Baltimore, other cities see violent holiday weekend

Violence surged in major U.S. cities over Memorial Day weekend, bringing new highs for homicides in Chicago and Baltimore after years of declining crime.

Nine murders and nearly 30 shootings over the weekend brought Baltimore's monthly homicide toll to its highest point in more than 15 years, taxing a city and police department already pushed to its limits after rioting last month.

Baltimore logged a record 35 homicides as of Tuesday, the most in a single month since 1999. This year, the city has had 108 homicides.

"I've never seen anything like it," City Councilman William "Pete" Welch told The (Baltimore) Sun. "The shootings and killings are all over the city."

The Memorial Day weekend was also a bloody one in Chicago, where at least 12 people were killed and 44 were wounded in gun violence from Friday night to Tuesday morning. The rash of violence continues a trend of killings and shootings that began this year after the city recorded the fewest homicides in decades last year.

The weekend's wounded include Jacele Johnson, 4, shot in the head Friday evening as she sat in a car on the South Side with a 17-year-old cousin, who was shot in the chest. On the city's West Side, a 17-year-old boy was shot in the back and the leg.

About two hours earlier, a 19-year-old man was gunned down two blocks from Chicago Police Headquarters, the Chicago Sun-Times reported.

Even before this weekend's incidents, murders were up 17% and non-fatal shootings had jumped 24% from the same time last year, according to Chicago Police Department statistics. The city has recorded 133 homicides this year as of May 17 compared with 114 at the same time last year. There have been 693 shootings this year compared with 560 at the same time last year.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who won re-election in April, touted the strides Chicago has made under his watch in reducing the number of homicides. The nation's third-largest city had 407 murders last year, the city's fewest in five decades.

After seeing crime drop sharply in the first half of 2014, St. Louis saw a steep rise in violence in several neighborhoods as protests grew, following the shooting death of Michael Brown in nearby Ferguson by police officer Darren Wilson. By year's end, St. Louis logged 157 homicides, the city's highest yearly toll since 2008.

The problem has persisted this year as well: Homicides went up 6% for the first quarter of 2015 compared with the same period last year.

Police Chief Sam Dotson said he noted a decrease in police-initiated interactions with residents in the midst of the worst protests in the St. Louis area in the weeks after Brown's killing in August. Police also were less active in November after the St. Louis County prosecutor announced Wilson wouldn't face criminal charges.

In Baltimore, Police Commissioner Anthony Batts wrote a letter to community leaders Monday, acknowledging the disintegrating relationship between police and the community. He said the police would move "aggressively" to address the violence.

Baltimore, he wrote, is "in the midst of a challenging time. Following a period of civil unrest, we have been experiencing an increase of the pace of violent crime, most notably homicides and shootings."

Batts told the Sun last week that police have struggled to stop burgeoning violence since the death of Freddie Gray, 25, on April 19 set off days of protests in West Baltimore and prompted Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake to put the city under a five-day curfew. Gray died a week after police arrested him from injuries he received while in police custody. Last week, a grand jury indicted six police officers in Gray's death.

An investigation by WBAL-TV found a 32% drop in arrests since the curfew. Police arrested 355 people after the curfew, compared with 522 arrests from March 2-8. The station's inquiry also found that homicide rates are up nearly 40% compared with last year.

In the 1990s, Baltimore routinely saw more than 300 homicides a year. The death toll dropped to 253 in 2002, under then-Mayor Martin O'Malley, who instituted a "zero tolerance" approach to crime.

Homicides rose in 2007 to 282 under then-Mayor Sheila Dixon. In 2011, under Rawlings-Blake, the city reached a low of 197 homicides.

Rawlings-Blake met Sunday with Batts and his staff about adjustments the police department is making to respond to the violence, the mayor's spokesman, Howard Libit, said.

Rawlings-Blake is "disheartened and frustrated by this continuing violence, particularly when you think about the progress that the city has made," Libit told USA TODAY in a statement.

"It's a very violent time — there are a lot of people being hurt," said Baltimore orthopedic surgeon Andrew Pollak.

Pollak, chief of orthopedics for the University of Maryland Medical System, said the homicide rate in Baltimore "is not a new public health problem — this is an ongoing public health problem." What's new, he said, is the volume of killings.

Though homicide totals have hovered between 200 and 300 for decades, he said, the aftermath of Gray's death has changed the dynamic between police and the public. "As a result, the gangs, who really are the heart and soul of this problem, have got the police and the populace fighting each other, rather than fighting the gangs."