October 14, 2003
Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre, London
Thank you very, very much. It’s a real pleasure to be here with all you today, and I’m honored that I’ve been invited over to share with you Baltimore’s story at this very important conference. I’d like to personally thank the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, the Home Secretary, David Blunkett, Police Minister, Hazel Blears, Louise Casey and her entire team who have been great at the Anti-Social Behaviour Unit at the Home Office, and all of the people who we’ve met in our short forty-eight hours here. I’m still a little bleary-eyed so you’ll bear with me. This trip’s been really interesting and enjoyable. It’s nice to know that we’re not alone and to see the progress happening here in London and all over the UK.
The reason I’ve been asked to come here today is that, a short while ago, I was very pleased to be able to host the Home Secretary’s visit to the City of Baltimore. I shared with him some of the things we have managed to begin to turn around in our city. It is a process, and our work is very much unfinished work. But we have been able to dramatically turn around what had been some pretty intractable problems in the city of Baltimore, with regard to disorder, crime, drugs, drug addiction, and anti-social behavior. I’ve learned a lot over the last couple of days about the sorts of challenges you’re facing here and also the determination of so many good people who live in every single block of our cities. It’s great to be with friends who are doing so much to combat our common foe, the darker side of human nature, the crueller side of human behavior.
The 25% reduction in violent crime that has been achieved here is a big deal. That doesn’t happen by itself. All of you know that. The goal of doubling the availability of drug treatment, the increased investment in public safety, getting more police officers on the street: those are hard things to accomplish and they’re all things that you’ve done. I had a great tour yesterday of Leicester Square, and saw the turnaround that the cameras are bringing to that area in the center of your city. Really inspiring stuff at the City of Westminster.
I am truly proud of the accomplishments of the people of the City of Baltimore, and on their behalf I am very grateful to be able to share with you their story. Every community is unique. Every community is different. I would not presume to prescribe specific solutions. You all know your challenges far better than I do, but many of the questions that I hear you asking are the same questions that we’ve had to ask ourselves as we’ve wrestled, confronting drugs, drug addiction and drug violence—the things that were choking our city. The same questions I’m hearing as you attack anti-social behavior.
How do we make government more effective without diminishing the capacity, the will, the power and the responsibility of the individual? What part of this equation is up to government to solve and what part of it is up to individuals, family leaders, community leaders? How much is about programs, and how much of this is really about heart and spirit? How much of this is policy, and how much is about the resilience and the choices that free and engaged people can make in their lives?
The City of Baltimore, a proud, colonial port—a city that was integrated before America ever became segregated. We are “the land of the free, the home of the brave,” the place where ‘the Star-spangled Banner’ was written; where neighbors, 60% of them immigrants, one fifth of them free, black citizens, came together and defended a very imperfect, but still great country’s infant liberty. We were a city that had gown to almost a million people, despite the fact that our entire city center burned to the ground in 1904. And we re-built it—ourselves. We also built the armaments that helped win the Second World War – the Liberty Ships, the B26. Baltimore was a great city and yet, by the time we got to the nineties, we were flat on our back. In one decade in our city, six thousand of our fellow citizens were killed because of the foreign chemical attacks of cocaine and heroin. Six thousand; twice the number killed in the Pentagon and World Trade Center attacks because of overdoses and the violence associated with the drug trade. We became the most addicted city in America according to the DEA by 1994 and we stayed there in ‘95, ...And ‘96, ...And ‘97, ...And ‘98… And ‘99… And by ‘99, we had also become the most violent city in America in one of the wealthiest states in America. Not surprisingly then, we suffered in the ‘90’s the largest job and population loss of any city in America.
And then came the election. Against that backdrop, we wrestled. Against this adversity, we wrestled with questions like ‘how do we turn this around?’ We talked about whether poverty causes crime or whether crime actually causes poverty. We talked about why we would have a double standard and allow behavior in some neighborhoods that we would never allow in more affluent areas. We talked about our fears: of policing, of crime, and of one another. At the end of the day we decided that, regardless of race, or class or place, we progress as a people on the strength of our neighbors. We concluded that there is more that unites us than divides us. And we got to work.
After the first year, we started to do some things right. We started to make government work again. We implemented the Comstat process, and were able to recruit Jack Maple and John Linder who had innovated with the performance measurement in policing in New York City and transferred that to New Orleans and Newark. We got them to come to Baltimore. We started to measure our progress. We started doing a better job of deploying our police. President Clinton helped us get 200 additional police officers on our street right away. Not just better policing but also far more drug treatment. We made drug treatment our number one legislative priority.
By the end of the year, a city that every year for fifteen years had 300 plus homicides, a city where many people used to shrug at the carnage and say ‘well, that’s Baltimore’. In the first year of just trying, we went below 260. And at the end of that year, the Ravens won the Superbowl!
Well, what we rediscovered in Baltimore was something we had forgotten: there are some things that the government can actually do! There are things that the government can do if you’re willing to set the goals, to share information openly, to measure performance, to move it forward. There are some things the government can actually do, and there are some things that government just can’t do. No government can reduce violent crime unless neighbors are willing to come forward and help by being witnesses and jurors and parents we need everyone to be; come forward as the loving brother or sister that gets another sibling to face up to their addiction and get that monkey off their back; step up to the plate by being mentors to children who are, essentially, without a positive influence at home; step forward by being partners with their police.
