Annapolis police chief: Gun violence spike driven by proliferation of handguns, mental illness and economic desperation

Technically, Annapolis Police Chief Ed Jackson injured his shoulder while protecting the president of the United States.

Jackson was hurt while returning to his office from a Naval Academy meeting on preparations for President Joe Biden's visit to Annapolis next month to address the graduating class of midshipmen.

"So, I’m on my way back here and I slipped and fell," he said.

The injury will require surgery, but the chief is expected to return to duty quickly and wear a sling for a few weeks.

In an exclusive interview with Meanwhile, in Annapolis, Chief Jackson talked about the preparations but most of the hour-long talk was dedicated to discussing the current spike in violent crime.

Eleven people have been injured in shootings so far this year in the city, surpassing the 10 gun violence victims for all of last year. It is a small number but one that remains a concern. Crime numbers fluctuate, though, and the pace isn't much higher than in 2020.

More importantly, Jackson said what he's seeing is something new for Annapolis, part of a national trend toward higher gun violence. A new analysis of CDC data recently found gunshots have surpassed car accidents as the leading cause of death for American children, teens and young adults.

"It’s a proliferation of handguns," the chief said. "What's driving it depends on who you talk to, but at the core of it is this mentality that we have in our culture right now that we resolve disputes by using a handgun gun."

The chief, who served most of his career in the Baltimore Police Department before moving on to teaching and finally coming to Annapolis three years ago, talked about factors that contribute to rising violence: guns, economic desperation and mental health.

"I think the elephant in the room is that America doesn't face up to the fact that we have millions and millions of people walking around here with mental illness, various forms of mental illness, who shouldn't have handguns," he said. "Even law-abiding citizens, you put a gun … in their presence and they're more apt to use them. "

Jackson is a regular speaker at a variety of community groups in Annapolis, and much of what he said in the interview reflects his public comments in recent weeks.

Several topics will be of interest to anyone who cares about crime in the city. A recent Anne Arundel Community College poll found it is the top concern right now. Topics the chief discussed included:

Finally, Jackson talked about Monday's premiere of the HBO drama "We Own This City" and what impact the six-part series about a corrupt police squad in Baltimore could have on the perception of law enforcement in Annapolis.

"We very may well have people protesting against it and lawyers calling more for police reform, to tighten the reforms after they see this," he said.

Here are highlights from the interview.

Can you capsulize what's going on in Annapolis with violent crime?

Well, I think what's going on in Annapolis is no different than what's going on in America. It’s a proliferation of handguns.

What's driving it depends on who you talk to, but at the core of it is this mentality that we have in our culture right now that we resolve disputes by using a handgun. And ... never in my entire 40-year career, between teaching criminal justice and practicing criminal justice, have I ever seen it this bad.

I think Annapolis is no different than – and I say this all the time when I speak publicly – Annapolis is no different than most American cities and counties for the fact that we have this proliferation of handguns.

What kind of guns do you see here? Have you seen stolen guns? Are you seeing ghost guns?

We're seeing ghost guns (guns altered to make them untraceable). We've experienced all that in Annapolis. In fact, we just had a young man that we took into custody and … one of the things that he was charged with was having a collection of illegal guns that included ghost guns.

We're seeing them from all over the place here. A good many of them were stolen. We have a lot of straw purchases... which is really problematic.

It's not only guys, but guys getting their girlfriends to buy guns for them and then report the gun stolen. That's the scam. That covers her in case the gun's seized in some type of nefarious act like a robbery or shooting. She has an alibi.

So you're seeing a lot of gun crimes. That explains the shootings. What other kinds of crimes are you seeing that involve guns?

Primarily assaults, believe it or not. Still a fair amount of robberies, but people are resolving their disputes – if I'm using the word resolve in the right context. Nothing's resolved. It just makes it worse. But you understand the context in which I'm speaking. People settle their disputes, I should say … by using handguns.

You know, the old proverbial “I used to handgun because I walked into a liquor store,” or “I walked into a bank” or “I robbed a corner grocery store,” those things are still occurring. Don't get me wrong. It hasn't gone out of style.

