A 15-year-old boy was arrested and charged in the beating and robbery of a Baltimore Police Department civilian employee, according to local reports.
The attack was captured on camera. The 59-year-old employee worked as a lab technician for the police department.
The video shows three teens surrounding the man before they punched him, knocked him down, and kicked him until he appeared to go unconscious.
After that, the teens are seen going through his pockets. Police later confirmed the man was robbed.
The teen suspect was arrested on Monday, July 29 at a store in Columbia, Maryland.
“This arrest was the direct result of the community’s outrage to this crime and the subsequent help that residents provided police,“ Baltimore Police Major Milton Snead said in a statement to the Sun. ”The floodgates of social media and anonymous tips opened and the information poured in.”
The victim was described as a Muslim, and there were questions about whether the attack was a hate crime.
Violent Crime in Baltimore
New crime statistics released by the FBI place Baltimore’s homicide rate last year well above that of any other large American metropolis, making it an anomaly in the national crime landscape for U.S. cities with populations over 500,000 people.
The 342 homicides notched last year in Maryland’s biggest city yielded a punishing homicide rate of 56 per 100,000 people, according to the FBI’s annual Crime in the United States report released Monday. Earlier this year, Baltimore had announced 343 slayings for the year, but three deaths were reclassified, eventually bringing the total to 342 in the city of roughly 615,000 inhabitants. The per capita rate was a record high for the city.
Among major U.S. cities, Baltimore was followed in the FBI’s annual tally by Detroit, which last year recorded a homicide rate of 40 per 100,000 people; Memphis, Tennessee, with a rate of 28 per 100,000; and Chicago, with a rate of 24 per 100,000. But some smaller cities reported a higher homicide rate than Baltimore’s. St. Louis, with a population slightly over 300,000, had a rate of 66 murders per 100,000 people.
Overall, the FBI says the national violent crime rate decreased by 0.2 percent from 2016 to last year, making Baltimore’s record tally stand out even more for large urban centers. In comparison, Houston, with over 2 million residents, had a rate of 12 homicides per 100,000 people. Boston, with less than 700,000 residents, had eight slayings per 100,000.
Violent crime rates in Baltimore have been notoriously high for years. In recent decades, the city’s gritty realities helped make it the setting for hard-boiled crime shows such as “The Wire,” “The Corner,” and “Homicide.” But there’s been a worrying march of killings since the 2015 death of Freddie Gray, who suffered a fatal injury in police custody, that eventually set a new per capita high in 2017.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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