Murder in Baltimore Versus Murder in Mexico
I compare gang homicides on the north and south sides of the border
I arrived in Baltimore, Maryland, on a red-eye flight in 2018 and my local producer, a bouncer and former drug dealer nicknamed Jelly Roll, said we were going straight to meet Mr Barksdale. I thought he was pulling my leg; Barksdale, I recalled, was the name of the drug-dealing family in the iconic TV series The Wire.
Jelly Roll revealed, however, that The Wire used the names of real criminals. The kingpin in the series, Avon Barksdale, was partly based on true-life Nathan “Bodie” Barksdale, who sold heroin from the 1980s and died in prison in 2016.
Jelly Roll took me to meet Bodie’s nephew Dante Barksdale, who was portrayed in the series as D’Angelo, a character who is murdered in jail in Season 2. “They killed me off,” Dante told me and shook his head. Dante really did do prison time for drugs but survived and said he’d turned himself around, becoming an anti-violence activist and writing his life story.
Dante’s book, Growing Up Barksdale was released in 2019. But then in 2021, a shooter fired a bullet into Dante’s head and he was pronounced dead in hospital. While he may have left the gangster world, the gangster world had not left him.
Dante was not the only person I talked to on that trip to Baltimore who was subsequently shot dead. I interviewed Tyree “Colion” Moorehead (pictured top), a former teenage triggerman who also claimed to have turned into an anti-violence activist. In 2022, Colion was assaulting a woman with a knife drawn in what the family said was a mental health episode and a police officer shot him multiple times. (You can hear my full interview with Colion and more on that case here).
The fact I interviewed two men on a reporting trip who were shot dead within five years is indicative of the violence in Baltimore. The last decade has been an especially bloody period in the port city that lies just forty miles from Washington DC. From 2015 to 2022 it suffered annual murder rates of over 50 per 100,000 residents, hitting over 58 in both 2019 and 2021. Last year, murders went down but were still high at about 46 per 100,000.
Tragically, this level of bloodshed is comparable to the murder hotspots here in Mexico and across Latin America. Last year according to this count, Baltimore had a higher murder rate than Cali, Colombia (45.8 per 100,000), Chihuahua, Mexico (41) and San Pedro Sula, Honduras (32) and over four times the murder rate of Mexico City (10 per 100,000). However, Baltimore was still substantially lower than Guayaquil, Ecuador (89), than Tijuana (92), and Colima City, Mexico (140).
Furthermore, Baltimore was not the top U.S. city on this list, with Memphis, Tennesee reporting over 60 murders per 100,000 in 2023. New Orleans, Detroit, and St Louis have suffered comparable fatality rates in recent years.
Overall, violence in the United States peaked in the eighties and big cities such as New York and Los Angeles have become much safer since. But it still blows my mind that despite having the world’s biggest economy and bank-rolling the far biggest military, the USA has a splattering of cities with such sky-high murder rates.
CrashOut has focused squarely on the bloodbath in Mexico and how we can understand it. But I think it’s important in making sense of this to compare it to the United States and look at what is similar and different.
A common feature is the collateral damage. In December in Baltimore, shooters fired at an apartment building and killed a two year old with a stray bullet. Those living in the hardest-hit neighborhoods almost all have friends or extended family members who have died from the gun. My producer Jelly Roll himself survived a bullet close to his heart and has lost countless friends.
“It’s just a revolving door. Friends are killing friends,” he says. “It’s not the way it should be.”
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