erricka bridgeford – Baltimore Magazine

Erricka Bridgeford is Baltimore’s High Priestess of Peace

Ron Cassie — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 14:10:31 +0000

News & Community

August 2026

ERRICKA BRIDGEFORD parks her bright blue Acura in an East Baltimore alley and spends a moment getting organized. As she steps out, she zips up her fanny pack with her left hand. Born without a right hand, she has become adept at balancing her iPhone on her arm as she moves around the car to pop its hatch. “I brought extra sage,” she says, tucking fist-sized bundles of the dried herb into her waistband. There are no signs of life on this back street, but she adds, presciently, “Someone always asks if I have more.”

One week earlier, a 26-year-old man was shot to death here. Baltimore Peace Movement supporters often participate in these “sacred space” rituals, occasionally accompanied by the family of the deceased. It’s not unusual for candles to be lit and tears shed. But Bridgeford expects she’ll be alone today. “It’s the middle of the week, people work,” she says with a shrug and smile. She holds the sage against her chest with the crevice of the arm she affectionately calls “my nub” and lights the grayish green leaves, which have been used for thousands of years for spiritual, medicinal, and energetic purification, with roots in Indigenous North American and ancient Egyptian, Roman, and Greek cultures.

“Gun violence is a sickness. It needs healing,” she explains, stepping across the cracked pavement. “Grief and trauma need healing, too.”

Describing Bridgeford and her presence is almost impossible. She is somehow both playful and contemplative. The 53-year-old interfaith minister wears eyebrow piercings, hoop earrings, braided hair, and Ray-Ban sunglasses. She swears causally, laughs easily, and hugs frequently. She also prays daily, meditates, practices Buddhist chant, and today, she is walking through this blighted alley in a flowered, pink Baltimore Peace Movement T-shirt and sparkling pink tennis shoes—as she offers blessings for the departed man, his loved ones, and the community.

She has performed these cleansing rituals after nearly every murder since the fall of 2017—a staggering, heartbreaking, 2,000-plus times. Even on the city’s toughest streets, her warm vibrations draw people to her and, as she reaches North Avenue, two drivers waiting for the signal to change recognize her and honk their horn.

“Hi! how are you?” she shouts back in a surprisingly booming voice. Her spiritual appeals may be quiet. She, however, is not.

As she returns to her car, an inquisitive mom with an infant opens the backdoor of her rowhouse. “I smelled the smoke and wondered what’s going on,” the young woman says. Bridgeford introduces herself and mentions a man recently had been killed nearby. “I heard about it from neighbors,” the woman says, accepting a Peace Movement flyer. “We weren’t home, thankfully.”

“And that’s sage you’re burning?” the woman asks, lifting her baby girl, dressed in all pink like Bridgeford, including a pink bow in her hair. “Sage is her name,” she says, smiling at the coincidence. “She’s six months old today.”

Later, in West Baltimore, a young man with gold fronts crosses paths with Bridgeford during her third sacred space ritual of the afternoon. Outside a small convenience store, the kind with bulletproof glass protecting the cashier, he tells her burning rituals bring bad karma. After a brief conversation, however, his body language softens and he reaches forward to thank and hug Bridgeford before heading down the street. On the stoop next door, an older woman, sitting alone, puts on her glasses and looks over to Bridgeford, inquiring about her doings. Soon, they are in an embrace.

“You feel like spring,” the woman says, not willing to let go, yet. “You don’t know how much I needed this.”

SINCE THE FALL OF 2017, BRIDGEFORD WALKS THE STREETS BURNING SAGE AS A CLEANSING RITUAL AFTER MURDERS DUE TO GUN VIOLENCE.

YEARS BEFORE THE CITY’S HISTORIC 60-percent drop in homicides began in 2023, Erricka Bridgeford was seeding transformation.

Originally founded as Baltimore Ceasefire by Bridgeford, and former rapper and activist Kevin “Ogun” Beasley, with community volunteers Letrice Gant, Jakia Jason, Michelle Shellers, and Darnyle Wharton, the since-renamed Baltimore Peace Movement began as an urgent call to action to stop the spiraling bloodshed in the years following the death of Freddie Gray.

The first “Ceasefire Weekend” in August 2017 challenged every corner and block of Baltimore to put down its weapons for 72 hours. Bridgeford and her team rallied communities with grassroots participation over three days, including sidewalk peace demonstrations, cookouts, concerts, basketball tournaments, and vigils to honor victims of violence and support grieving families—some 50 events in all. Pop-up hubs provided expungement clinics, child support information, and mental health professionals in neighborhoods heavily impacted by crime.

The message was painfully simple: “Nobody kill anybody.” (When corner boys and local gang members scoffed at the idea of a citywide, violence-free weekend, Bridgeford, who understands the male ego, turned it around on them. “Are you saying you can’t keep your area, your ’hood safe?” Their answer, without fail: “Oh, don’t worry about it, it’ll be safe around here.”)

The hope was simple, too. To create room for Baltimoreans to breathe amid the barrage of shootings and homicides, which had reached nearly a killing a day. That initial Ceasefire Weekend, which garnered international attention, lasted 41 hours before a homicide was recorded. In response, Bridgeford and Ceasefire volunteers gathered at the site of the killing, pouring intentional prayer, song, sage, and flowers into the location, transfiguring it from a place of trauma into “sacred ground”—the start of the practice Bridgeford continues to this day.

That November, an off-duty D.C. police officer was murdered a few hours into the second Ceasefire Weekend, which then remained homicide-free the next two days. On their third try, in February 2018, the city went a remarkable 11 days without a homicide. It was the first such stretch since Gray’s death from injuries suffered while in police custody led to mass protests and later, rioting.

Determining causation in any spike in homicides is murky business, as is the reverse—pinning down the reason for the now steepest decline in homicides of any U.S. city. The ongoing four-year drop to a 50-year-low correlates with the election of Mayor Brandon Scott, who took office in 2021, and the implementation of his Group Violence Reduction Strategy (GVRS). Undoubtedly, the combination of its focused deterrence, intensive support for individuals at the highest risk of violence, and a commitment to community messengers—for example, the Safe Streets program, which utilizes formerly incarcerated individuals to mitigate beefs and prevent harm—has been a major factor.

Baltimore police are also clearing more cases under Commissioner Richard Worley, and City State’s Attorney Ivan Bates has highlighted prosecutors’ improved partnership with the BPD. Bates defeated controversial incumbent Marilyn Mosby in the 2022 Democratic primary and took over in January 2023. Scott named Worley in June 2023.

That said, Bridgeford and the Baltimore Peace Movement’s role has proven to be anything but pie-in-the-sky as skeptics initially asserted. (Check the comments following her 2017 TED Talk on YouTube, if you enjoy seeing racists and misogynists proven wrong.) Research published in the American Journal of Public Health in 2020 estimated a 52-percent reduction in gun violence during quarterly Ceasefire weekends, with no evidence of additional violence postponed to the following days.

“I’m not the guy to say we’re responsible for changing the culture,” says Beasley, who is also the founder of Beats Not Bullets, which works with middle and high school students, and does outreach to incarcerated young men.

