This article refers to

crime In ordinary language, a crime is an unlawful act punishable by a state or other authority. The term ''crime'' does not, in modern criminal law, have any simple and universally accepted definition,Farmer, Lindsay: "Crime, definitions of", in C ...

in the

U.S. state In the United States, a state is a constituent political entity, of which there are 50. Bound together in a political union, each state holds governmental jurisdiction over a separate and defined geographic territory where it shares its sove ...

Maryland Maryland ( ) is a state in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. It shares borders with Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia to its south and west; Pennsylvania to its north; and Delaware and the Atlantic Ocean t ...

State statistics

In 2015 there were 166,510 crimes reported in Maryland, including 493 murders.

By location

Baltimore

Baltimore Baltimore ( , locally: or ) is the most populous city in the U.S. state of Maryland, fourth most populous city in the Mid-Atlantic, and the 30th most populous city in the United States with a population of 585,708 in 2020. Baltimore was ...

reported 223

homicide Homicide occurs when a person kills another person. A homicide requires only a volitional act or omission that causes the death of another, and thus a homicide may result from accidental, reckless, or negligent acts even if there is no inten ...

s in 2010. The number of all

violent crime A violent crime, violent felony, crime of violence or crime of a violent nature is a crime in which an offender or perpetrator uses or threatens to use harmful force upon a victim. This entails both crimes in which the violent act is the objecti ...

s for the city has declined from 21,799 in 1993 to 9,316 in 2010. Even with stark

population decline A population decline (also sometimes called underpopulation, depopulation, or population collapse) in humans is a reduction in a human population size. Over the long term, stretching from prehistory to the present, Earth's total human population ...

taken into account—Baltimore went from 732,968 residents in 1993 to 620,961 in 2010—the drop in violent crime was significant, falling from 3.0 incidents per 100 residents to 1.6 incidents per 100 residents. Baltimore's level of violent crime remains higher than the national average. In 2009, a total of 1,318,398 violent crimes were reported nationwide across the United States, equivalent to a rate of 0.4 incidents per 100 people. In 2011, Baltimore police reported 196 homicides, the lowest number of slayings in the city since a count of 197 homicides in 1978 and far lower than the peak homicide count of 353 slayings in 1993. The drop is significant, but the homicide rate is nevertheless in the same range the city saw in the mid 1980s, when the city had another 130,000 residents. City leaders credit a sustained focus on repeat violent offenders and increased community engagement for the continued drop, reflecting a nationwide decline in crime. The city recorded a total of 344 homicides in 2015, a number second only to the number recorded in 1993 when the population was 100,000 higher. This was the highest murder rate on a per capita basis ever recorded.

Policing

In 2008, Maryland had 142 state and local law enforcement agencies. Those agencies employed a total of 21,267 staff. Of the total staff, 16,013 were sworn officers (defined as those with general arrest powers).

Police ratio

In 2008, Maryland had 283 police officers per 100,000 residents.

Capital punishment laws

Maryland's former governor,

Martin O'Malley Martin Joseph O'Malley (born January 18, 1963) is an American lawyer and former politician who served as the 61st Governor of Maryland from 2007 to 2015. A member of the Democratic Party, he was Mayor of Baltimore from 1999 to 2007. O'Malley ...

, signed a bill on May 2, 2013 to repeal the

death penalty Capital punishment, also known as the death penalty, is the state-sanctioned practice of deliberately killing a person as a punishment for an actual or supposed crime, usually following an authorized, rule-governed process to conclude that ...

References

{{CrimeUS