolis, and judges often cower in the face of tough-on-crime political interests.

“There is nothing about Maryland’s laws or treatment of Black people that shows the state is progressive,” Carter said. “And there is nothing about Maryland’s stance on criminal justice that shows it’s progressive.” 

In the fall of 2019, more than two dozen government officials, including legislators, prosecutors, cops, defense attorneys, and academics, were called to the House of Delegates Judiciary Committee Room in Annapolis. Collectively they became the Juvenile Justice Reform Council, a bipartisan attempt to stem the flow of children into the state’s adult criminal justice system. 

Maryland state Senator Jill Carter served on the council as an appointee of the late Maryland state Senate President Mike Miller. The bulk of the council, including Baltimore County State’s Attorney Scott Shellenberger, were appointed by Republican Governor Larry Hogan. As the council convened in person for two meetings in 2019, and then virtually through 2020 and 2021, Carter and Shellenberger — the white, “tough on crime” prosecutor from Baltimore County — found themselves on opposite ends of the debate over reforms. 

Carter, an attorney herself, has been a vocal opponent of the practice of autocharging. In Maryland, a total of 30 crimes, including gun possession and assault, can lead to a child as young as 16 being charged as an adult. For children 14 and 15 years of age, autocharges are limited to first-degree murder, rape, and sexual offenses. Carter first introduced a bill to end the practice a decade ago when she was in the House of Delegates, but she couldn’t convince lawmakers to back the legislation. 

This effort, Carter thought, would be different. The words “criminal justice reform” fell from the lips of politicians across the country in the wake of the killings of Michael Brown in Missouri; Eric Garner in New York City; and Freddie Gray in Baltimore. Carter’s own city of Baltimore was placed under a consent decree in the aftermath of Gray’s death and subsequent uprising. And there was the case of Kalief Browder, the teenager incarcerated on New York City’s infamous Riker Island for three years, including 700 days in solitary confinement. His suicide following his release moved many to include juvenile justice in the broader conversation of criminal justice reforms. The time seemed right for sweeping reforms in Maryland, and the Juvenile Justice Reform Council took on the issue.  

“We heard from people who were charged as adults when they were juveniles,” Carter said. “We had a panel of experts and they all spoke about the problems with autocharging.” 

In the summer of 2021, the Juvenile Justice Reform Council voted in favor of recommending the state end autocharging. The vote was 13-3 to recommend lawmakers in Annapolis end the practice of automatically referring juveniles to adult court for specific crimes. It wouldn’t matter. 

Perhaps the most outspoken of Hogan’s appointees to the Juvenile Justice Reform Council came from Carter’s own party. Shellenberger has served as the Baltimore County state’s attorney since 2007. He recently eked out a narrow victory in the Democratic primary for his seat in July. Shellenberger said the vote held by the council meant nothing since the majority of the body’s members didn’t vote. 

“Well 13 isn’t a majority, I mean it’s not even — It’s not even half,” he told Maryland Matters. 

Shellenberger whipped up opposition to efforts to end autocharging, and many in Annapolis followed suit. When it came time to pass a juvenile justice reform bill, autocharging became a bargaining chip. Lawmakers used it to get the more conservative members in the legislature to pass a package that gave kids like the boy charged in Reynolds’ killing the right to have an attorney present during an interrogation. 

“What better solution if you are a politician [than] to blame the people who can’t vote,” said Joshua Rovner, director of Youth Justice at The Sentencing Project. 

Mosby supported kids having an attorney present during interrogation, but Carter remembered “she was silent on autocharging.” 

The roots of the juvenile justice system in Maryland, like most in the country, can be traced back to the end of the 19th century, when the courts began to acknowledge the differences between the minds of children and adults. Progressive reformers of the day argued children were still malleable and could be reformed through training rather than incarceration. Baltimore City adopted practices already in place in Chicago and set the line of demarcation between childhood and adulthood, known legally as the age of majority, at 16 years of age. It would stay this way for decades, and as the system that became the state’s juvenile justice system was codified in the 1940s, the age of majority in the state of Maryland was set at 18. However, in Baltimore City the age of majority remained at 16. 