But guns are used for so much more now. I mean, road rage. You know, cutting somebody off on (Interstate) 97 can be deadly dependent on who's on 97 that day. And people are so willing to use handguns...

I think the elephant in the room is that America doesn't face up to the fact that we have millions and millions of people walking around here with mental illness, various forms of mental illness, that shouldn't have handguns. Even law-abiding citizens, you put a gun … in their presence and they're more apt to use them.

So I don't know how we reconcile that. You know, police chiefs all over America talk about the proliferation of handguns, the problem with it. Then you pick up the paper the next day and some Second Amendment group or handgun rights people like the NRA are breathing down your neck.

So a lot of police chiefs, you know, try to shy away from that. But we can't shy away from it anymore.

At a Caucus of African American Leaders meeting recently, you talked about how desperation by some people contributes to gun violence. Is that connected to drugs?

It’s connected to drugs and it is connected to old disputes, hopelessness, mental illness. I've seen it all in the almost three years that I've been here. Like you said, I think there is a direct link to that level of violence and poverty and underserved communities, mental illness, drug addiction, alcoholism.

I'm talking about young people, too. Alcoholism, dependency, rage and then the availability of handguns contribute a lot. I do think that it's attached to your socioeconomic status, and then the legacy of underserved communities and inequities in our society in terms of, you know, access to those very things that you would have to have access to if a person expects to live a stable life.

How good is this community in addressing the underlying causes of gun violence: mental illness, inequity and the legacy of the social problems you discuss?

I think that I've been pleased over the last couple of years at least of the dialogue. Of course, you want to see that dialogue, see the nouns turn into verbs…. I've had some great dialogue and I've been a part of some great discussions. I think the last time I met with Anne Arundel County was about three weeks ago, with the Health Department – Dr. (Nilesh) Kalyanaraman and Dr. Pamela Brown (Anne Arundel Partnership for Children, Youth and Families) and others, social workers and health care professionals, doctors.

We have to find a way to craft the argument that is a part of the anticrime strategy, it’s not just enforcement, and more police and better deployment plans. We have to talk about infusing mental health services with that.

We have to get the courts to buy into alternatives to incarceration. I would love to hear a judge say: we want this person not to be evaluated to determine their fitness to have a fair trial, but we also want to have this person evaluated to see if they’re fit to reenter into the community...

Let’s talk a bit about your most wanted program, which you said addresses the most violent people. This is an old tool that just got beaten to death through overuse. You brought it back. Why?

I was warned when I proposed to bring it back that some people might be offended by it because, they said, you know what it's going to reveal. Brown, black and brown, people are going to be the only ones profiled.

Personally … I think it's a ridiculous argument at its core. Even if you talk about social justice and racism and stereotyping, we're talking about people who are wanted in a court of law… And to have them languish out there in the community without letting the community know that they're out there, No. 1, and then showing the community there's some kind of effort to at least bring them into court... Because we have an obligation, we have taken an oath to go out and serve that warrant to the best of our ability,

So you had some success. What was the arrest you made?

We made an arrest for a young man. We arrested him about 15 hours after my broadcast … on the Annapolis Annapolis TV station. … and about 15-16 hours later … the guy turned himself in and he was wanted for handgun possession and discharging in the city of Annapolis. To, my surprise, he came here, right here… into the lobby.

We should have never gotten away from that in my view... We owe the public that. You, your significant other, your children have a right to walk the streets of Annapolis and not be accosted by people who are out there just to engage in criminal or predatory behavior, whether it be robberies, rapes and murders.

Is this the same thing as the crime maps you’re going to be putting on the department website?

This is for the public … so that we can show people clusters of crime. So, part of protecting people is empowering them to have the knowledge. You know, the old adage knowledge is power? So we want them to be going to a website and we'll promote that out too. And we're going to show them clusters of crime. In other words, we're going to show where you're more likely most likely to be a victim of robbery or where you're most likely to be a victim of having your car stolen.

