The block in East Baltimore where Ashley Long was shot and killed in 2017 is desolate, even by the standards of the surrounding neighborhood. On a Saturday afternoon last spring, a cop in a parked police cruiser surveilled vacant brick row houses and an empty lot where abandoned buildings were demolished a few years back.
“Ghost town,” said Alex Long, Ashley’s older brother and a longtime violence interrupter who lives a few blocks away and is at ease almost anywhere else in the city. “You go over there at your own risk.”
In the seven years since Ashley’s death, there have been 15 more shootings and three people killed on the 700 block of North Rose Street, according to the police. That makes it one of the most dangerous spots in Baltimore. Locals know this neighborhood — bordering Madison-East End and McElderry Park — as “down the hill.” It’s only a half mile from the high-tech facilities of the Johns Hopkins University Hospital, but in 2017, the most recent year for which data is available, life expectancy here was 69 — a decade lower than the national average.
The night before Ashley was killed, she and friends had stayed out late clubbing, according to Long. After they returned to their neighborhood in the early morning hours, Ashley and another woman in the group allegedly argued, then exchanged blows. A witness told police that once they made peace, Ashley even helped the woman with an asthma inhaler and some water. But later that afternoon, two sons of the other woman came looking for Ashley, and the eldest, who was 18 at the time, shot her five times in the back.
Like most killings, Ashley’s was the tragic product of a complicated set of factors, including a young man primed to retaliate, and with easy access to a handgun. But it’s also notable that it took place in a neighborhood saturated with alcohol businesses. On the nearest corner, Q’s Liquor sits across from the Three W’s Tavern, and three more alcohol outlets that sell beverages to go or for drinking on the premises — Club Luzerne, Red Door, and Winston Lounge — are within as many blocks. Both of the women were likely intoxicated, according to Long. “Definitely alcohol was a contributing factor,” he said.
Decades of research has shown that alcohol contributes to violence in a couple of ways. Where alcohol businesses cluster, violence follows. And although most people who consume alcohol do so safely, people who have been drinking are also more prone to conflict. Perpetrators of homicide are rarely apprehended in time to measure their toxicology, but a global meta-analysis found that about half of killers were under the influence of alcohol at the time of their crimes. Data is more reliably collected from the dead, and in Baltimore between 2017 and 2021, nearly a quarter of homicide victims had alcohol in their blood, according to the Maryland Violent Death Reporting System, similar to patterns nationwide.
Both scientists and community leaders insist that drawing a connection between alcohol and violence is not about blaming victims. If anything, they say, it spotlights how alcohol’s availability in a neighborhood is shaped by policies beyond the reach of any individual resident.
Outside a McElderry Park school where his community organization, Tendea Family, was holding a “safe passage” event to walk kids home after the bell, 29-year-old Elijah Miles described the dynamic in the neighborhood as Orwellian. “They make alcohol available so that you can deal with oppression easier,” he said. “Alcohol is available, but not job opportunities. Alcohol is available, but not fruits and vegetables.”
Excessive drinking is no more common in Baltimore than elsewhere in the state, according to the data. But because the city has long endured an extraordinarily high rate of gun violence, public health scientists there have dug into the role that alcohol sales play in fueling it. And residents and a few policymakers have pushed reforms that are more creative and ambitious than in any other American city. In several neighborhoods that require alcohol outlets to close earlier than the regular call-time of 2 a.m., a recent study suggests, the change may be playing an unheralded role in the city’s decline in homicides.
Still, it’s not clear whether city agencies will make good on the systematic reforms that previous administrations have enacted. “If we could get all the laws that we have around alcohol outlets enforced, it would be transformative,” said Dr. Debra Furr-Holden, an epidemiologist who spent more than a decade documenting alcohol’s impact on Baltimore residents. “The problem is, it’s gums without teeth.”
One of the first people to propose a broader reshaping of alcohol sales in Baltimore was community organizer Julius Colon, who’d emerged from gang life on Manhattan’s Lower East Side to earn degrees in political science and nonprofit management from New York University. He relocated to Baltimore in 2009 to head Park Heights Renaissance, a nonprofit focused on community development.
At the time, Baltimore’s homicide rate was in decline — murders reached a 25-year low in 2010 — but the city still ranked among the most violent in America, according to FBI data. Colon set to work establishing a violence interruption program, greening vacant lots, and reopening a community center. As he drove around his new neighborhood, what most stood out was the prevalence of alcohol outlets. “It’s almost like every block I was turning,” he recalled, “there was a liquor establishment.”
