Baltimore’s mayor announced Friday she has replaced Police Commissioner Kevin Davis, citing the city’s high crime rate and promising to restore the confidence of residents and order to the streets.
Mayor Catherine E. Pugh named a deputy commissioner, Darryl D. DeSousa, as interim leader of the beleaguered police force.
“We need violence reduction,” the mayor said at a news conference, less than a month after she had told the city that crime had begun to trend downward in the most dangerous neighborhoods. On Friday, she said, “We need the numbers to go down faster than they are.”
DeSousa, a 30-year veteran, immediately sent an extra contingent ofuniformed officers to the streets, the start of what he called a continuous wave of law enforcement to confront criminals. He said that over the past year, “a lot of lives were lost” and there’s “a lot of people with bleeding hearts. . . . There’s a lot of work that needs to be done.”
The new interim commissioner, whom Pugh said she will seek to make permanent, said the extra officers are being sent to troubled neighborhoods and streets with specific orders to confront “trigger-pullers” and even merchants who help in the drug trade. “We are moving at an accelerated pace,” DeSousa said. Of the gunmen, he said, “the district commanders know who they are and we’re coming after them. . . . The citizens of Baltimore will see us getting ahead of crime. . . . They’re frustrated, they want answers and they want change.”
The 53-year-old New York native, who moved to Baltimore in 1983 and joined the police force in 1988, is inheriting a department with a tarnished national reputation. He will have to navigate a tough course with anxious residents and officers clamoring for more aggressive policing while the force is under oversight by the Justice Department, which cited the department for discriminatory and unconstitutional enforcement. All that comes amid frustration over the unsolved killing of a detective and a federal corruption investigation that has already led to guilty pleas from several officers for shaking down drug dealers and stealing money.
Pugh, in a statement, said “reducing violence and restoring the confidence of our citizens in their police officers is my highest priority. . . . The fact is, we are not achieving the pace of progress that our residents have every right to expect in the weeks since we ended what was nearly a record year for homicides in the City of Baltimore.”
Davis, who joined the Prince George’s County Police Department as a cadet in 1992, rose quickly through the ranks and various assignments, and made major by the time he was 36 and assistant chief at 42.
[Homicides in region drop; Baltimore’s rise]
He later joined the Anne Arundel County police department as chief before moving to Baltimore.
Davis assumed the lead of that city’s force in the aftermath of the 2015 death of Freddie Gray from an injury in police custody, and the riots that followed. He was named chief in July of that year after the ouster of Anthony W. Batts, following criticism of the way police had handled the unrest and a sharp spike in crime, most notably homicides.
But homicides continued apace over subsequent years, finishing 2017 with 343, setting a record in per capita murders and making the city one of the deadliest in the country. The District, with a slightly larger population, had 116. Baltimore, with 620,000 residents, had more homicides than New York City, with 8.4 million people.
The killings in Baltimore included several high school students, victims of random robberies and the bludgeoning death of a 97-year-old man in his home. Two high-profile slayings that remain unsolved are those of a homicide detective as he worked a case and an off-duty D.C. police sergeant fatally shot in his car.
[Baltimore Police Commissioner Kevin Davis works to restore neighborhood ties]
Davis also was shepherding his department through the Justice Department consent decree entered to help usher in reforms. The decree stemmed from the federal government’s conclusion that discriminatory policing had targeted black residents.
Davis was in many ways constrained by trying to change a culture of policing criticized by the Justice Department and yet still be tough enough on criminals to deliver safe streets. DeSousa couched his tough warning for gunmen by promising “real active constitutional policing.”
Police union leaders have complained that officers, angry over the prosecutions of six colleagues in the death of Gray, all of which failed to get convictions, had stopped aggressive policing. Pugh was also under intense pressure to lower the crime rate after a year of sobering headlines. The city’s national reputation for dysfunction continued in recent weeks after a woman was discharged from a hospital into the cold dressed in hospital clothes and images of shivering students adorned a local newspaper cover when schools lost heat in the latest cold snap.
[Veteran, 97, killed in home burglary in Baltimore]
Members of Baltimore’s City Council and police union leaders criticized Pugh for failing to put forward a clear and comprehensive crime plan for the city. When Pugh appeared on a local radio station, a host demanded she explain why residents should not move to the suburbs “as fast as possible.” The 98 Rock host told her, “This city is slipping away.”
[A wartime mayor struggles to curtail violence in Baltimore]
Pugh wrote a column that appeared last week in The Washington Post in which she described the end of 2017 as one of a “sense of loss, regret and deep frustration.” She wrote of a young college student killed after he innocently came by a robbery in progress.
“These sad realities are legitimately part of our narrative,” Pugh wrote. “But we are working hard to write a new narrative, one that reflects our progress and determination to end violence by ending the conditions that are its undeniable cause. Admittedly, this isn’t happening as fast as our citizens rightly demand.”
In her statement Friday, Pugh said she believes DeSousa “has the ideas, approach and demonstrated track record that will enable him to lead an accelerated effort to get criminals off our streets, reduce violence and restore safety — and peace of mind — throughout our neighborhoods.”
Pugh had kind words for Davis, who became a fixture in the city and in its troubled neighborhoods, making interacting with residents and community policing a central part of his style and plan. “I am grateful to Commissioner Davis for all that he has done to implement the initiatives underway to address violent crime at it root causes,” Pugh said. “I speak for the entire community in expressing our admiration and gratitude for his service to Baltimore and for his leadership of the women and men who put their lives on the line to serve and protect our citizens.”
DeSousa, in the same statement, said Baltimore has been his home for many years. “I’ve spent my career on its streets and in its neighborhoods to address problems and bring about solutions that are meaningful for the people we serve,” he said.
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