BALTIMORE—Baltimore ended the year with the city's highest homicide toll in eight years, despite a new police commissioner's modest success in slowing the spike in murders.
The city recorded 282 homicides in 2007, a slight increase over the previous year and the highest total since 1999, when 305 people were slain.
Things in Baltimore looked much worse on July 19, the day Police Commissioner Leonard D. Hamm resigned. At that point, Baltimore had recorded 178 homicides, putting it on pace for a total of 325, which would have been the most since 1996.
But under Hamm's successor, Frederick H. Bealefeld III, 104 people were slain over the final 165 days of the year. If sustained for an entire year, that pace would give the city 230 homicides.
Baltimore's per capita murder toll trailed New Orleans' and Detroit's in 2006, and New Orleans got even bloodier in 2007, with 209 murders in a city of 295,450.
New York's and Chicago's 2007 homicide totals were the lowest in more than 40 years, and in Philadelphia, slayings dipped slightly after reaching a nine-year high in 2006. But murders increased in several other big cities, including Atlanta, Miami and Dallas.
Criminologists blame a decrease in funding for neighborhood policing because of the war on terrorism; a demographic bubble of teenagers and young adults; and the scaling back since the late 1990s of after-school and anti-gang programs, such as midnight basketball, summer jobs programs, counseling, and high school equivalency diploma courses.
While Baltimore experienced a slowdown in violent crime after a particularly bloody first half of the year, the final homicide count was similar to that of the previous five years. Over that period, homicides haven't dipped lower than 269 or risen higher than 282.
Twenty-seven of the city's homicide victims were under the age of 18, according to police.
The year's final victim was Todd Dargan, 25, who was shot several times as he stood outside a supermarket on the afternoon of Dec. 28 in a violent section of east Baltimore. Police have no suspects in his slaying.
Fueled by a booming illegal drug trade, increasing gang activity and easy access to guns, citywide homicides topped 300 every year in the 1990s, and 2002's total of 253 stands as the city's lowest since 1988.
With a population of 631,366, according to U.S. Census Bureau statistics, Baltimore remains among the nation's worst cities for murders per capita, with about 44 slayings per 100,000 residents.
Mayor Sheila Dixon interviewed eight other candidates to be police commissioner, including former District of Columbia Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey.
The mayor said she made Bealefeld acting commissioner in part because he had served 26 years with the department. He was permanently appointed Oct. 4.
Bealefeld and Dixon have focused on repeat violent offenders, frequently sending them to the federal court system, where they face mandatory minimum sentences. They've also revived a police unit that traces illegal guns.
Daniel Webster, co-director of the Center for Gun Policy and Research at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said the new strategies made sense.
"I expect them to bear more fruit as time goes on," Webster wrote in an e-mail, adding that the mayor and police commissioner "have become more focused (appropriately) on getting illegal guns off the street and violent gun offenders off the street."
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