“I just know how the energy works on the street. When a conflict is resolved or terrible wrongs are avoided, those things don’t necessarily get talked about. No one on the outside sees it and it’s not publicized. But organizations such as us [the Baltimore Peace Movement], Youth Advocate Programs, We Are Us, Safe Streets, Roca—all the big organizations in the city, including those out of the Mayor’s Office—have been putting in years of that work. Naturally some type of harvest is going to come. The current numbers are the definition of a shift, right?”

BRIDGEFORD IN FRONT OF A PAINTING OF HER BY ANSON ASAKA THAT HANDS IN HER BALTIMORE COMMUNITY MEDIATION CENTER OFFICE; BRIDGEFORD CLEANSING THE STREETS.

BRIDGEFORD WAS 12 YEARS OLD the first time she saw a person killed. She was in her Rosemont bedroom and should have been asleep when she heard gunfire. She looked out her window, and watched her friend, Mike, an older boy from the neighborhood, running and knocking on doors for help and then falling on the pavement. She heard him cry, “God, please don’t let me die,” while being placed into an ambulance. She was too scared to tell her parents what she’d witnessed.

Ever since, she says, she has been attending funerals. There have been times she’s been to two in one day. In 2001, one of her three brothers survived getting shot during an argument with a family friend in broad daylight. In 2007, she lost her brother David to gun violence. He was the 21st murder victim on the 22nd day that year. Two of her aunt’s sons have been murdered. And these are just the family members that spring to mind before a Saturday community resource walk not far from where she grew up.

With a cadre of volunteers in Peace Movement T-shirts beside her, Bridgeford engages individuals and small groups of neighborhood residents who are either running errands or merely finding some shade on a hot day. She says hi to everyone and passes out information about a variety of available support systems for low-income individuals, seniors, and families, including the free conflict resolution services at the Community Mediation Center, where she has served as executive director since 2020.

At one point, while Bridgeford is speaking with a half-dozen young guys, an older man from the community interrupts and begins preaching about the dangers of street life to the teenagers, who are simply drinking iced tea outside a mini-mart. Bridgeford explains the man is not with her or the Peace Movement and then she leaves several flyers and gently walks away. The young men nod toward her, appreciatively, and tell him to get off his soapbox, not in so many words.

Even before she became the face of the Ceasefire weekends and the Peace Movement, Bridgeford, who is maybe all of 5-foot-3, stood out. A prenatal condition caused her to lose her right arm from the below the elbow and the index finger on her left hand. The rare birth injury, known as Amniotic Band Syndrome, occurs when fibrous tissue strands from the inner membrane of the placenta tangle around a developing fetus—in her case, her arm and finger, requiring doctors to remove both. She was told she was born screaming in the birth canal from the pain.

“A cool superhero origin story,” she says jokingly of her tortuous entry into the world. “I've thought about that a lot.

IN HER WORK TO HELP HEAL COMMUNITIES IMPACTED BY GUN VIOLENCE, BRIDGEFORD HUGS FREQUENTLY.

When I was born, my arm was already dead. I was in the most pain a person can experience.”

Bridgeford was also born chatty and smart, talking at a very young age, and possessed of a preternatural appreciation of people and life in general. (During another sacred space ritual, she strikes up a conversation with a feral cat—“Hello, Mr. Cat!”—explaining she has spoken to animals, trees, stones, mailboxes, well, everything, since she was small.) But it took her time to embrace her physical differences, made more challenging by the fact that she was a Black girl, born to teenage parents. She was bullied about her arm and got into schoolyard fights. After every altercation, which she says she always won (there is little doubt about her toughness and courage), she cried when she got home, appalled by the punches she’d thrown. Her parents had raised her to be respectful and rise above such behavior.

Bridgeford also credits her parents for encouraging her and not letting her limit herself despite her early obstacles.

“We were poor, we lived in low-income Baltimore public housing, but me and my brothers didn’t know we were poor,” she says.

Her mother and father were the parents that all the children in the neighborhood came and talked to. Her mom socialized with other moms, her father played jacks with the kids on their porch, and they coached football together. At some point when she was in middle school, they got a piano.

“There were a lot of families in my neighborhood, several anyway, that were two-parent households, but then in the ’80s, you noticed some of those families broke up,” she says. “Or when families moved out, single-parent households moved in. Over time, a two-parent household became an anomaly.”

Her father, a former Black Panther, car mechanic, and pastor, would later earn a college degree from Coppin State in his mid-40s. He taught her to tie her shoes with one hand. Her mom made sure she could read before she started kindergarten. Her mother—a similarly sized ball of energy—works with Bridgeford today as a mediation case manager.

“My parents had me intentionally when they were teenagers and wanted all their children to believe they could change the world,” she says. “They knew I needed to be strong and capable of taking care of myself.”

Two years after her brother was killed—his soft heart and kindness were a model for Bridgeford even as he struggled with substance abuse—she became an activist against the death penalty. She testified as a murder victim’s family member in front of the General Assembly, helping lead to the repeal of Maryland’s death penalty in 2013. Later, she became an advocate for state support for survivors of homicide victims. Forgiveness, not revenge, has been the key to her family’s healing.

“I am not naïve, I’m from West Baltimore,” she says. “I’m speaking from experience, not something I’ve read or researched, and I’m not saying those things aren’t important.” They are, she continues, adding she has been raped, lost a brother, a stepson, and cousins. “I just describe my optimism as spiritually gangster.”

BRIDGEFORD LEADING A PEACE WALK IN MAY OF THIS YEAR, WALKING PARTS OF NORTH AVENUE, ROSEDALE, BLOOMINGDALE, AND POPLAR AVENUE.

BORROWING INSPIRATION FROM WAR-TORN areas around the globe, Beasley had pitched the idea of organizing a ceasefire to Bridgeford when shootings began multiplying in 2015. She was involved with the 300 Men March, a nonviolence project co-founded two years earlier by activist Munir Bahar and then-City Councilman Scott, 130 and he had just attended a community support meeting.

He told her of his concept of establishing a period of time when people would commit themselves to peace.

For whatever reason—work, family, distraction—they played phone tag for awhile and the idea fell by the wayside. Two years later, however, with no end to the murders in sight, her 19-year-old son, Paul, turned to her as she was driving one day and told her the homicide rate had become the highest in the city’s history. It was also the worst of any large city in the country. What could be done? What could they do? The next day she called Beasley (they have since become a couple), and told him she was in.

Thousands of people showed up to the first Ceasefire weekend to pray, talk, and rally for nonviolence. Bridgeford recalls that one of them, a 23-year-old man named Devrone McKnight, had been shot in the face the day before. McKnight was heading home from the hospital that Friday evening with his face bandaged when he drove past a Ceasefire demonstration in Edmonson Village—10 blocks from where he’d been shot. He’d been on his way to work at Maryland Shock Trauma when someone pulled up and shot him. He was still dressed in green hospital scrubs and slippers when he joined the group (she has kept photos of them together on her phone). He became an animated presence, holding up signs and screaming at cars, “‘Honk your horns for peace!’” says Bridgeford.

In retrospect, it is not surprising that Bridgeford, who began working at the Community Mediation Center after her brother was shot by a friend in 2001, would eventually see the potential in Beasley’s ceasefire proposal.

