Baltimore's "Safe Streets" initiative has received a lot of the credit for the city's dramatic plunge in violent crime over the past few years, but now one man tasked with making city streets safer is accused of adding to the violence in Charm City.
51-year-old Antoine Burton was arrested and charged with one count of attempted murder on Sunday night after police responded to reports fo shots fired in the northwest part of the city.
Northern District police officers were patrolling in the Central Park Heights neighborhood around 7:25 p.m. Sunday when they heard gunshots near the 4400 block of Park Heights Avenue. They searched the area and found a 40-year-old man suffering from a gunshot wound. The man was transported to an area hospital for treatment.
Shortly after responding to the scene, police located a suspect, Burton, about a quarter of a mile away on the 2400 block of Loyola Northway. He was transported to the Central Booking Intake Facility and is facing charges of attempted first-degree murder and several handgun violations, according to a Baltimore Police news release. Charges against Burton were not visible in the Maryland Judiciary database as of Monday afternoon.
Just a few hours earlier, police responded to a shooting a few blocks away in which one person was killed and two others wounded. According to the Baltimore Sun, the homicide was the first recorded in the Park Heights neighborhood in almost 18 months.
Authorities haven't said if the two shooting incidents are connected in any way, but Baltimore Mayor Branon Scott was quick to distance Burton's alleged actions from the Safe Streets program that employed him.
In a statement issued Monday, Mayor Brandon Scott called Burton’s actions a “disgrace.” He reassured the public that the shooting was “an isolated incident that should not be used to undermine the proven work that Safe Streets does.”
“[Burton] has failed to live up to our standards for frontline community violence intervention staff and violated the trust that is at the very core of what makes violence intervention work overwhelmingly successful,” Scott’s statement reads. “Nobody should ever resort to violence to resolve conflict, especially someone tasked with promoting peace.”
Two things can be true here: community violence intervention programs can help reduce shootings and deescalate conflict, and street-level workers hired in part because they've supposedly turned their lives around may not have left their criminal ways behind. Burton is hardly the first violence interrupter to be charged with a violent offense. Several Ceasefire workers in Chicago have been accused of shootings in recent years, and the head of one Bronx-based violence prevention group was charged with running a drug ring in New York not long ago.
This is one of the pitfalls of hiring supposedly former gang members to serve as violence interrupters. Yes, some of these individuals may have turned over a new leaf, but there's no guarantee that's the case. Every hire is a crapshoot, and in this case it appears that Safe Streets misfired when giving Burton a paycheck and tasked him with stopping beefs from escalating into shots fired.
So long as these programs are run with accountability and transparency, I still believe these programs have value. I'd much rather see programs like Safe Streets than more laws designed to criminalize the exercise our Second Amendment rights. The problem, of course, is that it's generally not an either/or situation. Blue states and Democrat-run cities like Baltimore may embrace community violence prevention programs, but officials still want to see lawful gun ownership become a thing of the past.
Even with Maryland's restrictive gun laws, it's not difficult for criminals to get their hands on a gun. Law-abiding citizens, on the other hand, are required to take state-approved training courses to possess or carry a handgun, while many popular firearms are illegal to purchase under the state's "assault weapons" ban. It sounds like Burton wasn't allowed to have a gun on him, which makes this shooting a failure of both the Safe Streets initiative and the state's draconian gun laws.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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