Three hundred thirty seven.

The names on the Baltimore Sun homicide web page are listed chronologically but have no features that stand out.  Beside each name is an age, a sex, an address, and a race.  Most of the names are those of young men in their twenties; black, and dying somewhere in Baltimore’s Black Butterfly.

In 2021, 337 names made up this list. Twenty-three days into the new year have added 26 more. That’s more than one murder per day.

A pattern characterizes these names — a standard English surname (Smith, Cook, Hill) and a uniquely-spelled first name (Jajuan, Tyquan, Antion).  This past year, there were several female names sprinkled in — Milissa, Latonya, Brionna, Linique.

There are no faces associated with the names. Only an age, a date of death, and an address where their bodies were found.

In efforts to probe deeper, I Google each one, hoping to find a photo or a social media account that will bring some semblance of life to their lifeless name.

Oftentimes, there are no images or social media accounts.  In some cases, there is a GoFundMe page where family members posthumously coronate the dead with the title of “King” or “Queen” before asking people to help cover the burial expenses.  

Other searches reveal a mugshot from a previous crime.

And in some rare cases, there are actually bios from a job website.  One of these bios I found was for Ameer Whyee, who in 2015 served as a high school intern with the Maryland Department of Assessment and Taxation. Ameer stated in his bio that he was deeply honored to work as an intern. At the Department, Ameer noted that he was “tasked with entering forms and basically seeing if a business is really a business in the State of Maryland.”  

Ameer was just 21 years old when he was shot in the head near Frederick Avenue in Southwest Baltimore.

With so little known about these young black men, we leave it to the imagination: What precipitated their untimely death?  Were they mere products of harsh urban circumstances?  Were their lives already revealed to us through characters in the television series, The Wire?

Often, the vacuum of information on these dead young men is filled with vague tropes about urban decay, the war on drugs, and the controversial question about ‘the plague of black-on-black crime.’  Too often accusations of underlying racism prevent the questions from even being asked about root causes and potential solutions. Talking heads on local and social media claim that the homicide rate is a crisis, but the feeling of outrage seems to have disappeared.

There have been over 200 murders in Baltimore City each year for most of the past decade; well over 300 murders each year since Marilyn Mosby (D) took office as State’s Attorney in 2015. That number continues to climb. In sum, the number of homicides in Baltimore is nearly equal to the combined number of dead from the September 11 attacks and the mass shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary, Stoneman Douglas High School, and the Pulse nightclub.

But unlike those tragedies, there are no national campaigns for the victims.  There are no hashtags, no marches, no Congressmen in kente cloth kneeling inside the US Capitol.  There are no heroes or martyrs being honored out of the 3,000+ murdered.

Instead, there are pop-up candlelight vigils, makeshift memorials of Hennessy bottles and balloons, and corners with spraypainted hashtags and numbers indicating when the death occurred in the year. Eventually the balloons deflate, the Hennessy bottles are thrown away, and the spraypaint is eroded by mildew or covered over with new spray paint.

And there are politicians like Mosby and Baltimore City Mayor Brandon Scott (D) calling to defund the police and decriminalize crime. 

The quotidian nature of this cycle raises a set of brutal questions: Do these dead young black men matter?  Were their lives even significant?  Or are they just blurred statistics buried on some overlooked webpage? Even worse, are these black men the forgotten sacrifices to a vampiric political system in Baltimore City that feasts off the chaos and death?

Based on the clearance rate from the Baltimore City police department, we know that very few of the victim’s families will ever see justice.  Killers will never be arrested, much less be prosecuted.  BCPD has a clearance rate of 41.6%, well below the national average of 54.7% for similar sized cities. And Mosby gets guilty verdicts in only 38% of those homicides that are cleared. One in every 350 residents has been murdered since Mosby took office. Currently Baltimore City’s murder rate is 57 per 100,000. That’s twice the rate per capita of Mexico and three times that of El Salvador, countries where people flee to the US seeking asylum from a culture of violence. 

We hear about “thoughts and prayers” from politicians who, after every high-profile shooting, try to remake themselves into concerned uncles and pastors.  But we know that there is very little that these politicians can do and even less that they actually want to do.

The murder rate is a problem of indifference.  Who seems to care when black men are killing each other?

This indifference is not created out of futility, but rather a lack of brotherly concern for one another.  Baltimoreans like to pride themselves on being a “city of neighborhoods,” but these neighborhoods make up a motley patchwork of race and class in a deeply divided city.  And those divisions are further magnified at the street-level where individuals care less and less for one another.  The breakdown of the family and the absence of fathers has given rise to a cousin-and-nephew network of belonging that has only meaning in word, but not in real familial obligations.  The role of the black church has diminished from once being a pillar of the black community to now being an outlet for second-hand food and clothing and a Sunday morning club for middle-aged grandmas.

Kids and adults walk past sites of what was once a crime scene.  The powerful spray gun of a DPW worker has managed to wash away the blood and chalk and restore the corner back to what it once was: a congregation of vacant-eyed black men trying to hustle for a dollar. Police will drive by these men — Mosby can claim that arrests are down as a result of her “progressive” non-prosecution policies. The middle-class grandmas will likewise pass them by as they head to church services.  No one will stop to notice them.

And so why should we be surprised when we see the names of these black men appear in a newspaper article on the latest murder?

We shouldn’t.  We stopped caring a long time ago.