This practice created massive disparities that we still see today. In the 1950s, the state examined the inequalities in the juvenile justice system. John Ellington, special advisor to American Law Institute, authored a report on juvenile justice titled “Maryland’s Services and Facilities for Delinquent Children and Youthful Offenders.” In the report, he laid bare how the differences in age limits across the state hurt young people who happened to live in Baltimore City. “A boy of 16 or 17 faces a criminal conviction and a sentence to the Reformatory for an offense which would result in a finding of delinquency and commitment to a training school if he lived almost anywhere else in the state,” Ellington wrote.  

“Restricting the jurisdiction of the Juvenile Court of Baltimore City, with its large population, to children under 16 results in putting the criminal stigma on several hundred Baltimore adolescents yearly,” he wrote later in the report. 

Maryland would eventually raise the age of majority. But first, in the 1960s, it became one of three states, along with Pennsylvania and Mississippi to charge children as adults in first-degree murder cases. Eleven more states would follow suit in charging children as adults in murder cases, bringing to total to 14 by 1986. This was only the beginning. 

In 1994, President Bill Clinton escalated the war on drugs when he signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, better known as the Crime Bill. It put more cops on the streets, and it changed the conversation on juvenile justice. Reform was an afterthought. The more pressing issue was capturing and containing children perceived as a threat. “They are often the kinds of kids called super predators, no conscience, no empathy,” then-first lady Hillary Clinton said in a speech in 1996. “We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first we have to bring them to heel.” 

In the wake of her speech, even more states adopted autocharging, so that, by the end of 1990s, 45 states had legal provisions to automatically charge children as adults.

“In the 1990s, that’s when we had the launch of the super predator,” Mistrett said. “You had a big public narrative of this generation of kids who were crack babies out wilding in the street. We had all these racist phrases in the narrative.” 

Since the mid-2000s, more than two dozen states have either abolished the practice of autocharging or passed reforms limiting its use. Meanwhile, Maryland doubled down on autocharging, adding more crimes to the list with which prosecutors could charge children as adults.

Thirty three crimes in Maryland will automatically land a child charged with those crimes in adult court. 

Today, as in the mid-20th century, Baltimore City sends more children into adult court than any jurisdiction in the state. In 2021, the city was responsible for almost one third of the children sent to adult courts in Maryland. While legislators make it legally possible to sentence children as adults, and prosecutors have discretion over what charges to file, judges have the power to refer children sent to adult court back into the juvenile system. 

In mid-August, Maryland Circuit Judge Yvette M. Bryant ordered the Department of Juvenile Services to evaluate the teen accused of killing Timothy Reynolds and prepare a report for the court. The report, due in mid-September, will help determine whether or not the court will accept the defense attorneys’ motion to move the case to juvenile court. 

The motion filed by the lawyers for the boy accused of killing Reynolds will eventually appear in juvenile transfer court. It’s expected to take about three months to get the court date, which is partially due to the slow pace of legal proceedings, but is also strategic. Defense attorneys want to have as much evidence on the child’s home life, mental health, intelligence, and emotional maturity before they appear in front of a juvenile transfer judge. The hope is to prove to a judge the defendant should not be tried as an adult. 

“In Maryland we have specific laws that prohibit children from engaging in acts that adults engage in such as voting, such as smoking, or entering a contract,” Carter said. “But when it comes to certain crimes, we hold them accountable as adults. We force a child to prove he is a child.”   

And, according to court records, Baltimore City judges, more often than not, don’t see the children accused of crimes as actual children. Of the more than 1,900 children who were referred to adult court from 2012 to 2021, only 47 percent were transferred down to juvenile court. 

Before she went to work for Impact Justice, Mistrett worked on juvenile justice reform at The Sentencing Project. She has not called for the abolition of trying some children as adults, but wants prosecutors to prove their case for doing so in front of a judge. 

“Where is this fixing anything? How is that helping advance safety and advance healing?” Mistrett said. “It is feeding a system that has the worst outcomes.” 