Colon watched as the stores in Park Heights opened at 6 a.m., and as children stopped in to buy potato chips and sodas on their way to school. “I took offense to it,” he said. “Our kids are growing up and being indoctrinated to accept liquor as the norm.” Furr-Holden and other researchers later found that a third of Baltimore elementary school students passed one or more alcohol outlets on their way to school each day, and those who did were more likely than others to report having witnessed, at some point in their lives, the sale or use of drugs.
The hours of alcohol sales are dictated by state law rather than city ordinance, so Colon trained his sights on Annapolis, the capital. In 2010, he recruited state Senator Catherine Pugh, who in 2016 would be elected Baltimore’s mayor, to sponsor a bill pushing back the start of alcohol sales in the neighborhood by three hours, to 9 a.m. Then he mobilized community support, bused seniors to the Legislature, and testified before committees in the House and Senate. Colon said that liquor store owners accused him of being antibusiness, which he rejected. “Do I have a problem with liquor establishments? No, I have a problem with the number of liquor establishments in a given neighborhood.”
The district police commander in Park Heights at the time, Johnny Delgado, lent his support because he saw the bill as a means of addressing an overlooked driver of violence. “My whole police department spent years talking about social determinants I can’t control — homelessness, joblessness,“ Delgado said. Shutting off the tap of alcohol sales, by contrast, was immediate and “it really works.” By the end of the session, state lawmakers passed the bill requiring the neighborhood’s outlets to open later in the morning, nearly unanimously.
At the same time, Baltimore officials were trying to address the problem citywide. The new mayor, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, recruited Dr. Oxiris Barbot as health commissioner. Barbot, who was focused on addressing racial inequity, said she quickly began to hear a lot about alcohol.
The city was in the midst of a once-in-a-generation revision of its zoning code and a health impact assessment conducted by Johns Hopkins researchers had drawn attention to the high number of stores selling alcohol for off-premise consumption. When the Health Department held public forums in each City Council district to hear residents’ priorities, more than half of them ranked alcohol sellers among their chief concerns.
The density of outlets was “like a chokehold on these communities,” recalled Barbot, who felt that reducing their number could have an enduring impact on violent crime. Zoning changes often outlast programs and policy initiatives, shaping a city for decades to come. “There’s nothing more hardwired than a city’s zoning code.”
Alcohol never pulls a trigger, but it is a contributing factor in far more shootings than many people realize. Drinking leads to disinhibition, which can make people more aggressive and also easier to victimize, according to Dr. Pamela Trangenstein, who in 2018 wrote her public health dissertation on alcohol outlets in Baltimore. But alcohol commerce also shapes the environment in which victims and perpetrators interact. When alcohol is sold for off-premise consumption, it encourages patrons to loiter and drink nearby, which can be a recipe for conflict. Less obviously, said Trangenstein, as neighbors see norms and regulations being flouted this way, it can eat away at a community’s collective sense of order, further unraveling the social fabric. “Alcohol outlets bring people together in ways that other types of places don’t,” she said.
There’s evidence that closing alcohol outlets improves safety, although few cities have acted on it. In Los Angeles, where hundreds of alcohol outlets were destroyed in the unrest and violence that followed the 1992 acquittal of police officers in the beating of Rodney King, assaults dropped in neighborhoods where fewer alcohol stores were rebuilt. In 2002, after the Brazilian city of Diadema passed a law closing bars at 11 p.m., researchers estimated it cut homicides by 44 percent.
In a case-controlled study published in 2009, researchers found that people in Philadelphia were twice as likely to be shot and four times as likely to be shot dead in areas with more off-premise alcohol outlets than in areas with fewer of them. Soon after, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Task Force on Community Preventive Services concluded that “the regulation of alcohol outlet density can be an effective means of controlling excessive alcohol consumption and related harms,” including crime and violence.
The link between alcohol outlets and violence presents an opportunity, said Daniel Webster, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and a leading expert on firearm policy. “I do not think that policies to curb alcohol sales have been adequately appreciated or implemented for the purpose of reducing gun violence,” he wrote in an email. “The alcohol policy and gun policy worlds have been too siloed.”
But in Baltimore, researchers and community residents have made efforts to connect them. As in many cities, bars and liquor stores are disproportionately concentrated in poorer census tracts with a higher proportion of Black residents. Other factors associated with gun violence are already present, but the density of alcohol outlets can further aggravate them.
In the early 1970s, the city banned stores in residential zones from selling alcohol for off-premise consumption, and ceased giving out new licenses until the existing number fell below 1 per 1,000 adult residents (at that point, there were 2.5). But outlets that were not conforming with the zoning code were permitted to continue operating, and because the population shrank faster over the ensuing decades than did the number of alcohol stores, their concentration actually rose over time.
