duhThe Baltimore Police Department’s decades of gun seizures have not reduced violent crimes such as nonfatal shootings and murders. Through public information requests, Battleground Baltimore obtained the police department’s gun seizure numbers and other related police and crime data between 1990-2021—a time period of 31 years in which the city surpassed 300 homicides per year 17 times.
A close look at the data reveals what more and more people working in the criminal legal system across the country have argued: Seizing “illegal” guns does not reduce violent crime, although gun seizures and gun possession arrests remain metrics frequently cited by police (and praised as a prime example of “proactive policing”).
“The current intense focus on illegal gun possession without a license is having no effect on the gun violence crisis,” Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner wrote in a report released in January that looked at 2,000 shootings.
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not only that, but when cops excessively focus on guns they (rather obviously) harm black people at far higher rates than non-black people.
The behavior of Baltimore’s gun unit was extreme, but corruption among so-called “hard-charging” gun units is common. Last year, a former Metropolitan Police Department commander reached out to me because of the behavior they had seen within the Gun Recovery Unit, or “GRU,” in Washington, DC.
“Leadership focuses on how many guns GRU recovers and if an arrest is made with the recovery,” the former commander told me. “There is very little, if any, review of how the gun was recovered or how the arrest was made.”
Following George Floyd’s murder and nationwide demands for police accountability, New York City announced it would be disbanding its so-called “Anti-Crime” units, which operate similar to gun units in Baltimore and DC.
“The Anti-Crime units’ aggressive mentality seeded resentment. Frequent car stops and daily frisks in Black and Latino neighborhoods bred anger over a perceived disregard for residents’ constitutional rights,” George Joseph and Gabriel Sandoval wrote. “Because of the combative nature of their assignments, Anti-Crime and other plainclothes officers generated numerous civilian complaints and were at the center of a disproportionate number of fatal police shootings.”
As Fordham University Law Professor John Pfaff noted in Slate this week, New York City Mayor Eric Adams “promises to revive the NYPD’s undercover ‘anti-crime units’—disbanded in 2020 amid concerns about unconstitutional stops and excessive violence—and rechristen them ‘Neighborhood Safety Teams,’ deploying 400 to 500 officers on the streets to focus on ‘gun removals.’”
More broadly, Pfaff’s article is about the Philadelphia shootings report and how Krasner’s commentary and data analysis counters Adam’s much-ballyhooed tough-on-crime plan.
“Gun violence is an immediate concern,” Pfaff wrote. “But much of the data provided by the Philadelphia report…caution<s> that a broad-brush effort to stop the flow of guns may accomplish little on its own terms, and may even exacerbate some of the underlying causes of violence.”