Juveniles charged as adults are more likely to reoffend and end up back in the criminal justice system than those as children. Mistrett and other advocates for reform, consider this to be one of the drivers behind the demographic disparities seen in Maryland prisons. Black Marylanders accounted for 29 percent of the state’s population, while Black inmates accounted for 71 percent of those incarcerated in 2019, according to data from The Sentencing Project.

By the time the teenage boy accused in Reynold’s killing goes to trial, it’s likely Baltimore City will have a new state’s attorney. Mosby lost her bid for a third term to Ivan Bates. Bates, the former defense attorney, has promised to come down hard on the squeegee kids, but has not indicated whether he will or will not continue to pursue first-degree murder charges against the boy. If convicted of the crime, the boy would be sentenced to life, with the first chance at parole coming in 15 years — meaning that the boy will mature and develop in an adult prison, with the knowledge that he won’t even have the chance of release until he is 30.

For now, the teenage boy will spend his days inside the $35 million Youth Detention Center on Greenmount Avenue. The prison for teens accused as adults was the brainchild of former Democratic Governor Martin O’Malley, who wanted to build a youth jail in the city where he was once mayor to house children and bolster his crime fighter bona fides for a run at the White House. Construction of the prison was stalled over its initial $100 million price tag, but was completed at about a third of the cost by O’Malley successor Republican Governor Larry Hogan, a true sign of how both parties find common ground on locking up children.   

Donna Brown, co-founder of the Citizens Policing Project, has been in and out of juvenile facilities, including YDC, for years. She has worked closely with juveniles during and after their incarceration, and has seen the same young men enter the system in their teens and exit in their late 20s and early 30s ill prepared for the world. They come home with minimal work skills, after having their entire lives — when to eat, sleep, wake, shower and work — scheduled by corrections officials. In short, their development has been stunted and the time away from the support of family and friends has left many of them emotionally damaged.   

“To have a kid go through development while they are incarcerated only causes more harm,” Brown said. “It is never in our interest to incarcerate kids. They are in the most critical part of their development.”

What happened in July near the Inner Harbor was tragic for the Reynolds family, but also for the family of the accused, and the teenage boys who will likely feel the brute force of a criminal legal system bearing down on them in the coming weeks and months. But as more kids cycle through the state’s massive juvenile criminal justice system, the adults running that system should remind themselves of their responsibility to the children. 

“Where is the system of accountability that is supposed to service that kid?” Brown said. “We came up with the concept of ‘it takes a village.’ Where’s the village now?”

The post Maryland’s obsession with trying children as adults appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

Sweat trickled down Dan Bythewood’s forehead under the hot July sun. He promised the West Baltimore crowd he would keep his comments short so the 100 or so people who watched—activists, press, residents, and political leaders—could quickly retreat from the heatwave gripping the city. 

The developer, who is Black, stood behind a podium placed in front of the technicolor homes on Sarah Ann Street, a narrow stretch of concrete not wide enough for two cars to travel in opposite directions. Bythewood, president of the New York development firm La Cité (“the city” in French), trained his sight on the historic Sarah Ann Street homes almost two decades ago, with plans to redevelop the houses and the surrounding Poppleton neighborhood. The Sarah Ann Street homes have been empty since 2020, those who owned or rented them removed over the years through the use of eminent domain.

Behind Bythewood was Sonia Eaddy. Her 319 North Carrollton Avenue house was just feet away from the podium, and, like the Sarah Ann Street houses, the Eaddy’s home was also on the maps for removal which laid out La Cité’s grand plan for Poppleton. The Eaddy home was slated to be razed and replaced, and the close-knit family who’ve lived there for three decades forced to leave. 

But those plans were halted on July 18, 2022, as Bythewood stood before the crowd, sweaty, promising to work closely with the neighbors as he goes forward with his plans for Poppleton.

“[Today] is really about community,” Bythewood said. 

