For the first time in years, Baltimore has gone more than 10 days without recording a single homicide.
The first 11 days of January 2018 brought 12 killings in Baltimore City, per The Sun’s homicide tracker. This was shockingly unsurprising, given last year’s homicide tally that achieved a per-capita record for murders in a year in Baltimore. The month ended with 26 people dead
But February has been a different story. No one has been fatally shot since Feb. 1, when 27-year-old Jerrell Brice was gunned down around 1 p.m. outside the Douglass Homes complex in Dunbar-Broadway. (He succumbed to his injuries two days later.)
Non-fatal shootings have still been occurring—one apiece on Feb. 2, 4 and 7, and three on Feb. 10, according to police releases.
The spell of zero killings began just as anti-violence activists held their third Baltimore Ceasefire weekend. The ceasefire campaign, led by community mediator Erricka Bridgeford, began last August with the motto, “Nobody kill anybody,” and a holistic approach of organizing neighborhoods, nonprofits, city agencies and others to hold events all weekend long and encourage anyone engaged in street violence to put their guns down.
Each weekend has proved more effective than the last, with the most recent one ending in zero killings and just one non-fatal shooting
“To know that the whole weekend went with nobody’s family getting that phone call, nobody’s loved ones planning funerals, it’s a really awesome feeling,” Bridgeford told Baltimore Fishbowl on Feb. 5.
In a post this morning on the Baltimore Ceasefire Facebook page, organizers wrote that they don’t take credit for the spell of relative peace. That belongs to the “people of Baltimore,” the post said.
“There are no leaders in the Baltimore Ceasefire movement,” it added. “There are 6 co-organizers who work with the 600k+ residents of Baltimore who want to work with us to make our city a better place.”
According to The Sun’s Justin Fenton, Baltimore’s longest known zero-killing streak was a 17-day stretch in March 2014, and the longest period with no murders since the 2015 Uprising, which sent homicide rates soaring, was eight days from Feb. 28 to March 8, 2017.
