The City’s Mayor Battles Crime, Wins Praise as a Savvy Leader

Last spring, disaster seemed near for Martin O’Malley, the first-term white mayor of this aging and predominantly black industrial city.

The black police commissioner had quit. And O’Malley’s chosen replacement was not only white but a principal architect of the aggressive “zero-tolerance” tactics that made New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani’s name synonymous with racial tension.

“I think it would behoove every black mother to put a tight leash on all of our African American young men with a hope of saving their lives,” thundered the Rev. Douglas I. Miles, expressing the rage that surged through Baltimore’s black community.

“Now we will run from the New York boys in the drug world and from the New York boys in the Police Department,” he said.

Four months later, O’Malley, a 37-year-old former prosecutor who still leads his own Irish band, has done more than survive. He has solidified his support in Baltimore’s black community without giving an inch on his law-and-order approach to life on the streets.

Though daunting problems remain, that achievement is enough to catapult O’Malley into the front ranks of a new breed: savvy big city mayors who win black voters’ support while attacking crime and drugs without the violent incidents and allegations of police brutality that have divided New York and some other cities.

New York’s Giuliani represented the first wave: a single-minded leader who sent his police force out to impose peace and quiet on troubled streets and succeeded--but at serious social and political cost. O’Malley, like the mayors of Pittsburgh, Cleveland and New Orleans, seeks similar gains in safety and quality of life for the inner city without the toxic side effects.

If he succeeds, bigger things may lie ahead politically. Pittsburgh Mayor Tom Murphy, whose own police crackdown has cut his city’s homicide rate in half since 1993, said that--of the nation’s young political leaders--”O’Malley’s the one guy I know who could be president of the United States. He’s charismatic, has great ability to communicate with a real cross-section of people and can put together the right people with the right talents to succeed in office.”

David Petts, a pollster for Maryland Gov. Parris Glendening, agrees. “The sky’s the limit,” he says.

Since taking office last December, O’Malley has kept a promise to close down the city’s top 10 open-air drug markets and he is now working on shutting down 20 more.

O’Malley is also pressing--so far in vain--to cut Baltimore’s spiraling murder and drug addiction rates. The city has an estimated 60,000 drug addicts, almost one-tenth of its population. It has averaged about 300 murders each of the last eight years, 80% drug-related.

While attacking crime and drugs, O’Malley has reassured once-suspicious black leaders. Even Miles, who worked against O’Malley’s election last year, says: “He’s tried to live up to his campaign promises and has sparked enthusiasm and hope throughout the city. It’s obvious he’s popular in the African American community.”

Indeed, African American women, old and young, hug the tall, handsome mayor at public functions and line up with children to get his autograph.

Early on, O’Malley, who won election with 53% of the vote and carried every district in the city, created a sense of optimism in a city weary of continuing decline under Kurt Schmoke, its mayor of 12 years. A once-popular black leader, Schmoke had grown increasingly remote and did not run for reelection.

Some black leaders openly supported O’Malley over his two major black opponents. Kweisi Mfume, the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People president who declined to run himself, defended O’Malley from charges of racism. “People voted, not for the best black candidate or the best white candidate, but for the best candidate,” Mfume said after the election.

Poverty Levels High

The mayor will need all the support he can get as he grapples with the problems of a city still spiraling downward. Poverty levels are extremely high. Middle-class residents are fleeing at the rate of 1,000 or more a month. In some neighborhoods, three-quarters of the houses are abandoned. And budget director Edward Gallagher describes the tax base as “exhausted.”

O’Malley has some difficulties but did not face a real crisis until his first police commissioner, Ronald L. Daniel, resigned rather than implement a reform program that included a “zero-tolerance” enforcement strategy.

One feature of “zero tolerance” is arresting suspects for minor crimes as a way of catching repeat offenders and discouraging more serious crimes. Critics see it as a heavy-handed tool that unfairly targets blacks and leads to police brutality.

Similar programs have been credited with helping reduce violent crimes not only in New York but in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, New Orleans, Charleston, S.C., and other cities. But when O’Malley insisted on implementing it expeditiously in Baltimore, Daniel resigned.

When the mayor turned to Norris, the deputy commissioner, many blacks reacted angrily, saying that Daniel had been set up to fail so a white official could step in. Critics urged the City Council, comprised of 13 blacks and six whites, to block Norris.

The mayor made what turned out to be a critical decision. Accompanied by his new commissioner, he would face black voters directly in one of the city’s most violent areas--former Police Commissioner Daniel’s own West Baltimore district.

O’Malley and Norris were among the few white faces at the Edmondson High School auditorium for an open forum that night last April.

Before entering the hall, O’Malley told Norris: “You and I didn’t create 400 years of history, but we’ve got to go in there and listen and respond responsibly to their questions and complaints.”

Among the first to speak were critics accusing the police of racism, assailing Norris and demanding “zero tolerance of police brutality.” But others began asking questions and making less hostile statements. O’Malley and Norris promised to crack down on violent criminals without unfairly targeting blacks or permitting brutality.

Gradually, the mayor started to win applause. The meeting had begun at 6 p.m. When 9 p.m. arrived--the hour it was supposed to end--long lines of people were still waiting to speak.

O’Malley stayed. Not until 1 a.m. did the session end.

Carried on local cable television, the forum was a turning point. Soon after, the City Council voted unanimously to confirm Norris and the controversy faded.

“The message from citizens was clearly stated to back Norris,” says Councilman Melvin Stukes, a black who worked with O’Malley during the mayor’s eight years on the council.

O’Malley grew up in a family steeped in Democratic politics. His grandfather, a Pittsburgh ward boss, worked the polls for Franklin D. Roosevelt. O’Malley’s mother was putting out a party newsletter when she met his father. Her own father was the Democratic Party chairman in Fort Wayne, Ind.

Friends and relatives say that O’Malley always has been supremely self-confident. At the age of 20, he became field director of the presidential campaign of Sen. Gary Hart (D-Colo.). The mayor’s father recalls Hart once telling him that his own son thought “that Martin walked on water.”

“And I said, ‘So does Martin,’ ” the senior O’Malley says he replied.

Today, the mayor and his wife and their three children--two daughters, ages 7 and 9, and a son, who is 2--live in a modest three-bedroom house.

Passionate, Impatient

For all his popularity, some question whether O’Malley’s temperament eventually will alienate some of those who must carry out his policies--and whether his own commitment will falter under the strain of Baltimore’s problems.

Even O’Malley’s wife says that the mayor’s impatience sometimes rubs other officials the wrong way. Recently, a group of local judges told state legislators that the local court system, which O’Malley calls “dysfunctional,” had improved. The mayor declared that their comments made him want to “throw up.”

Her husband, Katie O’Malley says, is “passionate about his job--maybe too passionate, too impatient.”

But she says that as a prosecutor herself, she knows reform is necessary “to stop all the dying and bleeding. . . . It’s sad to grow up in Baltimore and remember all the great things about it and then see what I see today,” she says.

The murder rate, for instance, has not dropped. Indeed, the city was rocked recently by seven murders in one three-day weekend.

At a recent Cabinet meeting, the mayor sat listening intently as Commissioner Norris rattled off the gory details of “a drug shooting war going on out there” and warned that a drug kingpin, who counted one of his lieutenants among the victims, had vowed that “it ain’t over yet.”

O’Malley refused to be daunted. “There are three things I don’t want to hear,” he said. “ ‘Tried that and it didn’t work.’ ‘We’ve already done that.’ And ‘We can’t afford that.’ All of that is a code for ‘Nothing can be done.’ ”