He stuck to his promise not to talk for too long. The residents and the activists stood in the shade of a tree to shelter from the intense heat and humidity. Water was passed around to keep them cool and hydrated. Poppleton residents knew about Bythewood’s vision for their neighborhood, how he said he wanted to recreate the magic of Tulsa, Oklahoma’s famed Greenwood District, or Black Wall Street. And they knew he had a partner in the city who would help him take control of peoples’ homes and land in Poppleton, and sell more than $58 million in bonds to help pay for the infrastructure upgrades La Cité demanded for its Poppleton project.  

Now, they could celebrate. For a moment they had won. Poppleton residents and activists had fought the city for more than a decade, and La Cité was being forced to hand over the rights to develop the Sarah Ann Street houses to a local nonprofit—Black Women Build – Baltimore—who will restore and sell the homes. After years of worrying that Bythewood would change his mind and just knock down the candy-colored homes on Sarah Ann Street and build anew, the activists were finally confident the houses would not be demolished. 

Sonia Eaddy’s home on North Carrollton Avenue was removed from La Cité’s plans entirely, and saved from the brute force of an out-of-town construction crew’s wrecking ball. 

“This victory is for us, all of us,” Eaddy said when she addressed the crowd. ‘’It’s not just Poppleton.” 

The decision to have someone actually from Baltimore assist with the Sarah Ann Street Homes and to allow the Eaddys to stay was, in the words of Baltimore City Councilmember John Bullock, “a win-win.” Yes, the Eaddys would keep their home, but La Cité wasn’t leaving empty handed. The city agreed to pay $210,000 to Bythewood to forfeit his rights to demolish the Eaddy home and build on the land, plus another $50,000 for the empty home next door to the family. And Black Women Build – Baltimore has to pay La Cité $2,000 for each of the 11 homes on Sarah Ann Street they refurbish and sell. 

Bythewood gets to walk away from the most controversial parts of his plan for Poppleton, and, in the process, gets paid to no longer develop land he never owned.

The decision chills the heat City Hall was receiving from residents and activists alike for ostensibly kicking Black families out of their homes in the name of “redevelopment.” 

“It was the intent of everyone to bring about positive change and growth to this area,” Mayor Brandon Scott said during the press conference. “But sometimes … we just need to pause and think again about what’s best for our city.”

Tisha Guthrie stood alongside the activist and residents under the shade tree, feet from the podium. She has lived in Poppleton since 2021, in the Center/West apartments, the only two buildings La Cité has actually constructed out of the 30 planned for the neighborhood. Like so many people hearing the news, Guthrie was happy Sonia Eaddy had won. 

“I’m glad she’s getting to keep her home,” Guthrie told me.

But when Bythewood and the city announced plans to move forward with more construction and development in the neighborhood—the next phase of his project— Guthrie shook her head. 

“This isn’t going to change much for the rest of Poppeton,” she said. 

Bythewood’s vision of Poppleton as Baltimore’s own Black Wall Street has been far from that, Guthrie explained. Center/West isn’t finished. The grocery store Bythewood promised hasn’t materialized. In fact, the first level of Center/West, designed with retail stores in mind, doesn’t even have a finished floor. La Cité has turned to transient occupancy to fill the building. It is hardly the image of community and “Black excellence” associated with Tulsa’s Greenwood District. 

“If he knows anything about Greenwood he knows it was self-contained and organic,” Guthrie said. “It wasn’t the result of a developer coming from the outside to do anything. He isn’t willing to speak to the community, much less engage with the community to reach the success of Greenwood.” 

The city announced La Cité would soon break ground on a senior apartment building on an empty lot just north of Center/West, and Baltimore will again turn to the bond market to help finance the project. The city, Guthrie said, was “bailing [Blythewood] out” for what he did to Sarah Ann Street and the Eaddys. 

“I don’t see any lesson learned because this is a perpetual cycle that Baltimore keeps revisiting,” Guthrie said. 

Days before the announcement on Sarah Ann Street, people who work for the city were out talking to residents and building support for its “win-win” plan. Baltimore City Housing Commissioner Alice Kennedy hoped to sell the community on the idea that developers and the residents can work in concert. 

“I was talking with some people over the weekend and we cannot go back and we cannot change the past,” Kennedy said. “But we can only look to the future.”   

