Baltimore has had a lot of bad slogans and mottoes over the years.
There was Charm City. That more accurately became, Harm City.
There was, rather implausibly, Baltimore: The City That Reads. You can still find that slogan decorating bus benches in a city with rampant illiteracy. But it was rendered more accurately as Baltimore: The City that Bleeds.
Then Baltimore and Maryland gave up and reinvented themselves as the Home of the Star Spangled Banner, which was both true and not especially relevant to the Baltimore of today.
But now there is a bold new slogan. Nobody Kill Anybody.
Organizers aim to stop the shooting from Friday, Aug. 4, through Sunday, Aug. 6, with a unified and blunt message: “Nobody kill anybody.”
Their message has been printed on T-shirts and flyers. They designed a website and held community meetings. More than 1,600 people visited their Facebook page. The grass-roots campaign has swelled since it began in May.
That's really aiming high. A several month campaign to stop shootings for one weekend.
And somehow I suspect that the Ford Foundation isn't kicking in millions to this, the way it did to the racist hate group Black Lives Matter. But obviously black lives don't really matter to the left.
“I’ve seen the momentum build over the past several weeks,” said T.J. Smith, spokesman for Baltimore police. “We are all in this together, and we’re 1,000 percent supportive of the efforts.”
I should hope so.
“The Baltimore Ceasefire was not declared by any one organization,” organizers wrote on their website. “This ceasefire is the product of Baltimore residents not only being exhausted by homicides, but believing that Baltimore can have a murder-free weekend if everyone takes responsibility.”
What are the odds of it working? Not great.
Community ceasefires, however, have failed to stem the violence in the past. The group Mothers of Murdered Sons called for a ceasefire over Mother’s Day weekend, but at least four people were shot, including a 59-year-old man and 17-year-old woman. Both were killed.
Baltimore, meanwhile, remains gripped by its own violent spike, with 2017 on pace to be the city’s deadliest year ever. The number of homicides shot up to 344 in 2015; another 318 people were killed last year. Baltimore had not exceeded 300 annual homicides for decades before 2015.
“I’m cautiously optimistic,” Crifasi said of the ceasefire. “It indicates to me there are lots of people in Baltimore still invested in the safety and security of their communities.”
All of this is nonsense.
The only thing that would stop the killing is to deal with the shooters. And until you do that, all this is theater. Back in the day black communities got behind police crackdowns on drug dealers and gangs. That's what helped make the War on Crime happen. And then the rollback began. Black communities have to reject the pro-crime lobby of the left and make it clear that Black Nationalist hate groups like Black Lives Matter or the Nation of Islam don't speak for them.