Today I stumbled across a report that was compiled in the wake of the BELIEVE campaign, the famed public call-to-action by the O’Malley administration that called Baltimore citizens to fight against the ills of drugs in their communities.  The report I found was a self-congratulatory assessment of the campaign by the advertising firm who worked with the city on the project, Linder & Associates, Inc., based in New York City with offices on Park Avenue.  You can view it here.

As part of their campaign, Linder & Associates conducted surveys to get a feel for where city residents stood on the problem of drugs.  Two particularly interesting statistics:

- “Caucasians in Baltimore are less likely than African-Americans to see Baltimore’s drug problem as their own problem, at least to the extent that they need to take some action to oppose it.”

- “Only 47% of Caucasians polled said they were likely to take some action as a result of BELIEVE appeals compared with 76% of African-Americans.”

Of course I realize that this was an advertising firm conducting a survey, but this is still revealing, and I think captures a fundamental breakdown in Baltimore’s efforts to right itself and truly change.  BELIEVE was a flawed effort but one thing it had right was that for Baltimore to make progress in the fight against drugs, the city will need everyone’s help, not just those living in neighborhoods most affected by the drug trade.  This is a complicated problem, but if time has taught Baltimoreans anything it’s that fixing this problem is going to take sustained effort on everyone’s part, not just those who are most directly at risk.

There are many passages in the report that time has made compelling, and I won’t rehash the full contents, but I felt that one section needed to be highlighted for irony’s sake:

“In the words of Baltimore’s Mayor, Martin O’Malley, BELIEVE is a call to the people of the city to rise up and ‘risk action on faith.”