Race and Crime In The Big City: The Baltimore States’ Attorney Race (Part 1)

This is the first post in what is planned to be a series on racial dynamics in big city politics through the lens of the recently conducted Democratic primary election for States’ Attorney for the City of Baltimore.  

So much of big-city politics, since the early days of the Republic, has been about race. It has quite often been the prism through which nearly every issue has been viewed and perceived by all racial groups alike. Elections and campaigns have often turned on it, either implicitly or explicitly, and so has political patronage.

And Baltimore, Maryland is no exception. I’m not writing a broad history of Baltimore generally, or racial demographics or the history thereof, so I’m going to try to spell out the background as quickly as I can.

According to the 2008 population estimate for Maryland, the City of Baltimore has 636,919 residents. Of those, 401,573 (about 63%) are black while 196,112 (about 31%) are non-Hispanic white. The Hispanic (17,014) and Asian (12,840) populations are relatively small, at about, respectively, 3% and 2%.  

Like many old cities, Baltimore has been losing population for most of the past 60 years and it is not at this time clear whether that long-term trend has fully reversed itself. (At the very least, the mass exodus we saw for a few decades appears to have stopped for now.) At first it was mostly whites who fled, either to the suburbs (Baltimore County, an entirely separate jurisdiction which consists largely of suburbs, now has more population than the City of Baltimore) or to outside the metro area. In the later years of the exodus, many African-Americans, particularly middle-class and/or upwardly mobile families joined them.

What remained was a city that, outside of a few enclaves of relative prosperity, consisted in large part of people who had nowhere to run to.

Pervasive, multi-generational poverty crippled many neighborhoods, crime of all kinds ran rampant, particularly waves of violence driven by the trade in illicit drugs.  

Fast forward to 2010.

Things in Baltimore have actually rebounded a bit. Murder rates are still shockingly high but have come down some, though not as much as in some places. Some neighborhoods have become trendy places for young people to settle, attracting various businesses catering to their tastes. The Inner Harbor and Harbor East parts of downtown have improved markedly in appearance.  

It is against this backdrop that the 2010 race for States’ Attorney occurs. Longtime incumbent Patricia C. Jessamy, an African-American female resident of Northwood in northeastern Baltimore. Jessamy is a veteran of the civil rights movement (growing up in the Deep South in the final years of Jim Crow) and a prosecutor in Baltimore since 1985 and State’s Attorney since her appointment to the job in 1995. Challenger Gregg Bernstein, a Caucasian male and resident of Roland Park in north-central Baltimore, is a former federal prosecutor who’s been in private practice since 1991; though he has been a proscutor, he has never dealt with Baltimore City juries before.

Trying to summarize the salient issues as quickly as possible, since this isn’t about policy, Bernstein’s challenge was based mostly on the following ideas:

* The city’s conviction rates were too low;

* The relationship between Jessamy’s office and law enforcement was poor;

* Jessamy’s office wasn’t doing enough to combat witness intimidation, a major problem in Baltimore;

* Jessamy and her chief deputies are too focused on rehabilitation and crime prevention measures and not enough on locking up violent predators;

* Above all, too many violent repeat offenders weren’t being prosecuted aggressively enough, allowing them to commit crime after crime in the community.

Jessamy supporters responded to this charge in various ways:

* Most kinds of crime, particularly homicide, have been dropping during most of her tenure.

* Many of the factors behind low conviction rates are beyond her control and often come down to lack of resources, and that conviction rates are “smoke and mirrors.”

* For a few years, under prior leadership, Baltimore Police experimented with an aggressive “zero tolerance” policy that made many residents distrust law enforcement, and it was the States’ Attorney’s role to rein in police misconduct.  

Naturally, a lot of these arguments carry racial overtones and undertones, especially given Baltimore’s history. It occasionally got ugly. The police chief put a sign for Berstein on his lawn, prompting calls for investigation by Jessamy supporters. Jessamy at one point accused Bernstein of wanting to bring back the 1950s.

According to everything we commonly assume about how big-city politics operates, the incumbent should by all rights have prevailed. Without going too deeply into the merits of the candidates’ substance, there are many more blacks in Baltimore than whites, significantly more women than men, and a higher than usual number of people of all races who regard law enforcement officers with some suspicion and are somewhat uncomfortable with the notion of a prosecutor so clearly aligned with the police.

But a funny thing happened on September 14, 2010, something few observers were expecting.

Patricia Jessamy lost.

She ended up with 29,824 votes against Berstein’s 31,187 votes. (A third challenger, Sheryl Lansey, notched 2,361 votes, more than the difference between the two contenders; stay tuned for why that might prove signficant. The full precinct data for this election isn’t available yet.)

The rest of this series will focus on how that result happened and why.

Part 2 of the series will lay out my base assumptions and the reasons and justifications for them and what kind of data would tend to confirm those assumptions and what kind of data would force me to revise or abandon those assumptions. I’m also going to throw some conjectures out there I’m going to have a difficult time proving or disproving with the data I plan to have available, and there’s where I’m going to need the most from my SSP commentariat help in that section.  

Once I actually have data, Parts 3 and beyond is where the numbers get crunched. I’ll examine different neighborhoods and classes of neighborhoods and how they voted and with the help of my base assumptions as spelled out in Part 2, attempt to construct the most plausible narrative for how this result could have happened.  

Before I take a break for a while, I’ll spell out the broad scenarios I’m most looking out for going forward. Going in I know it could be a combination of these, or even something completely different from any of them.

1. A near-total racial polarization scenario where nearly all black voters supported Jessamy across the board and nearly all white votes supported Bernstein across the board. In this scenario Bernstein wins because mostly white turnout is far higher than black turnout.

2. A multi-racial coalition of voters, consisting of white voters and middle- and upper-middle class black voters, perhaps less skeptical of law enforcement than those in poorer neighborhoods, propelled Bernstein to victory.

3. A multi-racial coalition of voters, consisting of white voters plus black voters in crime-plagued poorer neighborhoods, weary of a States’ Attorney office many perceive as being “soft on crime.”

Through this exercise, I’m hoping to find out how far has Baltimore come and where is it going. and I can’t think of a better web community to welcome along for the ride.