How Much of Baltimore's Violence is Political?

As some of you know, my main "beat" is civil violence, but since my return from Ghana, I've been thinking more about violence here stateside, particularly urban violence (actually, the interest ultimately comes from a conversation I had with one of our Ph.D. students before heading to Liberia about "resilient communities," but that's another story).

As even more of you may know, my home turf of Baltimore is a pretty violent place (28XX Greenmount Ave?  Basically right around the corner from my house).  If you're not aware of this, jeepers, go watch The Wire already.  It's only Februrary, and so far we've had 16 homicides (see the sidebar).  In 2011, Baltimore had a total of 196 murders, and that was a significant drop from the 300+ murders per year the city had been seeing in the 1990s.  For comparison, the UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict Dataset counts you as having an armed conflict if there are 25 battlefield deaths per year.  And the Correlates of War datasets count you as having an intra-state war if there are at least 1,000 deaths per year (the same overall number is used for their newer non-state war dataset) - but in a whole country.

Of course, the difference between Baltimore and, say, Darfur, is supposed to be that the violence in Baltimore isn't political.