The Baltimore center typically handles neighborhood, business, landlord-tenant, and family and interpersonal disputes, but they have also worked with more than 3,000 incarcerated and formerly incarcerated individuals and their families. Montgomery County state delegate Lorig Charkoudian co-founded the nonprofit—one of 17 across the state—after earning a doctorate in economics from Johns Hopkins University, where her research focused on conflict mediation and policing. (Reducing conflicts through mediation, she found, can lower the cost of policing by cutting down repeat calls to police, repeat court appearances, and even incarceration.)

For the past dozen years, Charkoudian, a dedicated marathoner, has led a two-day, 70-mile, Hagerstown-to-Baltimore “Run for Re-entry” to highlight the plight of and build support for returning citizens. For several years after the 2015 uprising, the organization led local teenagers and Baltimore police in “dialogue circles” to improve relations between the BPD and at-risk youth.

They way Charkoudian sees it, Baltimore, with its commitment to violence interruption, mentoring programs, addiction recovery services, and other efforts, has developed an ecosystem of healing, connection, and community.

“The Peace Movement, in particular, is a very community-building thing and it happens with people being together in the same space,” Charkoudian says. “We’ve become used to phoning it in, literally. Relationship-building, which is where healing from trauma comes from, is not something you can phone in.”

BRIDGEFORD TAKES A BREAK AT THE PEACE WALK; PLACING A HAND ON THE MEMORIAL STONE FOR HER BROTHER, DAVID, WHOM SHE LOST TO GUN VIOLENCE IN 2007.

BRIDGEFORD WAS featured in the Emmy-nominated documentary The Body Politic, which highlighted Scott’s 2020 mayoral candidacy and his promise of a collaborative, community-driven approach to tackling gun violence. After his election, he named Bridgeford co-chair of his transition’s public health and safety committee. She is the first to say there are too many factors that drive gun violence to point to any single solution. If there was, it would be an easy fix. And she is also the first to say more work needs to be done and more help is needed to keep pushing the homicide rate down.

“Most Safe Street locations do incredible work,” she says. “But they still don’t have enough workers, just the bodies that they need to cover their whole catchment area.” The Community Mediation Center, where Scott briefly served as board chair before becoming City Council president and mayor, still struggles with funding every year, she notes.

For several years, the Peace Movement has collaborated with other nonviolence advocates and organizations to promote shared events, but it, too, struggles with waning support from time to time. In July, as the movement approached its 10th year, she hosted a citywide engagement meeting to gather input to further grow the Peace Movement and attract additional partners.

BRIDGEFORD LIGHTING A STICK OF SAGE IN THE BACK OF HER CAR TO USE AT THE CLEANSING RITUAL

“I do think the culture around violence has changed,” Bridgeford continues. “I can’t go to the grocery store without people coming up to me and thanking me for my work. I can’t pull up at a red light without a bunch of young boys on the corner being like, ‘That’s the Ceasefire bitch, yo. Keep doing what you’re doing, shorty.’ I can’t walk through the streets without somebody coming up to me saying, ‘Oh, I’ve been in jail. I saw you on the news all the time and couldn’t wait to come home and get back to my community because I kept seeing people like you out there.’

“However, we finally have a mayor,” she says, alluding to Scott, a longtime friend as well as an ally, “who is firmly committed to and investing in anti-violence programs. That is probably the biggest thing. It is a change.”

Scott handily won reelection two years ago, largely on the basis of the dramatic drop in homicides. But like Bridgeford, he believes that the city’s approach and commitment to preventing gun violence need to move forward.

“We still have not expanded the Group Violence Reduction Strategy to every district,” he says. “We also have to sustain our investment in this work. There is concern about federal funding cuts [to local criminal justice programs], but our congressional delegation has been always been great in that regard.”

The rebuilding of hope and public trust in recent years—the block-by-block work performed by Bridgeford, the Peace Movement, and other grassroots groups—also needs to continue, he says. In no small part, because hope and public trust are critical to effective community policing. “You don’t improve the clearance rate from 37 percent to 62 percent without restoring trust,” Scott says.

Several things about the decline in gun deaths in Baltimore are certain. One, it has not occurred because police have been arresting more people. The BPD arrests a fraction of the number of individuals in its mass incarceration heyday, a practice, if anything, that was likely counterproductive, producing more trauma, more family separation, and more individuals with criminal records who then struggle to get back on their feet, says Daniel Webster, a professor at the Hopkins’ Bloomberg School of Public Health, who has studied gun violence here for 30 years.

Two, a deluge of crises—the uprising following the death of Freddie Gray, BPD’s frightening Gun Trace Task Force scandal, and the federal indictments of former Mayor Catherine Pugh, former Police Commissioner Darryl De Sousa, and former City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby—had broken trust in the city’s major institutions. That dysfunction fueled distrust between city leaders and agencies—and between the members of the public more broadly.

“There’s work on the ground necessary to preventing gun violence, there are systems that need to function, and there is a cultural component to preventing gun violence,” Webster says. “When things were really bad, nobody trusted anyone,” he says. “Everybody was pessimistic. The police were very cynical, and I think the same with the community. Over a long period of time, police have gotten a lot better. The city has a clearer anti-gun-violence strategy.”

Webster also feels compelled to underscore something fundamental to urban gun violence, which most people don’t recognize, he says. It acts as a social contagion. As shootings go up, they feed on one another because there’s more retaliation, there’s more pain, there’s more trauma. Everybody is scared and therefore they’re carrying the guns. “It’s easy to imagine this contagion process when things are going up,” Webster says. “But it works in reverse as well, so when you can get things going in the other direction, that makes it easier to sustain the progress.

“We need to help the people and places that have suffered loss and trauma, and I also agree that we have much better capacity to do that than we once did. Erricka, and particularly some of the things that she does, is important. The healing aspect of this is important. She is a unique leader.”

Bridgeford is unique. Charkoudian, who as an accomplished legislator and Ph.D. is not normally prone to hyperbole, calls her “an embodiment of love.” “A prophet,” she says, who sees a world that doesn’t yet exist, a better world, and starts to manifest that world.”

It is undoubtedly true that, for several reasons, people do respond differently to Bridgeford, which she says, “If we’re going to be 100 percent honest,” she is aware of.

“I don’t remember the impact that my having one arm has on other people,” she says. “Most of the time, I’m not thinking about it.

However, I do know that if I walk up to a group of people on the corner and I start talking, they’ve seen me coming. They’re like, ‘Oh, it’s a handicapped lady’ and people in general treat disabled people differently. We get more grace, for a minute. ‘What is she about to say?’ I’m kind of cute, too,” she continues with a laugh, adding that if she has her thighs showing, the Safe Street guys will tell her, “You look good today.”

But it is also apparent that she’s from Baltimore, she’s of this city. “I look like a Baltimore girl, I act like a Baltimore girl, I talk like a Baltimore girl, right? I am approachable, and if somebody like me came up to you and started talking to you about people getting killed, and your attitude is, ‘Yeah, yo, that shit is fucked up,’ that all works in my favor.”

Her physical appearance, in other words, may open the door a crack in some tough places, but something else happens next.