Kennedy’s sentiment is comforting, but the land deal that allowed Bythewood to cash in property he never built nor owned for hundreds of thousands of dollars illustrates the relationship the city has with many developers who come to Baltimore. 

“Baltimore is desperately seeking a savior,” Carol Ott, Tenant Advocacy Director at Fair Housing Action Center of Maryland, told me. “That can come in the form of one person, one company, or multiple companies. But the idea is the city doesn’t have the resources or the capital or the people to make it happen, so the city goes outside to find this magic bullet.”

Bythewood promised big, and the city fell for it. Not once, not twice, but three times. 

Way back in 2004, Dan Bythewood first laid eyes on a parcel of land just west of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and south of Baltimore’s infamous “Highway To Nowhere.” Poppleton had long suffered from disinvestment and population loss. The neighborhood, on the edge of West Baltimore, didn’t receive the investment aimed at downtown’s waterfront communities that have long been the focus of Baltimore’s attempts to attract business and new residents. MLK Boulevard seemed like an informal barrier between Poppleton and downtown, between investment and neglect. Bythewood had an idea of what he could do to change that, and, like so many out-of-towners, it was prestige TV that informed his ideas of the city. 

A native of Long Island, Bythewood’s view of Baltimore seems largely shaped by The Wire and the idea that the show’s depiction of the drug trade is closer to fact than fiction. “If you remember the episode of The Wire, the drug dealers would buy every other [rowhouse], so they could know who would knock on your door,” Bythewood told me. “We had to create density so that scenario wouldn’t happen any longer.”

While the scenario he recalls never quite happened on the show, Bythewood made it clear he wanted to “control the dirt” the way he imagines a drug lord would. His plan for Poppleton called for 30 buildings with 1,800 apartment units densely packed into the neighborhood. There would be businesses for residents to shop. This increase in commercial activity and new neighbors, he told me, would reduce crime. “When you have more people walking on the street or people looking at the street…you have fewer people doing bad things,” Bythewood said.

The neighborhood would be mixed-income and mixed-race, but Bythewood imagined it would attract its fair share of Black professionals. 

“[Poppleton] used to function as a neighborhood of Black businesses and doctors and lawyers,” he said. 

Poppleton, Bythewood told me, “could be Black Wall Street.” 

In 2006, La Cité reached an agreement with then-Mayor Martin O’Malley, whose pro-development agenda and tough-on-crime “zero tolerance” approach to policing (nearly 100,000 people were arrested in 2006) fit nicely with Bythewood’s vision. He wanted 13.8 acres in the neighborhood. Many of the row homes were vacant, but there were still plenty of homeowners like the Eaddys living in Poppleton. 

“The city had to acquire the property first,” Bythewood said. “There were a lot of holes in the doughnut.” 

Baltimore City entered into a land disposition agreement, which meant it would use eminent domain to take properties such as the Eaddys’ home, and sell them to La Cité. Baltimore City would do the nasty work of clearing the neighborhood for the developer, similar to the ways that cities cleared the Black slums in the middle of the 20th century to make room for highways and high-rise housing projects. The work was scheduled to begin in 2007. 

Little happened after the deal was signed. La Cité promised it could develop the land, but the 2008 housing bubble burst, credit dried up, and Bythewood couldn’t get financing. 

“There was the Great Recession,” he said. “And everything stopped.” 

Like so many cities which flourished during the post-World War II industrial boom, Baltimore has struggled with a hemorrhaging population, job loss, and thousands of vacant homes. And, for the last 20 years, the city has turned to tax increment financing to spur investment and kickstart redevelopment. Tax increment financing (TIF) is where a city sells bonds to pay for infrastructure such as water connections, street lights, sidewalks, and other street improvements like curb cuts to spur the development, usually in a business district or a retail corridor. The assumption is the bonds pay for themselves, as the tax skimmed off the incremental increase in property gains covers the cost of the bonds. The increased value, when there is one, doesn’t go to police, fire or schools. Where the appreciation of home values and commercial properties in regular neighborhoods provides more money for public services, in TIF districts, the increased value pays off the debt owed on the bonds. 

