When Fredrick Bealfield became a cop, he went after the drug dealers. After all, his city seemed overrun with them. It took him years to decide drugs weren’t the real problem. The problem, he says, was people using guns to commit crimes.
When he became Baltimore’s top cop, he took this realization with him. He told his force to let the person with the bag of weed get away. Instead, he told police to go after the man with the gun. He claims this unconventional strategy lowered the murder rate in Baltimore dramatically.
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