“People see my missing arm and think, at first, that I’m broken, like some people look at Baltimore as broken,” she says. “But then they realize, I’m actually whole. And that Baltimore, which has this magic and this love for itself, can be whole, too.”

She says this after she has twice returned to her car after the sacred space rituals to grab a pair of scissors. She brings scissors with her to remove the harsh yellow crime scene tape that police too often leave behind after they find a body.

At one location, crime tape was left wrapped around a light pole and a street sign. At the other spot, yellow tape was tied through a stoop handrailing in front of a vacant rowhouse where a man, who had been shot, was found dead. “A lot of people run to a house when they get shot, vacant or otherwise,” she says. “They’re desperate. They’re looking for help, somewhere safe.”

With no one around, she cut and removed the tell-tale tape at both locations, depositing it in the nearest trash can.

It is someone’s job to put the crime scene tape up, and it is someone’s job to take it down, she explains, but often it just gets snatched away.

The twisted ends remain on display.

“I remember the blood on the sidewalk that didn’t get cleaned up after my brother was killed,” she says. “Everyone in these communities knows what happened. No one needs to see reminders every day.”

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Five Things to Know About Democratic Mayoral Nominee Brandon Scott

Ron Cassie — Wed, 10 Jun 2020 11:09:00 +0000

After the initial round of ballot tallying last week, 36-year-old City Council President Brandon Scott rallied as mail-in votes were counted over the past several days—pulling out a close victory over former Mayor Sheila Dixon in the Democratic primary for mayor, according to results posted Tuesday night.

In a crowded field with 24 candidates receiving votes, Scott won 29.4 percent of the tally. Dixon claimed 27.7 percent of the ballots cast—a margin of 2,358 votes. The final count remains unofficial and is not expected to be certified before Friday. Roughly 2,000 ballots remain outstanding.

Dixon, 66, also a former city council president, became Baltimore’s first female mayor in 2007 after Martin O’Malley was sworn in as governor. She resigned as part of a plea deal after being charged with multiple felonies and misdemeanors, including theft, perjury, and misconduct in office.

Scott will face Republican Shannon Wright, a nonprofit executive, in this fall’s general election. With a nearly 10-1 Democratic to Republican Party registration advantage in the city, Scott’s victory is all but assured in November.

“Tonight, we celebrate a hard-fought victory for the future of Baltimore,” Scott said in a statement. “From the bottom of my heart, I want to thank my family, my team, our volunteers, those who voted for a new way forward for Baltimore, and everyone who believes change is not just possible, but long overdue. Our city stands at a crossroads. Baltimore will only move forward as a city united, not divided. It will take all of us to build a city that is safe, equitable, and accountable. As a son of Baltimore, I could not be more honored to lead our great city in this critical moment and carry the work forward with you.”

Here are five things to know about Scott:

The City Council Elected Him as President Following Catherine Pugh’s Resignation

The city council elected Scott its president after Bernard C. “Jack” Young ascended to the mayor’s office following former Mayor Catherine Pugh’s resignation in the wake of the Healthy Holly children’s book scandal. Scott prevailed after a weekend-long, behind-closed-doors fight with Young’s chosen successor—Council Vice President Sharon Green Middleton. Initially, it appeared that neither Scott nor Middleton had the votes to prevail, but when the scales tipped in Scott’s favor, council members ultimately supported him 14-0.

He Was One of the Youngest Candidates Elected to Citywide Office

A subject in 2018’s well-received documentary Charm City, Scott was one of the youngest candidates ever elected to citywide office at 27. After growing up in Park Heights, he graduated from Mergenthaler Vocational-Technical High School, where he ran track and cross country, and then studied political science at St. Mary’s College in Southern Maryland. He got his start in politics as a liaison in the office of then-City Council President Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, who later became mayor. Scott will be significantly younger than the age of the average U.S. mayor—which is 56, according to a recent study. But the ambitious Scott would be the same age as Martin O’Malley when O’Malley ran for mayor and with several more years of elected experience. He lives in the city’s Frankford Neighborhood.

He Has a Diverse Coalition of Support

In mid-May, a Baltimore Sun, WYPR, and the University of Baltimore poll showed Scott was the only major mayoral candidate with near equal support among both black (16 percent) and white (17 percent) voters. Scott, who also had a diverse coalition of support, led among voters younger than 35 and also younger than 50. His late voting surge in ballots arriving in the final days before the June 2 postmark deadline indicate that he continued to win support as he marched with protestors in the city following the death of George Floyd. “I can talk young, old; rich, poor; white, black; gay, straight; trap house, board room,” Scott told the Baltimore Fishbowl following that poll. “No one else can do that in this race. No one else has that flexibility in this race.”

He Supports Defunding the Police

Scott was widely viewed as the most progressive of the top-tier candidates in the race. He has pushed for reforms that would curtail some of the power of inherit in Baltimore’s strong mayor even as he ran for the office. As the chair of the Council’s Public Safety Committee from 2016 until he became city council president, Scott advocated a holistic approach to crime reduction and for Baltimore police department reform. He co-founded the anti-violence group 300 Men March and is close to Ceasefire co-founder Erricka Bridgeford. “Baltimore must re-allocate its budget away from the current dependence on the police department,” Scott tweeted this week. “We must diversify our investments into agencies that focus on proactively developing our young people and communities.”

He Passed Groundbreaking Legislation Advocating for Racial Equity

Scott previously served as a member of the Budget and Appropriations and Judiciary and Legislative Investigations committees. In 2018, he introduced and passed groundbreaking legislation that created an equity assessment program in Baltimore that requires all city agency decisions—and their operating budgets, capital budgets, and proposed legislation—to be weighed through an equity lens.

Baltimore must re-allocate its budget away from the current dependence on the police department. We must diversify our investments into agencies that focus on proactively developing our young people and communities.https://t.co/aDDa7ySCF1
— Brandon M. Scott (@CouncilPresBMS) June 9, 2020

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Baltimore “Spy Plane” Initiative Gets Okay from Federal Court

Ron Cassie — Mon, 27 Apr 2020 19:30:00 +0000

Editor’s Note: This article was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center.

High-tech aerial surveillance cameras will soon be coming to a cloud near you, Baltimore.

A U.S. District Court judge gave the go-ahead Friday to a controversial Baltimore Police Department pilot program known as Aerial Investigation Research (AIR), which will collect images of vehicle and pedestrian movements across 90 percent of the city—up to 12 hours daily—for six months starting this week.

Among his reasons for green-lighting the program, Judge Richard D. Bennett cited previous court rulings that have allowed warrantless camera surveillance and the “highly relevant” level of violence “afflicting the City of Baltimore.”

The Baltimore Police Department (BPD) has described the widespread aerial surveillance system as “simply a creative, technological assist” in fighting crime. Critics and the ACLU, which filed a lawsuit on April 9 seeking to halt the police department program, have decried the privately operated “spy planes” as an unconstitutional invasion of personal privacy and freedom from unreasonable government searches.

Judge Bennett concluded, however, that the ACLU lawsuit plaintiffs failed to meet the “heavy burden” needed to support a preliminary injunction.

“In a city plagued by violent crime and desperately in need of police protections, the public interest clearly does not favor the imposition of a preliminary injunction blocking constitutionally sound police programs,” Bennett said in his opinion. “The AIR pilot program may proceed.”

