BALTIMORE — A violent weekend in Baltimore has city residents questioning the constant crime scenes in their neighborhoods—and the mayor is reacting to their concerns.
Over roughly a 24-hour span, the city saw a deadly mass shooting in Southwest Baltimore, a brutal beating that killed a 59-year-old man in Southeast Baltimore, an early morning shooting that killed a 19-year-old man in East Baltimore, and a shooting that killed an 18-year-old man near a West Baltimore mall.
“It makes me feel ashamed because it’s been the norm for all of my lifetime, right?” Scott told WJZ’s Annie Rose Ramos following a naming ceremony on Saturday. “I want us to remember how long we have always been struggling with violence in this city and then pause ourselves to think deeper.”
Southwest Baltimore resident Crystal Parker expressed concern about the tempo in violence following the mass shooting on Friday.
The shooting killed a man who was targeted and also another man. Two other innocent bystanders, one who had been waiting for a city bus, sustained injuries as bullets began flying across West North Avenue on Friday morning.
“People have accepted it as part of normalcy and it’s not normal,” she said. “This is war.”
Not all of the violence is tied to illegal activity and territorial skirmishes, Scott said.
“This isn’t all connected to drugs and gangs and things that people may think,” Scott said. “[It’s] basic disputes that folks are deciding to settle with the use of handguns.”
One man protesting the more than 200 murders that have happened in Baltimore this year outside of Baltimore City Hall told WJZ that the only way to change the city is to change the people who govern it.
“We gotta change the people. We gotta change leadership,” the man, known as Kenny, said. “That’s what we gotta do.”
