Both the War Room and Safe Neighborhoods shared an interest in targeting individual criminals known to be violent. Criminologists who have studied Baltimore have concluded that just a few thousand hardcore criminals cause much of the city’s mayhem, and Jessamy says she has targeted them—and locked up “thousands” of them. Yet violent crime continues to strike with stunning regularity.
This fact, along with her insistence that she doesn’t know why Bealefeld came out against her during the campaign, shows that Jessamy is out of touch with reality, Bernstein says. But Bernstein’s reality may be different from Baltimore’s.
In a city where large swaths of the population see the police as the enemy, Jessamy’s attack-the-police-and-treat-the-offenders philosophy resonates. “My opponent wants to leave out the community,” Jessamy told the Canton crowd.
Bernstein’s “pro-prosecution,” pro-police message likely resonates most with voters in Canton, Federal Hill, Pigtown, and other neighborhoods where house prices (and mortgages) have increased even while street crime—prostitution, petty drug dealing, assaults, and vandalism—have continued apace. They mostly trust the police. They don’t understand why their city has to be lawless.

See the full article from “Baltimore City Paper”