The ACLU, which plans to appeal the decision, disagreed, in particular on constitutional and civil rights grounds.

“It is tragic and unacceptable that the failures of the Baltimore Police Department, and the city’s long-term unwillingness to address the root causes of crime, have now led to the decision to impose the most far-reaching mass surveillance program in American history here in Baltimore,” David Rocah, senior staff attorney at the ACLU of Maryland, said after the ruling. “If allowed to stand, this ruling is a decision that the city, and the country, will come to regret.”

“Baltimore is a city with a terrible history of racism and lack of accountability for abuses by police, which only further compounds our concerns about this program’s potential for misuse,” Rocah added. “We are hopeful that the courts will eventually recognize the serious constitutional issues here and stop the persistent aerial surveillance program.”

A previously secretive, publicly undisclosed iteration of the program—first reported by Bloomsberg Businessweek in 2016 after a tweet inquiring about the strange constant circling of planes overhead—was halted amid condemnations from civil liberties advocates.

We will appeal a federal court decision to allow the aerial surveillance pilot program to move forward. The program would put almost all Baltimore residents under constant, aerial surveillance.

We can’t trust Baltimore Police to use spy planes. https://t.co/nOG0gMu1gQ
— ACLU of Maryland (@ACLU_MD) April 24, 2020

Baltimore Police Commissioner Michael Harrison said he was pleased by the federal court ruling and that it will enable city police to move forward with the program as scheduled.

“The planning of the program’s implementation has been measured and deliberate, putting into place additional safeguards, oversight and review,” Harrison said in a statement released by the department. “I take very seriously the utilization of every legal and moral tool to address the unacceptable levels of violence that often besieges our most marginalized communities. The program will be submitted to great scrutiny during this pilot phase and I will continue to be cautiously optimistic about the potential. Ultimately, the data will show us the efficacy of this technology as a potential tool for the department in solving and reducing violent crime.”

The estimated nearly $3.7 million cost of the pilot will be funded by Arnold Ventures, a limited liability corporation founded by Texas philanthropists John Arnold, a former Enron executive and hedge fund manager, and his wife, attorney Laura Arnold. Future costs or funding support for the program remains unclear.

Harrison has said previously it is in the private company’s interest to abide by the memorandum of understanding (MOU) limitations with the department. Part of the existing MOU includes transparency around any potential technology upgrades—for example, the production of higher resolution images beyond one pixel per person, which currently prevents identification by race or gender, police say.

If the program is shown to be effective in Baltimore, there is every likelihood it could prove attractive to cities and towns across the country.

“They [Ohio-based Persistent Surveillance Systems and Arnold Ventures], are relying on us to vouch for them,” Harrison said previously. “So this can be used in other cities. We are literally their only reference.”

The BPD anticipates the program beginning sometime this week.

Among lawsuit plaintiffs are Baltimore community advocates Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, a grassroots public policy think-tank; Erricka Bridgeford, co-founder of the Baltimore Ceasefire project; and Kevin James, a community organizer and hip-hop musician known as Son of Nun.

The plaintiffs have said such widespread surveillance would violate privacy rights, give more power to a police department with a documented history of civil rights violations, and impede community relations.

“The last thing the citizens of Baltimore need right now is to be watched every minute of every day,” James said. “Would you try and repair a relationship by spying on someone?”

In Friday’s opinion, Judge Bennett did note that the actual precision of collected images, described as dots that won’t identify personal characteristics, has not yet been proven. Plaintiffs also have standing under the First Amendment, he wrote, to “challenge the collection and retention of data associated with them.” There’s “no dispute” plaintiff’s images “will be captured by the airplanes deployed by Persistent Surveillance Systems and that those images will be preserved in a server it maintains.”

Unanalyzed imagery data collected by the sophisticated camera system, which will capture “32 square miles of the city every second,” will be stored by the company for 45 days, unless part of an investigation, police say.

The six-month pilot is also set to go forward despite Gov. Larry Hogan’s stay-at-home orders and staged re-opening plan that limits future public gatherings, which the ACLU has contended would undermine any effort to prove the trial program’s effectiveness in fighting crime.

“I find this bizarre given that the purported purpose of the pilot is to gather data to see if this is effective and whether there is a deterrence effect,” says Ashley Gorski, a staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project. “How can they possibly measure the plane’s deterrence effect when there is a stay-at-home order? It makes no sense at all.”

In response, the BPD has argued that data collected will be meaningful because crime has continued in recent weeks despite the governor’s social-distancing and stay-at-home orders.

“As of April 13, 2020, Baltimore had experienced 81 homicides, five more than the same duration of time in the prior year,” the police department noted in its response to the ACLU suit. “Certainly, there is no shortage of murders, shootings, and armed robberies requiring investigation.”

There’s no indication that police would use the surveillance planes to enforce the stay-at-home order or related law enforcement, under the contract between BPD and the private company, Ohio-based Persistent Surveillance Systems, which specializes in such military-grade technologies. Company videos reveal the Wide Area Surveillance system’s capabilities.

Under the contract, police access to surveillance images is limited. Police say they will request the company’s analysis of visual data for targeted violent crimes—such as homicides, shootings, armed robberies, and carjackings—though Commissioner Harrison also has discretion to request data analysis under “extraordinary and exigent” circumstances. Gorski adds: “There are no guardrails for that discretion.”

Plaintiff Dayvon Love, director of public policy with Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, called the district court’s decision “extremely disappointing.”

“This kind of technology should not be in the hands of any police department, especially one with a history of pervasive corruption,” Love said. “This technology will compound the harms inflicted on residents who have been impacted by well-documented police abuses in Baltimore.”

J. Cavanaugh Simpson is a former reporter for The Miami Herald and a freelance journalist based in the Baltimore area. She can be followed via Twitter @JoCavanaughSim1.

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Dear Western

Angeline Leong — Tue, 03 Mar 2020 10:54:11 +0000

Just inside the brick-and-stone school building on Falls Road, a dozen 5-by-3-foot black, red, and white canvas portraits, painted in the style of former president Barack Obama’s famous “Hope” campaign poster, hang from the walls of Western High School’s lobby. They form a hall of fame of sorts, reflecting the eclectic backgrounds of some of the most recognizable alumnae of the first and oldest all-girls public school in the country.

The likenesses smile back at you. There’s award-winning actress and playwright Anna Deavere Smith and Robin Quivers, Howard Stern’s longtime radio sidekick; along another wall, former Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, Baltimore Ceasefire founder Erricka Bridgeford, and Maryland state Senator Jill Carter, who is in awe of her inclusion.

“It’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen,” says Carter, who is among those running for late Rep. Elijah Cummings’ U.S. Congressional seat. In a nod to Western’s diverse history, Carter is on a wall alongside the images of American Jewish leader Henrietta Szold and Claribel Cone, one half of the sister duo responsible for the renowned Matisse collection at the Baltimore Museum of Art.

A reasonable person might assume that the portraits of these notable alums were always supposed to be placed inside the school’s main entrance—so the roughly 1,140 current Western students and 100 staff members could be inspired by this Baltimore school’s legacy. But initially, the portraits were intended to hang outside. As it happened, last fall, ahead of Western’s high-profile, on-campus 175th anniversary celebration, the school was forced to put up plywood boards to cover a dozen windows—scheduled for repair—along the school’s visible three-floor façade.

