BALTIMORE — Three people have died, and one was injured, in the past month after being shot by police officers in Baltimore City or County. The shootings come as temperatures warm up and officers spend more time interacting with the public, responding to thousands more calls for service as people move outside.
Authorities in Baltimore received at least 9,000 more emergency calls in the past 30 days compared to the month prior, according to city 911 data. Baltimore County Police typically get hundreds more cases each May and remain at a heightened level throughout the summer months before rates, and temperatures, cool down in the fall, according to county crime statistics.
Criminologists and police have long noted that warmer weather often leads to more violent crime. The common theories have been that people tend to spend more time outside in the warmer months, young people are out of school, and summer heat can make tempers rise.
But “seasonal cadences” like that have barely been studied for police uses of force, said University of Miami criminologist Alex Piquero. The main reason — there’s a lack of uniform data.
“It wouldn’t surprise me if we saw that same increase in the summertime” for police uses of force, Picquero said. But “if you don’t collect the data, you certainly don’t know.”
The Maryland Attorney General’s Office’s Independent Investigations Division, which probes all fatal or near-fatal police shootings in Maryland, took on six cases last April and May. So far, that unit has opened four investigations since the start of this April.
In three of them, as well as during a nonfatal shooting last week in Essex, investigators or family members have suggested that the person shot by police was experiencing a mental health crisis. And in all of them, police recovered a weapon — something that Baltimore County Police Chief Robert McCullough said after Sunday night’s police shooting in Dundalk was happening more often.
“More and more in these incidents, people are armed … with a handgun or armed with a knife,” he said, pointing to “the danger in terms of the number of handguns that are on the street.”
Asked if police were encountering more armed people than usual, Baltimore County Police representatives said Monday that McCullough was only referring to the recent spate of “police-involved shootings with armed individuals this year.”
Picquero said that statistics on police killings are only the “tip of the iceberg” for uses of force — officers are trained to fire their service weapons as a last resort, he said.
It was unclear what led to Sunday night’s fatal police shooting in Dundalk, though county police said officers “responded to the actions of the armed subject, resulting in one officer discharging their firearm” at the man involved, who was not identified. Police said he was “experiencing a mental health episode.”
They said police responded similarly last week when a knife-wielding man in Essex “refused to comply” with orders to drop the weapon. He was hospitalized with injuries but has survived. Police suggested he was in crisis, too.
Police in the city said that Jai Marc Howell, 26, ran from officers on the 4600 block of York Road in Kernewood and brandished a firearm, firing at authorities and striking a police cruiser. Police returned fire, he died at the scene.
Investigators, who don’t have body camera footage to work off of, have not said what exactly led to Baltimore County officers firing at Arvel Jones, Sr., a 51-year-old father who authorities said had been shooting bows and arrows at cars late last month. His family told other media that he struggled with mental health.
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