BALTIMORE — After 10 people were shot — seven of them in one incident — overnight in Baltimore after the city’s most violent month in decades, police announced Sunday that 10 federal agents will embed with the city’s homicide unit for the next two months.
The agents detailed to the city from the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the U.S. Marshals Service and the U.S. Secret Service represent a “flipping of the script of sorts,” Interim Police Commissioner Kevin Davis said.
“That’s a bit unusual because local police departments — and Baltimore is no different — historically send detectives to federal law enforcement agencies to embed with their long-term investigations,” he said.
The department’s homicide clearance rate is 36 percent, Davis said, and the agents will use their federal resources to help homicide detectives try to solve the rest of the 187 killings in the city this year.
Forty-five people were killed in July, matching an all-time monthly high from 1972, when the city had 275,000 more residents. Forty-two people were killed in May after the unrest over the death of Freddie Gray, 25, from a spinal cord injury in police custody.
No previous year has had two months with more than 40 killings, and the 116 killed from April to July is a three-month high in data kept since 1970.
Davis said police have confiscated about 20 percent more guns on the street this year than at this point last year, and they believe people are arming themselves amid an “atmosphere of uncertainty” after the unrest.
“Given where we are now in Baltimore, we need to win tomorrow,” Davis said. “We need to win Tuesday, then we need to win Wednesday. So we can’t be looking too far down the road because we’re in a moment we need to fight our way out of. Having them embed with our homicide detectives and literally be on the streets of Baltimore, boots on the ground, is what we need right now.”
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