“Boarded up,” says Carolyn O’Keefe, Western Class of 1974, the outgoing and passionate leader of the recently launched Western High School Foundation, which is rallying to raise money to keep the school’s proud history and record of accomplishment alive. “Do you know what that means in Baltimore City? It means it’s shut down.”

In an effort to spruce things up, she connected with Hampden artist Jess Pfohl and commissioned the images. But in the weeks before they were completed, workers from the city arrived and finally started installing vents for a new air conditioning system in the spots where wood covered the windows.

“So we ended up putting the paintings inside. It’s more permanent that way, anyway,” O’Keefe says. “We made lemonade out of lemons. That’s sort of always been the Western way.” Now, however, there is a plan in place to make more than lemonade.

“This school has such a rich story. That’s why this effort is important.”

Western High School first opened Nov. 1, 1844, four years before the first women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York, in a tiny one-classroom building on North Paca Street. Over the next half century, as the city’s population grew, the college preparatory school moved to five different locations before landing at its current home, which opened in 1967 as part of a state-of-the-art, joint complex shared with the then-all-boys Polytechnic Institute. (Poly, which remains a next-door neighbor, went coed in 1974.)

Then as now, the schools share an auditorium, courtyard, cafeteria facilities, and sports fields while functioning separately when it comes to academics and classrooms. Both attract kids from across district boundaries. Both require admission and remain among the best places for city kids to go to high school. Both, of course, rely on school system funding, which Western could always use more of to help cultivate the next generation of “Accomplished Alumnae,” as the school’s famous graduates near the front doors are identified.

Public records show Western’s budget for 2019 at nearly $7.4 million, or $6,500 per student, about the same annual per-student figures as Poly and fellow elite public schools City College and Baltimore School for the Arts. For years, however, those three schools have also received private funding from separate foundations and stakeholders supporting their missions. City College, for example, raised $2 million for a new library at the school several years ago. In addition to their public school system funding, the Baltimore School for the Arts raises one-third of its total budget through their fundraising partner, the BSA Foundation.

Western, until this year, hasn’t had a similar fundraising arm—despite a spirit of sisterhood and appreciation for empowering generations of young women of different backgrounds. In the 1960s and 1970s, in particular, according to alumnae, when Western was nearly half black and half white, the school possessed a unique sense of identity. “I was a bit outraged,” says O’Keefe, referring to when she learned that City College, Poly, and Baltimore School for the Arts had organized, functioning private fundraising efforts behind them and Western did not. The first alumnae fundraising meetings, held in the school’s library, were two-steps forward, one-step back—20 people one night, 10 another. But gradually, through word-of-mouth, a 16-person campaign committee was formed. Finally, a formal announcement on the new Western High School Foundation and its efforts was shared at the start of the yearlong 175th anniversary celebrations in November.

“The school has such a rich history,” says Belinda Conaway, a former Baltimore city councilwoman and current registrar of wills, and another face immortalized in the paintings. “That’s one of the reasons why this effort is so important, so we can make sure we can fill in where the school system doesn’t.”

In 2009, the U.S. Department of Education named Western a “Blue Ribbon” winner, and it has been acclaimed for its accelerated college prep program, where students can finish four years of high school work in three and then spend 12th grade taking advanced placement and/or college-level courses. At the same time, its reputation—not to mention finances—suffered a blow when an ex-principal admitted in 2015 to stealing more than $50,000 from the general student fund to pay her own personal bills.

Over the decades, despite its solid achievements in the classroom, there hasn’t always been a great deal of communication from the various administrations running the school to alums. That finally changed five years ago, when Michelle White, a 1993 Western graduate, took over as principal. She immediately went to work to reconnect with alumnae, posting on social media and organizing phone calls with fellow graduates “to think about how they could share their time, talent, and treasure with Western,” White says.

From there, a new booster club was born, which has helped with smaller needs such as books, equipment, trips, school furniture, and connecting students with internships. But White says she and others also recognized a need to raise money for larger, longer-term projects, like renovating the school library and providing consistent college test preparation (so the school can keep up its 98 percent advance-to-college rate). White foresees other improvements to their now 53-year-old main building, including simple things like landscaping and signage, and maybe even a dove (the school mascot) statue outside the building, which many drive past without even knowing it’s home to one of the most storied public schools anywhere.

By day, O’Keefe serves as the director of development for Roca, an organization helping at-risk young men in the city, and before that she worked in PR roles in the high-end jewelry industry, making her a natural fit to lead Western’s public fundraising campaign. She’d been itching to get involved with the school since moving back to Baltimore after years spent in Boston and New York. The notable 175th anniversary of Western’s founding represented a timely opportunity to put out a call to her fellow graduates—as well as others who support all-female education.

O’Keefe and the Western High School Foundation’s goal is to raise something close to $200,000 by November 2020, when the school’s milestone year is over. In other words, if 1,000 people donate a symbolic $175, they feel they’ll be well on their way to providing the support that will enable future students make it to any college or career they want.

“There was the sense of freedom . . . to express your independence.”

“We have a great legacy. We’re warm, safe, and have great spirit here,” O’Keefe says. “But we also have ambitions to bump it up in terms of the girls’ academic success and future. We’re going to do big things.”

Not surprisingly, perhaps, there’s been a little pushback about more pressing needs at other schools, which, for example, have dealt with chronic heating and air conditioning problems in recent years. That said, like other city schools, Western hasn’t had a major renovation since it opened.

“I get that,” O’Keefe says. “We have to be better about targeting people that care about Western. We don’t want to be a burden on [the average taxpayer or other public school parents]. We get that we attract some of the better students in the city, and we appreciate what you all are doing and your challenges. So we have to do this a bit on our own.”

Dr. Julie Seely, a medical director in northern Virginia who graduated from Western with O’Keefe in 1974, was the first person to donate to the campaign.

“We’re out to prove that just because you live in Baltimore City doesn’t mean you can’t be on your way to success,” says Seely, also the author of the historical memoir The Skinny House, about her African-American grandfather. “That’s ridiculous.”

Later, flipping through a collection of Westward Ho! yearbooks, O’Keefe begins to point out more familiar faces.

There’s future bestselling author Laura Lippman in 1970s alongside O’Keefe in a Hi-cology (a mash-up of high school and ecology) club picture. And Nancy Streeks (later Grasmick), the blonde-haired class treasurer who would become the Maryland State superintendent of schools. There’s also Robin Quivers, with close-cropped black hair, wearing a pearl necklace. Her bio doesn’t explicitly indicate she’ll one day work alongside America’s most successful shock jock in New York, but it does list a few related activities—Glee Club, Tutor, Campus Crier Representative, Ticket Committee, and Decorating Committee.

The school’s historic diversity is apparent on the throwback pages, too. “Back then, we were roughly 45 percent white, 55 percent black, something like that. It was really great,” O’Keefe says, turning through other yearbooks, which in more recent editions show a student population that’s 96 percent black. “We really got to know each other in a very fun way.”

