Take the subway to Upton, a station on Pennsylvania Avenue in West Baltimore, and when you emerge onto the street, you may think you have arrived in a scene of The Wire, an old hit HBO show. Young men hang around, a few hawking drugs. Speak to Malik, a 40-year-old man selling knock-off Ray-Bans from a bin bag, however, and you will quickly be disabused of the idea that nothing has changed. “Where you are standing, try about ten years ago, you couldn’t hear yourself think,” he says. “It was all guys shouting ‘red top’, ‘red top’, ‘yellow top’, ‘yellow top’.” Now, he says, “it is all cleared out. I don’t know what’s going on. It’s gentrifying I think. Shit looks nicer, know what I mean?”
Baltimore was associated with violence even before The Wire made it famous for it. But something seems to be changing. So far this year there have been just 45 homicides in the city, down by a third from the same period last year. Last year was already Baltimore’s best in over a decade, with 199 homicides. In 2021 the city recorded 344. At the Johns Hopkins Hospital, Katherine Hoops, a paediatric doctor and researcher, says that it hasn’t admitted a child injured by a gun for months. A few years ago it treated at least one a month.
.png.webp)