And so, we launched the Believe campaign. And the rationale behind the Believe campaign was this: One of the biggest enemies we had to confront in Baltimore was not so much the drug dealers, though they were formidable, it was our own cynicism. Our own low esteem of the capacity of one another. The culture of failure that had us wallowing in the sense that nothing we could do would work; we couldn’t do it. We had ten excuses for why we shouldn’t even begin to try. So we had to attack the cynicism that was in our city (and had become ingrained in the political culture of our city) that culture said there was nothing we could do about drugs. And we attacked that cynicism by first establishing the credibility of the messenger. The messenger was the ‘Believe’ campaign; and we appealed to people right where their cynicism and negativity was, and we acknowledged the validity of that perception.
We ran a four-minute commercial that we called ‘the movie’. We got all of the stations to agree to sell us time much less expensively. Simultaneously, we aired the four minute ad on the affiliates in the City of Baltimore. It began in Baltimore, in a very rough neighborhood as seen through the eyes of a young, 10 year old African-American boy. That boy would become the metaphor for the city’s very future and the city’s existence. As the boy is standing there on the corner warming himself at a fire with a homeless, addicted person next to him, he says “My Grandmother says that we’re all part of one big fire. I don’t know if that’s true, but I know there’s a fire inside of me.”
Then you travel with the boy as he goes through his neighborhood – drugs all around, you can’t get away from it. Those guys from the County, who happen to be white, motioning him to the car. “They think that I’m a drug dealer. They think that’s all I’ll ever be. I don’t want any part of that.” And then as the music changes (it’s a dark ad, in the night), it passes by the front of a church which says in neon ‘come unto me’, the music changes.
The little boy says “my little sister’s gone to the store to get some candy. I wonder what’s been keeping her?” and then the voiceover, as the camera moves down the street to a crowd of people and the flashing lights of an ambulance, says “the people of Baltimore are in a fight. It’s a fight for their future. It’s a fight that in some neighborhoods, we’ve been losing, one life at a time.” And then it focuses on a little girl with her tightly-braided hair, dead on the pavement with her lifeless eyes wide open.
Then as the camera flashes on black faces and white faces, young and old faces standing around the little girl with tears running down their cheeks, it says ”...there are some who say ‘give up. It’s over. We’ve lost’. But for the strong, the brave, this fight is not over. What will it take to make us stand together and say ‘enough’?” The camera goes back on the face of the little boy looking right at you, asking ‘what are you going to do about it?’ implicitly in his searing silent stare. Then it goes back to the boy, back on that corner where it began, and he says “please, don’t let the fire go out”. And then in stark white on black come the words: Believe, ...believe in us, ...believe in yourself, ..Baltimore, ...Believe. And it ends.
For three very uncomfortable, painful weeks, we ran those ads. I got a lot of calls from civic boosters and the business guys asking ‘why on earth did we run those ads?’. But we ran them for an important reason: we needed to re-establish our credibility in order to call people to another place. After those three weeks, we ran the same type of ads, except that it asked people to step forward to be mentors for one hour a week. We did the same thing on police recruitment. Get somebody into drug treatment, we’ve got a lot more of it and it works. We need everybody. The response was tremendous, despite the cynicism, despite all the people who said it was slick marketing and slick PR, the response was tremendous. We saw the number of calls for drug treatment increase by 250%. We saw a 300% increase in the number of people coming forward to be mentors. We saw a big increase in the number of people who wanted to be police officers. Just as importantly, we saw a big increase in the number of candidates who had degrees and college educations who wanted to be police officers. We started to break all past records in terms of minority recruitment and hiring.
We continued to move this. It became organic—people embraced it. We had bumper stickers out there and other things and we created, most importantly, for all of the calls to action, a culture in which recovery from addiction was made a civic virtue. We made our witnesses heroes. We made our police officers people that were out there doing the toughest job in America. We created a culture where there was no such thing in our city as a spare American. We needed everybody. People embraced it and they ran with it.
I’d like to show you a few slides to illustrate the visual field aspect of the campaign. A lot of the people who had been cynical at first and thought that it portrayed the city in a bad light started investing their own dollars in getting Believe banners. We gave signs and banners to schools, we gave out ‘Believe’ pencils on school visits. We put ‘Believe’ wherever we could and in the hands of kids. Interestingly enough, I have had to explain what the Believe campaign is about to a lot of privileged adults, but I have never once had to explain it to a child. They understood implicitly and embraced it.
We opened the first major in-patient drug treatment centre in years and years in Baltimore. Despite our problem, you’d think we’d be opening more and more. We hadn’t opened one in thirty years. We put Believe in other languages. We started a mentoring program recruiting 400 mentors to volunteer through churches. They act as the portals to help us get services to the kids.
Just some pictures from the kick-off. We did it in a church in East Baltimore with the director of drug policy in the White House. We created a web page to try to get people involved, and started putting ‘Believe’ on all of our stationery in City Hall, on all of the messaging at the bus stops, every place we could. Who could ever forget the Believe mobile, sponsored by M&T Bank in the City of Baltimore. We move it around our neighborhoods, open it up, bring out all of the neighbors. Sometimes we put it in the middle of the street to close down the block and deny it from the drug dealers. To let people breathe and live and see that there is strength in numbers and a lot of good people in every block.
We didn’t intend for this to go into the environmental side of things, but it did quite naturally. People started doing community clean-ups and labelling them ‘Believe’ clean-ups. In essence, it has become a theme which has given a context to a whole lot of the civic action going on. So anyway, that’s a few slides to give you a sense of our field campaign.