How Tough On Crime Prosecutor SAVED Baltimore
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjGHT1jlXkk
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Actual Justice Warrior | 26 November 2025}
In this video, I discuss Ivan Bates who is the most important political figure in the history of the city of Baltimore as he has now pulled off the impossible & saved the city from it's darkest days in less than 3 years.
Sources:
The so called "Actual Justice Warrior" apparently doesn't know the difference between a "clearance rate" (the number of people arrested) and the prosecution rate (the number of people prosecuted). Prosecutors don't arrest people. Prosecutors don't typically even investigate street crimes. They do investigate white collar crime and political crime but those are crimes where the suspects are already known. Who investigates street level crime and makes arrests? Police do. How do police chiefs get their jobs? They are appointed by the mayor. Oh, and Baltimore County, which surrounds Baltimore City, has its own mayor and police chief. In 2023 Baltimore County hired its first black police chief after the previous one was forced to resign in part over violent crime in the County.
Robert McCullough is the first Black man to serve as Baltimore County's police chief.
www.cbsnews.com
In December 2024 Balitmore City appointed a new police chief Ryan Lee right about the time that the murder rate started going down.
By Megan SaylesAFRO Business
[email protected] The Baltimore Police Department (BPD) has selected a former police chief who resigned from his post following allegations of misconduct to serve as chief of detectives in the department’s operations bureau. Ryan Lee, a current resident of...
afro.com
I'm not sure of Ryan Lee's ethnicity (he's not white) but I do know that he was forced to resign from his previous position as chief in Boise Idaho because he injured another officer during a training execrise. (
@TheTexan I'm sure the officer was ultimately okay).
The injured officer claims Ryan Lee targetted him because Lee preferred K9s to only bite if necessary and the injured officer preferred them to bite suspects as a matter of course. This is in sharp contract to Actual Justice Warrior's praise of the police brutality tarnished Memphis PD and proof that you can be tough on crime without brutalizing crime suspects.
See:
https://www.cbsnews.com/baltimore/n...ican-american-police-chief-robert-mccullough/
I will give AJW credit for at least admitting the decrease in crime is real though notice that at first he said he didn't believe it. And I'm still seeing MAGAs in comment sections on news articles about decreasing crime in Birimgham and Baltimore doing mental gymnastics like "They're not counting juvenile crime." The murder rate is the murder rate regardless of who did the crime which is shown by the fact that a large percentage of murders go unsolved. They don't take a murder out of the crime stats just because a juvenile was later found to be the perpetrator.
Side note. Birmingham still has the same Attorney General throughout the past murder wave and the current murder drop. Danny Carr was elected to the position in 2018 and is still in it. Birmingham's murder drop is over 50% as compared to Balitmore's which is around 26%. Both drops are impressive. But MAGA won't talk about Birmingham. I wonder why? I met Danny Carr and personally like him. I do think he made at least one really bad call. During the terrible murder wave on 2024, a firefighter who had witnessed a murder was himself murdered while the suspect was waiting trial and the murderer got off. The murderer was later murdered in the infamous "Hush Lounge" shooting that
@Anti Federalist posted about on the forum. Interstingly enough, the prime suspect in the Hush Lounge shooting has also been charged with killing the fire fighter. (Why kill the witness in a murder and get the suspect off and then turn around and kill the suspect? I don't know.) My problem is that they HAD to have recorded a victim statement prior to his murder right? I know that's standard practice in Nashville even in less serious cases like robbery and aggravated assault. And under the hearsay exception of "declarant unavailable" his video testimony would have been admissible in court. The irony is if the murder suspect had been prosecuted and convicted he might still be alive.
See:
https://www.wvtm13.com/article/timeline-damien-mcdaniel-muder-charge-firefighter-arrest/63922775
Again, what changed in Birmingham was the police chief Michael Pickett. We went from a white police chief who, frankly, was not doing is job, to a black chief who is and who is beloved by the community. (Seriously women are throwing themselves at this man).
And yes. There have been a couple of fatal shootings by police under his tenure. One a couple of months ago where a cop responded to a domestic violoence situation where the man was being beaten and the woman and her mother jumped the cop, took his tazer and had him pinned down until he shot the woman three times and killed her.
The more recent case a cop responded to a "shotspotter" report (accoustic AI gunshot reporting tool) and when he showed up at the scene the community told him who had the gun and the gun man drew on the cop and the cop shot him one time and killed him.
Dispatchers received a call on Nov. 28 from ShotSpotter in the Kingston Community and a second call came in about a fight with a weapon.
www.wbrc.com
In both cases BPD quickly released bodycam footage and avoided any community backlash. In contrast Homewood PD (different city but in the same county) waited for months to release the body cam footage of a police shooting which led to protests that involved BLM.
ALEA has been criticized for not releasing body camera footage in the Homewood police shooting death of Jabari Peoples,
www.al.com
Homewood is majority white with a white chief and mayor and Birmingham is majority black. Danny Carr had to investigate all the incidents because, again, he's the county prosecutor and he cleared the officer in the Homewood case. (The suspect had a gun and pointed it at the officer). But no protests in Birmingham because the community was treated with respect and information was released promptly. (Seriously the far right Republican governor of Alabama, Kay Ivey, complained about how long it was taking the video of the Homewood shooting to be shown to the family and their lawyer and as far as I know it STILL hasn't been released to the public).
So there you have it. Probably more than you wanted to know about Baltimore's reduction in crime.