That way people can go out... and when they leave their front door they can take the right precautions. We’re not doing it to scare people and make them paranoid because … Annapolis is historically been a very safe city. And I still think compared to most American cities is still relatively safe even when you take into account what happened to … Michelle Cummings last June.

(On June 29, Michelle Cummings of Texas while standing on the porch of an Annapolis hotel when she was killed by a gunshot fired in another neighborhood. Police have charged a man in connection with the homicide. Cummings and her husband were in Annapolis with their son for his induction into the Naval Academy.)

And it still hurts me. It haunts me... I still have days where it's hard for me to shake it, you know, because this shouldn't happen to and it was under my watch, and I take it personally.

You're also in the process of changing to a new national crime reporting system, the National Incident Based Reporting System. Is that the data that’s feeding the crime map?

They’re connected, OK? ... Uniform Crime Reports, as you remember ... had eight index crimes, four persons and four property. Run by the FBI for almost 100 years. It's a very antiquated system.

The best way to describe the difference between the Uniform Crime Reports and this new system, this National Incident Based Reporting System… is that the UCR had a hierarchy. So when you count a crime, you only count the most serious crime in one incident.

So for example, if you had a murder, and the motive behind the murder was robbery and rape. Say a guy approaches a woman abducts her, and he pulls her into an alley and he takes her jewelry, then he actually commits a sexual assault and then kills her – under UCR it only counts as a homicide. It wouldn't count all the other crimes. Only the most serious crime was counted.

Well, really, four or five crimes were committed against that woman. The federal system only counted murder, the most serious crime. Well, NIBRS doesn't have a hierarchy. It counts each individual crime that was committed against that victim. Although it's related to one incident, right?

What I like about the new NIBRS … it's a more honest, and a more transparent means of producing crime reports. And so when we do our pin maps out of NIBRS, we actually want to talk about each individual crime and where they happen in those areas. So even though that robbery may have started out as a burglary and escalated, we still want to count it and say if it happened in Eastport we're going to count that category…

Our crime map, so when you go on our website …, it'll show what's most likely to happen or what has occurred in those communities.

At the Annapolis Rotary Club meeting recently, you talked about public safety cameras, you said the city is investing $1 million in upgrading the system. So what's present now in terms of cameras and how's it going to grow? What's that going to do?

Yeah, well, we found a couple of things, Rick. First of all, our service needs to be upgraded. And that includes city cameras as well as the fiber optics. … But it's two things operating that we're trying to reconcile. The city cameras need an upgrade. And we do have a new server .. and we are installing new cameras all around the city.

A young lady asked a question at the rotary about the cameras. I think her question was why were most of the cameras going toward Dock Street and near the market and further up toward Church Circle and State Circle.

Well, they're going up that way now. But historically we hadn't and that's before I got here they've all concentrated around the bars … because of the problems we’ve had in the bars. But now they are going to be distributed just about everywhere in the city of Annapolis, and we’re only 7.1 square miles as well. So that's not a monumental task. It's a big one.

They don’t solve all crimes. There was a street shooting a few years ago and the camera was just simply pointing in the wrong way. So it's not a panacea, right?

I tell people this all the time, cameras can’t testify. Cameras can’t argue intent. Cameras can distinguish between first and second-degree murder. Citizens can based on what you tell us under oath. Based on what you testify in the court of law, you can fit the testimony into the intent.

You also talked at the Annapolis Rotary meeting about police reform measures that have come out of the State House. So let's start with what's good, what good came out of that effort?

Well, there's parts of it that I do like like. For example, it forces local jurisdictions to provide mental health services for police officers.

Most of all my career, we've always had mental health services, but that was up to the chief or the commissioner. And that was an internal thing but now it mandates and I think that does resonate well with the public.

Parts of the law, like physical fitness programs... I do buy into the theory that if an officer is physically fit, and they're good with hand-to-hand combat, that they don't have to resort to deadly force…

What I'm not a big fan of, overall, it takes a lot of the autonomy away from law enforcement and operates on the premise that police or police departments can't be trusted to discipline our own.

