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Within four hours: Three shootings, two fatal, drug-related as usual. It was a particularly deadly stretch, even for Baltimore, one of the most dangerous cities in the nation, where more than 6 percent of the population is hooked on drugs and the narcotics trade flourishes in slums that are sometimes called “the other Baltimore.” Meanwhile, the FBI had just reported that violent crime in the city had increased for the first time since 1999. For Dan Rodricks, a veteran columnist for the Baltimore Sun, covering homicides, drugs, and turf wars was nothing new, though the shootings, combined with the knowledge that the city seemed only to be slipping deeper into a morass of violence, left him unsettled and angry. “You feel like grabbing somebody and shaking them,” he said recently. “Can you stop this please?”
As he sat down to write his column for the following day’s paper on a Wednesday in early June, he had a thought that, even at the time, seemed absurd. Perhaps he could appeal directly to the dealers to curb the violence. Maybe some would listen. “Dear Baltimore drug dealers,” he began, “I promise this will be the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever heard. Here goes: How about taking the summer off to see what it might be like around here without all the shooting and killing? Serious. How about a cease-fire? A little break could save lives, maybe even your own.” He included his phone number in the column and offered to set dealers up with part-time work if they were looking to ease out of “the life.” The column drew its fair share of critics, among them a local talk-radio host. Rodricks was practicing kumbaya journalism, some said. Dealers don’t want a nine-to-five; besides, they don’t even read the paper.
The first call arrived at 4:30 a.m. on the day the column was published, and Rodricks would receive many more in the days, weeks, and months that followed. Indeed, his phone has not stopped ringing since. Most of the callers are men in their late twenties to mid-forties. They are dealers and addicts, some are both. Most have done time. All want out of the game, but don’t know where to turn. So they turn to Dan Rodricks.
To date, Rodricks has received more than 600 calls, not to mention those from worried mothers and grandmothers seeking help for their children and grandchildren. On an average day, he gets between ten and fifteen calls, though he has received as many as fifty. “I’m calling about your jobs program,” one recent caller told Rodricks. Recalling this conversation, Rodricks chuckled, because, after all, he’s a columnist, not an outreach worker. And he’s not running a “program” per se. Or is he? Lately, it’s certainly been getting harder to find the time to write his column, he acknowledged.
Rodricks, who’s fifty-one and has been a Sun columnist for the past twenty-six years, has no experience to speak of when it comes to job placement or drug treatment, the primary needs of his callers. As his original plea snowballed into a local phenomenon, the columnist initially thought to himself, “What do I do now?” As it turned out, he and his callers would help each other. They tell Rodricks their stories, which often become fodder for his columns, and he, in turn, links them to job and treatment programs. One of these programs, Supporting Ex-Offenders in Employment Training and Transitional Services, run by Goodwill Industries, has received nearly a hundred referrals from Rodricks. Of those, twenty-five are now employed and thirty others have enrolled in the program.
If anything, this exercise in public-service journalism has awakened Rodricks to a problem that is far more complicated than he realized. Exiting the drug life, after all, is more difficult than anyone might think. For one, employers are reluctant to hire ex-offenders, and since many firms now run background checks, there’s no outrunning the past. He has also found the infrastructure that’s in place to help addicts insufficient. The wait for an open slot in a treatment program, for instance, can last days or weeks, during which time some addicts backslide or simply change their minds.
For Sun readers, Rodricks’s work may dislodge some misconceptions about the people who live and deal on the streets of “the other Baltimore.” “The stereotype is that a lot of the people that live in these neighborhoods are lazy and don’t want to work,” said Mike Adams, the Sun’s assistant city editor. Rodricks has also cut to the heart of an epidemic of drug-related violence that the paper has covered episodically — “a murder here, an act of violence there, a court case here,” Adams said. “He’s put a face on a deep problem in this city and other cities as well.”
Friends have asked Rodricks when he’ll drop the crusade and focus on other things. Perhaps he’ll continue through the end of the year, perhaps longer, he said. “I don’t know when to stop because the phone keeps ringing, and I’ve heard so many interesting stories. It’s kind of irresistible because you don’t know where the next phone call’s going to lead.”
— Daniel Schulman
To read the articles in the January/February 2006 issue, click here.
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