New O'Malley Mailers Show Crime Reduction Claims Lower Than Before

BALTIMORE, Md. -- A new campaign mailing by gubernatorial candidate Martin O'Malley spells out the mayor's claims about crime reduction, but it actually touts a number that's not as high as what O'Malley has claimed in the past.

However, the O'Malley campaign rejected any notion that the mayor is backing off his crime reduction claims.

There is a new number in the newest mailing that is actually 10 percentage points lower than the crime reduction number that had become so ingrained in the mayor's claims about his record.

It's been a bedrock claim of O'Malley's -- that, since taking office as mayor in 1999, violent crime in Baltimore has been cut by 40 percent -- more than any other city in the country.

The mayor touted the number in speeches and on his campaign Web site where it appears first on the list of his claims of progress.

But now, the WBAL TV 11 News I-Team has discovered that the new campaign mailing is making a more modest claim. It is stating that violent crime is down nearly 30 percent, not the 40 percent that's been repeated so many times.

Also, the mailing is missing the claim of a nation-leading reduction. Instead, the phrase used is "one of the largest declines of any major city."

What the campaign has done is suddenly use a different measuring stick.

The 30 percent figure comes from comparing crime numbers reported by the city in 2005 to the year 2000, not the year 1999 that's consistently been used by the O'Malley campaign before.

The 1999 crime numbers claimed by the city have been called into question by criminologists because an O'Malley-ordered audit of the numbers originally reported that year dramatically increased the biggest category of violent crime, and therefore formed a higher water mark from which O'Malley made his crime reduction claims.

Asked whether O'Malley is now backing away from that audit, a campaign spokesman said the mayor still stands by it but decided not to use the 1999 numbers in his new mailing because that year's numbers aren't posted by the FBI.

A second claim in the new mailing states homicides in Baltimore are down an average of 18 percent under O'Malley. That number is drawn from comparing the average number of homicides between 2000 and 2005 to the average of a 10-year period in the 1990s during which the city's murders reached their peak and then started dropping in 1997.

Specifically, during the mayor's tenure, homicides in Baltimore dropped by 11.8 percent, comparing 2005 to 1999.

In previous reporting by 11 News on the accuracy of the city's overall crime reporting, criminologists have said homicides are a city's best measure of the incidence of violent crime.