There have been a couple of incidents right here in this department before your time. There was an officer who was alleged to have stolen money from somebody the department knew for bad reasons. That officer was allowed to retire and didn't face charges. Then another officer changed the details of an arrest warrant to fit a suspect. He was promoted.

He just retired, (Sgt. Christopher) Kintop.

The first one, you have no argument. That officer (Cpl. Duane Daniels) had almost 30 years. Under Maryland law, we couldn’t stop his pension, but we still could have charged him. Even if you had to send his pension checks to jail, then you do that. …

He could have had 28 incredible years and then messed up his last two. I’m not even against the argument about taking his pension. But Maryland law is different. Once you earn your pension you earned it. But he still should have been criminally charged. You have no argument from me.

The Kintop one was a little more interesting once I learned what really happened. Let me get it right. Sgt. Kintop did bear some responsibility. But that’s where the narrative got screwed up. It was the white guy that kept getting arrested. It wasn't a black guy...

But Kintop, that was a supervisory thing. And that kind of foolishness I determined to stop.

He left here very bitterly. He sat right at the door, and I kid you not, Rick, this is only a month ago. He gave me a piece of his mind on his last day.

He’d been here for a long time.

Been here for a long time. I think he was a nice guy but I think that he was the poster child for what the Annapolis Police Department had become. And it's no criticism of (former chief Michael) Pistoop or no criticism of (former chief Scott) Baker.

When I got here some of the most important decisions were made by people at the bottom of the chain instead of at the top. So much so, I don't know if you know this, Rick, but this office, my office where I'm sitting at now, was just used under Baker was like a warehouse.

He was downstairs with the troops. And he was going out with him riding the bicycles every day...

Don't get me wrong. I have an obligation to go speak to my people, thanking them for good work and all that kind of stuff. But I'm old school. I think the police chief is primarily an administrative job. And they don't need me running around with the, going on warrants, especially if they do something screwed up.

If I have to discipline I’d rather be primarily the administrator and lead the department than worry about winning friends and influencing people.

I don't want to get too far away from what you were talking about the reforms, loss of autonomy.

We have an accountability board now, trial boards, hearing boards for serious acts of misconduct. ... They make recommendations to the chief and the new law reads that once it’s sustained there's nothing that the chief can do. They can only up to punishment. They can't lower the recommendation. They can only increase it.

For the most serious things, it now rests with the accountability board. And my argument is, is that it wasn't rooted in systemic corruption here. This is all rooted in a political movement… I guess America had enough with the George Floyd incident.

(Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer in May 2021. The death sparked protests and police reform initiatives nationwide. Maryland passed a package of police reforms in the 2021 session.)

And in many ways, I've sat in venues where people talked about Annapolis like it was Minneapolis. And they weren't referring to the Kintop thing or those kinds of things. They were referring to hardcore misconduct that we've never seen here. I mean, hardcore misconduct, you know, we never had a Gun Trace Task Force in Annapolis….

We’ve talked a little bit about the HBO series “We Own This City,” which premieres Monday night. You said you were worried about the impact of that in Annapolis. Why?

So, (“We Own This City”) … will reveal some pretty horrible things about the (Baltimore) police department.

And here's what keeps me up, Rick, and what makes me worry about Annapolis because we have a few councilmen who want to see police department's pretty much done away with here in the city of Annapolis. And my worry is that when they see this HBO special, they will make the argument it’s right here in our backyard.

It’s not like in California or somewhere in the Midwest, it’s right here in our backyard. ...

And I'm afraid that people want to use that to justify the reforms in Annapolis and so we're actually bracing for it. I had a meeting last week with my command staff. I said maybe I'm overreacting, but we have to keep this in the back of our minds…

And I'm just afraid that a lot of people want to attach that somehow to Annapolis. And I'm not the only chief just thinking like this. … And we very may well have people protesting against it and lawyers calling more for police reform, to tighten the reforms after they see this …

Rick Hutzell is a nationally recognized journalist. He lives in Annapolis. Contact him at meanwhileannapolis@gmail.com