The papers tell us every day that Baltimore City is dangerous.  Statistics tell us that although crime and the murder rate are both down, they’re also still too high for comfort.  Our own personal experience tells us that there are parts of the city to avoid after dark.  Yet our politicians tell us differently.  Why?

In 1974, Mayor William Donald Schaefer complained that it was the media’s fault that this “psychology of fear” ran the city.  But is it really the media?  I remember being afraid to walk down certain streets in the city long before I started reading the news, as I’m sure many city residents have for many years.

It’s hard not to find support for the belief that Baltimore City has a problem with crime if you spend any time there.  Yet Baltimore’s political leaders have long refused to give much credence to the idea.  How is it that they can turn a blind eye to such a problem?

Part of it must be that they rely too much on statistics and too little on what they see.  How often do they spend the night in the depths of the city and listen to the squad cars wail by their window?  How often do they walk home late at night and have to pay special attention to avoid dark alleys?  By the same token, how often do the average residents of Baltimore do in-depth studies about the crime trends in the city over time?  We are coming at this problem from two different perspectives.

That might explain some difference in the pictures we see but it does little to explain the frustration politicians seem to feel with our belief that the city is dangerous.  In my own opinion -- and that’s all this is -- it’s frustration not at our fear but at the feeling that they have failed us.  To admit that the city is as bad as it really is (or even as bad as it seems), our politicians must face the fact that what they’re doing isn’t really working.

The poster-child city of decay has to be Detroit.  Once a promising city, now many people won’t touch it with the proverbial thirty-nine-and-a-half foot pole.  The reasons for its decline are numerous, much like Baltimore -- not to suggest that we’re in as unfortunate as situation as Detroit.  But we’re certainly on our way, with economic policies that chase away businesses and reckless spending that will no-doubt lead to higher taxes in the coming years.  Poverty breeds desperation, desperation breeds crime, and the cycle repeats.

I wonder if the Mayor of Detroit expressed frustration when people started worrying about the rising crime rate in the sixties.  I wonder if, instead of viewing the riots as a warning sign of things to come, he complained about the media blowing it out of proportion.  I wonder how many times he had the opportunity to learn from his mistakes and start taking action.

The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem.  If we want to see Baltimore start to climb out of the hole it’s digging then we need our politicians to wake up and stop acting like the things they’re doing are helping; that things are improving.  If people believe the city is dangerous then they won’t move there, just as if people believe the stock market is risky they won’t invest.  Confidence drives our lives just as it drives our economy, making fear a powerful enemy of progress.

We can either continue to get frustrated about it and keep repeating that things “aren’t that bad,” or we can do something about it.