Everyone has their own memories, but they share common themes. Seely, whose father was a Morgan State professor, recalls taking two buses to school from northeast Baltimore, and that it was well worth it to prepare her for college at Wellesley. “I was introduced to so many concepts, friends, subjects, and really a sense of competition among women. It was a wonderful academic sorority,” she says. “It changed my life. My father was academic at heart. He knew it wasn’t how big your house is, it’s really the education you get.”

Jill Carter, who went on to Loyola University and became a journalist, a lawyer, and then a legislator, sounded a similar tune. “Everybody knew Western girls had class,” she says. “And there was the sense of freedom there. Your ability to express your independence, that may be common now, but I don’t think it was necessarily the case back then. There was no other place to go but Western.”

White recalls a similar feeling of validation while a student at Western. “I want them to access the college of their choice,” she says. “I want them to feel empowered to cultivate their gifts, their talents, to explore new interests, to know that they have the room and support to do whatever it is they want to do.”

Already this year, O’Keefe and the fundraising group have arranged for writing coaches from Harbor East-based Laureate Education to help Western’s juniors write their college application essays. And representatives from Baltimore-based architectural firm Ayers Saint Gross have been on site to dream up plans for new outdoor features.

On a recent afternoon at Western, as an end-of-period bell rings and students file into a busy hallway, O’Keefe pokes her head inside the open doorway of Ms. Clay’s English classroom. A few students linger, so O’Keefe—someone used to asking for money and definitely not afraid of putting herself out there—asks the girls if they know “Dear Western,” the school’s alma mater.

“I don’t know it all, but I know the chorus,” one student replies.

Then the high schooler, along with her teacher Ms. Clay and O’Keefe—it’s not clear who started—begin to sing.

To you, Western High School,
We pledge our faith and loyalty,
To serve your name in love and honor
And to follow your standards faithfully,
For e’er we’ll remember your motto so true;
We’ve received light, let us give light –
A lesson well learned from you.

“This makes me proud,” O’Keefe says, soon bounding with energy and pointing out her old locker on the way back toward the school’s lobby, where those eclectic portraits portend a bright future for Western students already here and those to come.

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Q&A with Erricka Bridgeford

Manny Zabala — Tue, 14 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In 2017, as a reaction to the city’s alarming homicide rate, Erricka Bridgeford co-created Baltimore Ceasefire weekends—three designated days during which city residents committed to putting down their weapons, with the hope of reducing violence. But even before Ceasefire, Bridgeford, who works as director of training for Community Mediation Maryland, assisted in passage of a 2015 bill to provide resources to families of homicide victims, as well as the 2013 repeal of the death penalty. Last year, the short film, SAGE, which premiered at the Maryland Film Festival, documented Bridgeford’s ritual of burning sage at the sites in the city where homicides have been committed.

How does Ceasefire work?
We’ve said from the beginning if people are given an opportunity to do something together, that if you have as many people as possible involved, it becomes peer pressure. You don’t want to be that guy who kills somebody while the whole city is having a sacred weekend to celebrate life together.

This is why outreach before the weekend is really important. We’re saying to everyone, be as peaceful as you can and think of ways you can be peaceful on purpose. When people know it’s Ceasefire weekend, they have a conversation with someone, put a flyer in their hand, put a poster in their window.

Part of the reason you started this was that your brother was killed in 2007. Tell us about that.
My brother was two and a half years younger than me. He was my first sibling, so we were very close. Losing him felt like the end of my world. I was working at Community Mediation of Maryland at the time. I found out he got killed when I was in the middle of teaching a mediation training to the Office of the Public Defender in Baltimore. I was in bad shape for about six months.

What’s your biggest success story?
Back in February 2018, the Ceasefire weekend started a stretch of 11 and a half days when nobody got killed. The city hadn’t gone that long without a murder since March of 2014. Instead of trying to guess, we went to the streets and had conversations with people in some of the most violent areas of the city. After the weekend was over, we kept saying, “Oh, my goodness, it’s day four now, it’s day five.” It became a thing and, by day seven, the media had picked it up, so people were having that conversation: “I don’t want to be the one who breaks that streak right now, Baltimore is doing good.”

How has Ceasefire grown?
There are two Ceasefire Charter schools—Creative City and Lillie May Carroll Jackson and we’re working on Frederick Douglass High School—which are used for education and training programs. We’ve trained 30 Ceasefire ambassadors, both youth and adults, who represent the movement. Right now, we’re excited about our ability to get out our branding and messages. Around the city, you’ll see Ceasefire messages on buses and subways and also billboards.

It sounds like you’re reaching a lot of people.
I thought it was going to take years to get the kind of participation and buy-in that we’ve gotten in just two years. I’m completely blown away by it. Also, research shows there’s up to 66 percent fewer shootings on those three days, and the violence doesn’t immediately spike after the Ceasefire weekend. That’s always a big question: Are people just waiting till after the Ceasefire? Even the following weekend, violence doesn’t go up.

How did people resolve differences without firearms?
When people had conflict with each other, they’d go to whoever was their leader—whether it was their gang leader or someone they respected in the neighborhood. They’d say, “Look, I have a beef with so-and-so, but I know we have this thing going in Baltimore right now and I don’t want to be that guy that messes it up.” So they would brainstorm and come up with creative ways to resolve the conflict. They’d block off a lot or an abandoned field where people could come. Whoever had this conflict, they were going to come and have a fight and after the fight was over, nobody could come back shooting, nobody could keep talking about it and antagonize the other person. Anyone who came to see it had to check their gun with someone at the gate—yes, this really happened.

People look at shooters as different from themselves. The truth of the matter is that if most people had a gun in their hand at the wrong time, many more of us would have shot somebody and never even remembered pulling the trigger. Conflict often escalates—and it’s easier to buy a gun in Baltimore than find fresh fruits and vegetables.

Does your background in mediation help with your advocacy?
Mediation skills give me the ability to understand people’s hopelessness and make sure people feel heard, but it doesn’t give me the wherewithal to keep navigating murder. What helps me with that is having faced so much murder myself and doing my own healing work around my own trauma.

I was born with one hand, so society treats me like I’m broken, and I’ve watched people treat Baltimore like it’s broken. These different things are identity markers for me: Having one hand, being Black, being a woman, growing up in poverty, having to face murder so much. These are my experiences and give me this wide-ranging emotional and spiritual wherewithal to navigate and engage with murder.

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City Council President Brandon Scott Announces Mayoral Bid

Ron Cassie — Fri, 13 Sep 2019 19:18:00 +0000

City Council President Brandon Scott announced his 2020 bid for mayor Friday in the Park Heights neighborhood where he grew up, making an urgent case for top-to-bottom change in city government.

Scott, who said he was “tired of seeing the tears of young people who’d lost their classmates” to gun violence, was introduced by Cease Fire founder Erricka Bridgeford. “We must stop the bleeding and address the root causes of gun violence,” the 35-year-old Scott told those gathered. “Baltimore needs a mayor invested in the people of this city, not the status quo.”

In his 10-minute address, Scott reiterated recent proposals and pledges to bring professionalism to city government. “Every agency will be held to performance measures,” Scott said. “There will be a focus on resolving 311 issues.”