The Police Department is empowered to identify alcohol stores where multiple shootings or other crimes have occurred within a two-year period, and threaten to “padlock” them unless they take remediating measures like adding lights or security cameras. Closing an outlet this way gives law enforcement leverage to negotiate improvements with other store owners, according to Jason Hessler, deputy commissioner of the Department of Housing and Community Development. “You can do that once and then kind of ride the wave,” he said.
But the frequency with which the department padlocks outlets varies based on who is police commissioner, and since 2008 it has only padlocked eight, according to department data, and none under the current mayor. The city has 1,138 existing alcohol stores.“We shouldn’t have to wait for a murder to occur around a liquor store to use a padlock law,” said Adam Milan, a Baltimorean who studied under Furr-Holden as an undergraduate and published research on alcohol outlets with her.
Under Barbot, the Health Department decided that, instead of just reacting to violence around alcohol outlets, the city could be more proactive about it. In 2012, the department proposed several changes to the rules governing alcohol sales, primarily directed at the 100 or so outlets that were operating in residential zones, which had been prohibited for decades. Outlets in residential zones may have a smaller effect on violence than those in commercial areas, where crime rates are generally higher, but they were already operating illegally and thus an easier target for regulators.
Still, the city couldn’t just shutter them, according to George Nilson, who headed the city’s Law Department at the time. “You can’t just snap your fingers and say goodbye.” So the city’s leaders offered the outlets two years to either transform their businesses into something that didn’t sell alcohol, relocate, or close down.
Residents, scientists, and politicians together pushed for the changes. Colon took reporters on a tour of the liquor stores in his neighborhood. Mayor Brandon Scott, who was then a City Council member, joined Furr-Holden on a local radio station to voice his support. When lawmakers held hearings, the Health Department organized residents to attend, and the meetings were packed.
The city Planning Commission approved the legislation in March 2013. Then the City Council began its own hearings, and the process slowed. In 2014, Barbot left for a job in New York City (she would later be named health commissioner there), and after the killing of Freddie Gray by police that April, homicides in Baltimore shot up more than 50 percent. Years passed. It wasn’t until December 2016, on the second-to-last day of Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake’s term, that she signed the zoning changes into law.
The final measure designated 80 nonconforming alcohol outlets for closure, far short of the 15 percent reduction initially proposed by the Health Department. Still, a team including Furr-Holden calculated that the measure had the potential to prevent 22 homicides a year and save tens of millions in public funds.
The owners of alcohol outlets dug in their heels. When their two-year grace period was up, in 2019, a group of them challenged the rezoning in state court, arguing that the city did not have the power to order their stores closed without compensating them, even if they had been out of compliance for decades. More years went by, and it was December 2022 by the time an appellate court judge finally dismissed the stores’ legal challenge. Meanwhile, more than a dozen store owners got policymakers to spot-zone their addresses as “commercial,” so they could continue to operate even though they remained embedded in residential communities.
The city’s current administration, which has repeatedly named public safety as its top priority, has not identified limits on alcohol sales as a means of achieving it. Despite drawing attention to problematic bars and liquor stores in his time as a city council member, Scott makes no mention of alcohol in the “comprehensive violence reduction plan” his administration released during his first term. The Mayor’s Office did not respond to requests for an interview, but did eventually answer some written questions.
It has been eight years since the rezoning passed, and 14 years since the first calls for eliminating off-premise alcohol sales in residential zones. Their numbers have dwindled, but many remain open.
This spring, Deputy Commissioner Jason Hessler said the Department of Housing and Community Development was aware of 18 alcohol outlets still in operation, and “probably by June,” after reviewing information gathered about them, would send letters revoking their use permits. “It’s just bandwidth, really,” he said. “This is one of a lot of things we focus on.” After The Trace shared a list of additional outlets that appeared to be operating in residential zones, the department revised upward its list of nonconforming outlets to 23, and said the revocation letters were “in process.” In early November, the Mayor’s Office said the letters had been sent.
Citywide, the number of alcohol outlets per 1,000 residents is nearly identical to a decade ago, before the rezoning took place.
Partly out of frustration with the difficulty of outright closing alcohol outlets, several state lawmakers have reverted to Colon’s strategy of tightening hours of operation. Senator Cory McCray, who represents a district in Northeast Baltimore where a couple of dozen alcohol outlets are licensed for on-premise and off-premise sales, introduced a bill in 2020 that sets back their opening from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. and moves up their closing from 2 a.m. to 10 p.m. The Baltimore Police Department wrote a letter in support, hailing the bill as a “creative approach to dealing with a significant crime problem,” and the Legislature passed it into law.
