For more than three decades, Baltimore has had some of the nation’s highest rates of violence, poverty, and drug use. In too many of the city’s neighborhoods, only a few individuals can remember a time when a leading cause of death for youth was not homicide, a time when families and community residents ensured that children were safe and supported in their journey to adulthood. The duration of the problem has become part of the problem: For many, there is no memory of a time when life held greater value.

I moved to Baltimore from New Haven, Connecticut, in 1991. Trained as a sociologist, I had spent more than a decade at Yale University conducting large-scale epidemiologic studies of the distribution of and risk factors for mental illnesses. Shortly after moving to Baltimore, I secured funding from the Maryland Mental Hygiene Administration that provided a full-time mental health clinician in all of the public schools in East Baltimore and also created support teams of community health workers and parent liaisons. Two days after the opening of the East Baltimore Mental Health Partnership office on Monument Street, something happened that changed both my research career and my focus. I received a call from our project director, who told me that the staff had been forced to hit the ground as bullets came through the wall when a young man had attempted to rob the pharmacy next door. 

As we enrolled more families, I began to get reports of our youth being shot, family members being shot. This was at a time when the city—particularly East Baltimore—was experiencing the historic height of the murder rate. The toll of this violence made me concerned that our success in helping the youth stay with their families was only increasing the likelihood that they would later become victims.

In Baltimore, there are neighborhoods that have had murders each year for more than three decades. It's common to hear that the city cannot police itself out of this problem, but few discussions go beyond law enforcement, and few strategies involve working with the people who live in communities most afflicted by violent crime—some of whom are already engaged with disrupting the cycle of violence, usually via networks unknown to those who have the resources needed for change. These are the types of activities where experience and credibility are more critical than formal education. 

In the following pages, you will discover several perspectives on the circumstances that perpetuate violence—and, more important, accounts of the efforts being made to break the cycle of violence. An increasing number of individuals and organizations recognize that peace must be actively waged, not just be expected to happen. Hopefully, this issue of Urbanite will stimulate discussions about how to better identify opportunities and solutions, and how to better support efforts most likely to achieve success. We need to move the discussion beyond what someone should do to what we as individuals can do to contribute to the creation of a safe, supportive, and economically viable Baltimore.

—Philip J. Leaf, Ph.D. is a professor in the Department of Mental Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, with joint appointments in the departments of Health Policy and Management, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, and the School of Education. Currently he is the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for the Prevention of Youth Violence and the senior associate director of the Johns Hopkins Urban Health Institute. He is proud to be a resident of Baltimore.

Research assistance provided by Charles A. Hohman and Siobhan Paganelli