Maryland approved the use of TIFs in 1980, but Baltimore didn’t use the financing tool for decades. Mayor William Donald Schaefer was a critic of TIFs, and claimed the deals were just a handout to developers. The beloved former mayor who went on to become governor believed TIFs didn’t spread redevelopment evenly across the city, and that certain neighborhoods would be chosen for development and improvement while others languished. TIFs would become cities within the city, directing money to neighborhoods that city leaders, developers, and the business community saw fit for investment. In Baltimore City, the birthplace of redlining, this had the potential to only deepen the divide between Black and white, rich and poor. And it did just that, with bonds backed by the full faith and credit of a majority Black city. 

“They are asking Black people in a segregated city to pay for more segregation and redlining,” Ott said. 

TIFs were first deployed in Baltimore in the early 2000s. M. Jay Brodie, then the head of the Baltimore Development Corporation, successfully lobbied for Baltimore to sell TIF bonds. Since then, the city has relied on the bonds to build projects like Harbor East and Port Covington, which received a whopping $660 million in bond funding (Port Covington received the largest TIF bond in city history, and has been mired in controversy from its inception, including allegations this past spring of wage theft). 

Baltimore City established what Brodie called a “but-for” test. 

“The ‘but-for test’ establishes the project won’t be built without the supplement from the government,” Brodie said. “That is, the numbers on the project will be in the red and not the black without the TIF.” 

Unlike Chicago or Los Angeles, Baltimore doesn’t assign a TIF district based on location. City TIFs are project-based, meaning the developer comes requesting the financing. Former Baltimore City Councilperson Carl Stokes remembers when Brodie and the developers of Harbor East came looking for a TIF. “During the presentation we were told the property is among the most valuable on the East Coast,” Stokes said. 

Stokes remembers sitting back in his chair listening to the Baltimore Development Corporation tout the value of Baltimore’s waterfront, and thinking something didn’t add up. 

“I said to the [Baltimore Development Corporation], ‘do you hear yourself?’ ‘But we have to do this,’ they told me, ‘to make sure the land is developed,’” Stokes said. “Political leadership would say we couldn’t capture these developers without giving away money. And I was countering that because it was absolute bullshit.” 

In 2012, after a half decade of not developing Poppleton, the city sued La Cité to get out of the land disposition agreement. The city lost, and, only three years later, La Cité approached Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, looking to sweeten the land deal. The company applied for TIF funding, requesting $58.6 million for lighting, street improvements, and water connections to redevelop Poppleton. 

In La Cité’s application, the company pointed to the disinvestment in the neighborhood,  rampant crime, and open-air drug dealing. “This was the same place where the HBO show The Corner was filmed,” Bythewood told me. 

That show was not filmed in Poppleton. And the allegations of open-air drug dealing in the TIF application conflicted with the grassroots work happening before Bythewood fixed his sights on the neighborhood. In the early 2000s, residents converted an empty lot where homes had been demolished along Sarah Ann Street into a park, and kept a consistent presence there until the drug dealers left.  

La Cité’s TIF presentation came in May 2015, days after parts of Baltimore City had burned in response to the police killing of Freddie Gray and decades-old issues in Baltimore, such as segregation. At the very moment when many were reckoning with how to radically change Baltimore, La Cité, Stokes explained, “was trying to figure out how to get enough land and enough housing to build a city within a city.”

Bythewood also offered the city something rare in TIF-financed deals: he would build affordable housing. Perhaps La Cité’s city within a city would be inclusive, Stokes thought. Despite questions about Bythewood’s finances and La Cité’s failure to develop the land from 2007 to 2015, Baltimore approved his application and began selling the bonds.

“Cities develop land, and often do so by neglecting or ignoring working people and the poor,” Stokes said. “Here was a young Black developer, and he came to us and said ‘I am going to do affordable housing.’” 

