Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott (D) blamed the media for perpetuating violence during the “Summer of Peace” event on Monday and lauded “personal responsibility” as one of the keys to lowering violent crime.
During the event, a member of the media asked: “Do you think your administration can have a summer of peace given what we’ve seen this year?” an ABC News affiliate reported.
Scott “fired back,” defensively answering the question and accusing the community at large of “spreading this hate.”
“I think that’s a ridiculous question. I think that your station, in particular, has to understand this is not hashtag. We are going to work every day to make sure that does not happen wherever we can prevent it,” he said. “We ultimately have to understand personal responsibility. Where’s the personal responsibility? When are we also going to call on people to check on what’s going on with their young people, to make sure they know what their young people are into?”
He continued:
When are we going to have a conversation how everybody, including your station, can play apart in reducing violence, instead of spreading this hate, spreading this violence, spreading the hashtags, spreading this nonsense.
The “Summer of Peace” was organized as a way to speak up against crime and violence in the city.
We know what the mission is. The mission is to save lives in Baltimore, and particularly to save the lives of our young people.
The Baltimore Police were investigating 137 murders as of Monday, less than halfway into 2022, according to the station, which cited a Forbes report showing that Baltimore was the fifth most dangerous city in the country. Baltimore had 337 murders in 2021, which was the seventh consecutive year the city had more than 300 homicides. Analysts have predicted that 2022 could prove to be the deadliest in Baltimore’s history.
“After studying a decade of crime patterns, Sean Kennedy, with the Maryland Public Policy Institute, says the city is on-track to see more than 375 homicides this year,” a Fox Baltimore report said in April. “That would be the most homicides that Baltimore has seen since 1993 when the death toll hit 353.”
Democrats, including Mayor Scott, have run the city since the 1960s. Scott notably led efforts to defund the Baltimore Police by $22 million when he was a city councilman. As mayor, he backtracked by proposing a $27 million increase the following year. This April, Scott announced the city would be hiring civilians as investigators for its detective force as it faces staffing shortages and rising violent crime.
Police Commissioner Michael Harrison said the hiring of civilian investigators is “directly tied” to the department’s struggle to hire and retain officers and noted that the agency had a shortage of 350 positions, CNN reported. The far-left news outlet blamed the pandemic, the “great resignation,” low pay, “the climate for law enforcement” stemming from the demonization of police after the death of George Floyd, and “local reform efforts” for complicating recruitment and retention.
Baltimore also has a Soros-backed Democrat State Attorney, Marilyn Mosby, who during the pandemic and afterward, ordered the city to stop prosecuting certain low-level crimes, including prostitution, drug possession, and minor traffic offenses. Mosby has defended her policies, at one point saying, “we cannot arrest our way out of the problems or prosecute our way out of gun violence.”
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