By declaring his candidacy, Scott became first elected leader to make a formal entry into the race, which many observers predict will eventually come down to a two-person generational battle between the council president and Mayor Bernard C. “Jack” Young, who has given indications he will run, but has not yet declared his intention to seek Baltimore’s highest office next year.

Young, the former council president, became Baltimore’s 51st mayor following former Mayor Catherine Pugh’s resignation earlier this year when she came under fire—and investigation—after receiving more than $800,000 in questionable deals from her Healthy Holly children’s book series. Young had tried to get the council to name Councilwoman Sharon Middleton as his council president successor, but Scott outmaneuvered her for the necessary votes. Young and Scott have been viewed as potential 2020 mayoral rivals ever since with occasional tensions spilling out in public view.

Former Mayor Sheila Dixon, former Baltimore Police Department spokesman T.J. Smith, state Sen. Jill Carter, state Sen. Mary Washington, and state Del. Nick Mosby are said to be considering a bid for mayor as well. Former Democratic candidate for governor, Ben Jealous, recently told the Baltimore Sun he has ruled out a run for mayor, but is considering running for state’s highest office again. Twelve candidates, none currently elected officials, including four Republicans, have declared themselves candidates for mayor with the State Board of Elections.

First elected at 27, Scott, a subject in last year’s well-received documentary Charm City, was one of the youngest candidates ever elected to citywide office. After growing up in Park Heights, he graduated from Mergenthaler Vocational-Technical High School and then studied political science and graduated from St. Mary’s College in Southern Maryland. He got his start in politics as a liaison in the office of then-City Council President Stephanie Rawlings-Blake.

He previously served as chair of the council’s high-profile Public Safety Committee and co-founded the anti-violence group 300 Men March. He has also served as a member of the Budget and Appropriations and Judiciary and Legislative Investigations committees.

Earlier this summer, Scott unveiled a detailed, 29-page legislative and policy proposal highlighting his vision for improving city government, making communities safer, investing in youth, and bringing an equitable framework to governance. He essentially announced his bid with the release of a campaign video earlier this week.

If elected, Scott would be significantly younger than the average U.S. mayor—56, according to a recent study. But the ambitious Scott would be the same age as Martin O’Malley, another ambitious former councilman, when O’Malley ran for mayor and actually possesses several more years of elected experience.

“Brandon is hard-working, there’s no doubt about that, he’s smart, and capable,” former 1st District City Councilman James Kraft, told Baltimore this spring, adding he was not making an endorsement, but expressed confidence in his former colleague’s ability to handle the city’s top job. “He’d also surround himself with smart, good people.”

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The Big Baltimore Playlist: May 2018

Lydia Woolever — Wed, 16 May 2018 14:56:00 +0000

In the latest iteration of The Big Baltimore Playlist, we round up five local songs we can’t get enough of right now, ranging from boundary-breaking bluegrass to vital hip-hop and thought-provoking spoken-word poetry. Check back each month for new songs of the moment, and follow our Spotify playlist as we continue to build a soundtrack for our city.

“White Horse” by Bumper Jacksons

At the exact moment of the Women’s March on Washington in 2017, Bumper Jacksons frontwoman Jess Eliot Myhre was in labor with her first child. The lead singer emerged from that life-changing experience and found herself moved to write this spirited anthem, reflecting on motherhood, feminine power, and the #MeToo movement. With hearty acoustic strums and the wavering twang of steel guitar, Myrhe and her master-of-their-craft bandmates create a call to collective action for women the world over. “We don’t need a man on a white horse, we don’t need anyone to save us,” she sings with gusto. “We can move mountains, when we harness our own power.” In this country-tinged tune, the Americana septet does exactly that, mobilizing through melody, using their feel-good sound to speak truth to power.

“Feel Nobody” by Butch Dawson

This West Baltimore artist approaches his tracks with a punkish edge, carving out his own corner in the local rap canon as he imbues his smoke-swirled melodies with nonchalant murky beats and, lately, a horror film’s flare. See last fall’s video for “Dead Man Draggin’,” in which Dawson transforms into a woods-wandering zombie a la The Walking Dead. But where that slow-burned with chill wave vibes and jazzy drums, this new number is an edge-of-your-seat thriller. “Feel Nobody” hooks you with its incessant whir, deep bass, and occasional scream-like sample, then Dawson’s delivery brings the suspense—his rhymes gaining new intensity and volume with every hard-hitting verse. At its core, the song is about survival in “the swamps,” as he calls Baltimore’s toughest neighborhoods, and staying unapologetically true to yourself. Keep an eye out for his forthcoming full-length Swamp Boy.

“Caroline” by The High and Wides

Since forming on the Eastern Shore in 2015, the High & Wides have crossed the Chesapeake Bay to Baltimore, combining the backwoods roots of their hometown with the gumption of their new city to create a modern “hillbilly music” revival. From fiery barn burners to heartbroken ballads, this talented string quartet is celebrating the region’s rich bluegrass history, carrying the torch for the Old-Line legends who came before. The band’s boot-stomping first single puts their expert instrumentation and finger-picking finesse on full display. Full of hearty harmonies, lightning banjo, tight fiddle, and driving bass, it’s a simple reminder of how goddamn gorgeous the naked voice and unadulterated instrument can be. We’ll follow their breathless tempos down whatever dusty road—or up whatever chart, as the album just debuted at No. 10 on the Billboard bluegrass chart—they go.

“Invocation: Dear Baltimore” by Judah Adashi and Erricka Bridgeford*

One of the most beautiful things to be born out of the Baltimore Uprising is that of Rise Bmore, a free evening of music, speech, and community that takes place every April 19, on the anniversary of Freddie Gray’s death. Now in its third year, this spring’s event began with the premiere of this breathtaking ballad and love letter to Baltimore. The song combines “Rise,” a Civil Rights-inspired composition by Judah Adashi—Rise Bmore’s founder, plus Peabody professor and organizer of the Evolution Contemporary Music Series—with words by Erricka Bridgeford, the creator of Baltimore Ceasefire, which just celebrated another successful weekend without murder. With ascending piano and aching breaths of flugelhorn, the song evolves from poignant storytelling to courageous poetry. Bridgeford’s husky lines captures the city’s essence in a few simple notes. Listen. Meditate on these words. Feel your heart fill with hope for our hometown of Baltimore.

“4 3 2 4 1” by Smoke Bellow

We first caught wind of this song by way of the long, strange trip of its music video. The short film was so perfectly oddball that it could only have been made in Baltimore. After a three-year hiatus in their Australia homeland, Christian Best and Meredith McHugh returned to Baltimore in 2017 with their first new record in years. Just released via Ehse Records, Isolation 3000 was inspired by Smoke Bellow’s two distant and disparate locales, and includes this otherworldly song. With a new third bandmate, local artist Jessie Hughes, it takes the minimalist experimentation of the band’s past work and evolves it outward—or, rather, inward—down a sort of psychedelic rabbit hole. Swirling in synth loops and droning guitar, McHugh’s meditative incantations urge listeners to follow. Their labyrinthine dreamscape—from space through the ocean to the Outback—is worth getting lost in.

*Not available on Spotify. We’ll add it when if/when it comes online.

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