La Cité became one of a handful of tax increment-funded projects which included any housing at all, let alone affordable housing. East Baltimore Development Incorporated (EBDI) had tried to do the same in the neighborhoods around Johns Hopkins Hospital. Like Poppleton, the project meant clearing a neighborhood and moving the residents out of their homes. And, like Poppleton, the project was scheduled to start not long before the housing market collapsed. However, EBDI has never produced enough property tax to cover the bonds sold by the city to help build the development, according to the Baltimore Development Corporation. Still, the city was ready in 2015 to partner with another developer using tax increment financing to develop affordable housing. 

If the bonds are not covered by the TIF, the developer is on the hook to pay the difference. Bythewood said he doesn’t know if he has ever paid the special tax. 

“I just pay my property taxes when they are due,” he told me. 

Bythewood’s Center/West apartments have not covered the cost of the bonds, and his company has paid the special tax to cover those bond payments, according to Baltimore City’s Finance Department. 

Bythewood claims he wanted to make a neighborhood, not a self-contained city, although so far all that he has to show for it is Center/West, a hulking two building complex painted gentrification gray. The twin buildings have door attendants, gyms, and one has a pool and a rooftop lounge. At five stories, Center/West stands out in a low-slung neighborhood with row homes. The complex casts a shadow over Edgar Allan Poe’s historic home, directly across Amity Street. Tisha Guthrie thinks the disconnect between Center/West and Poppleton is wide. 

“The vibrations and the energy that you feel just looking across the street,” Guthrie said, standing with her neighbors in the lobby of one of the two buildings, “you have the Center/West complex and across the street you have a dilapidated park and homes owned by people who are being pushed out.” 

The divisions can be felt within Center/West’s buildings themselves. The two buildings are largely mirror images on the exterior, but on the inside they couldn’t be any different. “Avra,” the larger building, has a pool and a rooftop bar, which Bythewood said was a matter of having more square footage on one of the lots. But residents in the smaller “Cirro” building point to interior hallway carpets that are not cleaned, parking spaces that are priced out of the reach of most tenants, and management that often doesn’t respond to the help line. 

“No one picks up the emergency line,” said Ira McKoy, who moved to the Cirro building to be closer to work and his son. “Living here makes me feel like this is nothing but the projects.” 

Walking into Avra, the carpets are cleaner, and the management staff has a rental office and greets residents and visitors. “They’re two completely different buildings and you can feel it almost immediately,” Guthrie said. 

Cirro residents also complain about the revolving door of Airbnb guests and traveling nurses who come and go. “See? She has a badge from the hospital, she doesn’t live here full time,” McKoy said, pointing to a young white woman walking through the lobby.

Bythewood defended the use of Airbnb rentals, and called the traveling nurses “frontline heroes in the fight against COVID.” But when he set out to plan Poppleton, he imagined a community with deep social ties, not just fancy buildings for nurses to temporarily live in. He blamed Baltimore, a place he claims makes it too easy to break a lease, for the turn to transient occupancy to cover the cost of his building. 

Just north of Cirro sits an empty lot. It’s where La Cité will begin Phase II of the Poppleton project. Senior housing will be built, along with a high-end neighborhood market. The city has already sunk $11 million of TIF money into the project, and expects to spend most, if not all, of the $58 million approved. The next phase means more bonds will be sold to help finance the project. 

Back in 2006, Bythewood convinced Baltimore to help him clear land for development. When the development didn’t pan out and the city failed to get the development rights back, he convinced City Hall to give his firm $58.6 million to help finance his Poppleton project. And even as that project has been delayed and scrutinized for targeting homes and families for removal, the city paid him more than a quarter million dollars for land he never owned—so that the people who have been living here the longest can return, or not have their homes taken away from them.

City leaders have been convinced that developer subsidies and displacement is the cost of progress. “City leadership just felt—and sometimes Baltimore has this inferiority complex—that it had to give away money to get developers to develop real estate,” Stokes said. 

The dance the city does leaves residents feeling expendable and so subservient to developers that the Eaddys getting to simply stay in their home is considered a victory. 

“You are being sent a message by your government that you are not worth investing in,” Ott said. “We can move you around like pieces on a Monopoly board.”

The post Land Grab: Why a Desperate City Kept Cutting Deals With a Developer Who Didn’t Deliver appeared first on Baltimore Beat.