Police Commissioner Batts: “These Guys Were Just Assassins”

(UPDATED 11:41 a.m.)—Baltimore Police Commissioner Anthony W. Batts blamed gangs' methods of killing for the spike in the Northern District’s homicides last year.  

Batts said "micro rivalries" between the Black Guerilla Family and Blood subset Tree Top Pirus were to blame for many of the murders in the Greenmount Avenue corridor last year.  

"These guys were just assassins. These weren’t just regular shootings," Batts told members of the York Road Partnership during the group's meeting Wednesday.   

He recalled a conversation with a University of Maryland R. Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center doctor, who told him that 97 percent of people who make it to that hospital alive leave alive.

"Well [the gang members] weren’t allowing these guys to get to shock trauma," Batts said. "What they were doing is walking up on each other down the alleys, and coming up close range, and shooting them in the head four or five times—I mean just viciousness. So they were executing each other. They were assassinating each other on both sides." 

He attributed the increase in homicides citywide in 2012 from the year before—despite the number of overall shootings being "drastically" down—to the fighting between these gangs.   

According to Comstat figures, the numbers city police use to track crime, city homicides increased from 197 in 2011 to 217 last year citywide. In the Northern District, the number of homicides surged from 15 in 2011 to 24 last year.

Shootings citywide dropped from 379 in 2011 to 372 from the year before. Where as shootings jumped to 35 from 30 between 2011 and 2012 in the Northern District.    

Batts said because it's taking police too long to put together the connections between murders, he wants to build better intelligence sharing in the department.

"I wanted us to know [where] these micro rivalries were taking place," Batts said. "And I don’t expect us to be able to stop shooting number one, because we can’t have a police officer on every block at every location in the city. But I definitely wanted us to stop shootings two through 11. So we couldn’t afford to have a shooting in July and catch it in October or November."

He added that the Northern District had been driving him "nuts" last year, and that he had called Maj. Sabrina Tapp-Harper, the district’s commander, into his office several times about the violence and the response. He said that they’ve made several changes, and that they’re starting to see positive results.

"We sat down and we started putting a lot of different things in place and it’s working very well in the Northern," Batts said. "Greenmount was on fire, it was just on fire. That’s where all these assassinations were taking place."

According to Comstat figures updated through March 30, homicides citywide are up 48 from 41 during the same time period last year. While the number of shootings citywide are down to 62 compared to 78 during the same time last year.

In the Northern District, there were four homicides compared to two at the same time last year. But shootings are down from eight at the same point in 2012 to three this year.

Batts argued that increase in homicides in the district can be blamed primarily on domestic disputes, such as a murder-suicide in Waverly and a shooting death last month in Remington. 

Batts remarks were part of a larger address to residents about a wide variety of topics, such as making the department more efficient, the media’s obsession with homicide numbers and trying to get residents from "succeeding" neighborhoods to help residents build commmunities in the Western District. 

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