This and other subsequent bills create a patchwork of rules around the city, with some alcohol businesses closing earlier than others on the same street. But that is what this roundabout means of regulation requires, McCray said: “The other parts of the city, I don’t have control of that. But in my footprint, I do have a say.”
There is some evidence that even this piecemeal approach is saving lives. In a study published in April in JAMA Internal Medicine, Trangenstein and other researchers tracked violence in McCray’s district and otherwise similar areas in western Baltimore, and found the change was associated with a 24 percent decrease in violent crime within 800 feet of any alcohol outlet (including taverns subject to the bill that sell alcohol for both on-and-off-premise consumption, and liquor stores that were not subject to it).
The authors noted some limitations: the area affected by the change in hours may have differed in some unobservable way from the areas of the city used as controls, which could account for the reduction in violence. And although the decline in crime had been specific to the area where alcohol outlets closed early, the data could not show whether the reduction was specifically in alcohol-related incidents.
If the study is replicated and holds up, the implications for public safety could be huge: In McCray’s district, which is home to 9,000 people and measures just a square mile, the policy appeared to have prevented 11 homicides in its first 30 months. That degree of impact would be significant even for a costly, complex public safety intervention. In this case, however, that impact didn’t require any carefully tailored programs or police overtime or mass arrests — just a simple change in operating hours.
To be sure, there is a cost for alcohol outlets. M&M Liquor, situated on a bleak corner in East Baltimore, was one of the businesses required to close earlier. Through an inch-thick layer of bullet-proof glass, the cashier said the owner was depressed on account of losing thousands of dollars of business.
For decades, many of the corner stores that sell alcohol have been owned by Korean-Americans, and some have said they feel targeted by lawmakers because of their ethnicity. Mario Chang, president of the nonprofit Korean-American Grocers and Licensed Beverage Association, which advocates for local retailers, is conflicted about any narrowing of store hours. His family has owned a liquor store in the Mondawmin neighborhood for 31 years, and he appreciates the importance of preventing crime. “Everybody has concerns with violence in the neighborhoods,” he said. But he also claimed that the change in hours had reduced some stores’ revenue by as much as 30 percent.
Chang contended that if alcohol outlets contribute to violence because people congregate around them, take-out restaurants and other late-night businesses ought to be required to close earlier, too. Trangenstein said some studies connect late-night fast food joints to crime, but the relationship isn’t as strong. “Policies that target alcohol outlets aim to focus on those businesses that have some of the highest risk for violence,” she wrote in an email.
There’s a tension for residents, too, because in Baltimore neighborhoods as much as anywhere, drinking is a customary ritual of relaxation. And for people with little means to go out to restaurants or bars, the street is one of the few available public spaces to congregate.
On the block in East Baltimore, as people gathered on stoops, nursing Jack Daniels minis and Bud Ice tall boys, Eugene Brown, the vice president of the McElderry Park Community Association, blasted R&B from a boom box attached to his mechanized wheelchair. “We just want to enjoy life and enjoy each other,” he said.
He supported the change in hours for alcohol outlets, but he was quick to point out that the law treats as equal a lounge patronized by an older crowd, who he felt caused little harm, and another regularly visited by trouble. Although the outlets on a nearby corner now closed early, mere blocks away — outside the boundaries of McCray’s district — others remained open until 2 a.m.
An easy solution would be for the state Legislature to shorten the hours for all alcohol outlets in Baltimore, observed Trangenstein. “If lawmakers in Baltimore are looking to get more serious about reducing violence around outlets, making this a citywide initiative is a good way to go.”
Alex Long isn’t entirely convinced. Seven years after Ashley’s death, his voice drops as he reflects on the loss. “A small piece of me died then,” he said. Having mostly raised her himself, Ashley was in some ways more of a daughter to him than a sister. He had watched her overcome childhood learning disabilities to ultimately get a degree in early childhood development. “Whatever she had, whatever you needed, there was no hesitation,” he said.
He thought the change in alcohol outlet hours was worthwhile, but also knew violence stems from multiple causes. In his neighborhood, where trauma is rife and mental health services scarce, “alcohol becomes the medicine.” And he was skeptical that shortening alcohol sales hours was enough. “The bars can close at whatever time but unless we get these people a real opportunity at something different,” Long said, “that’s what will create the change.”
