Was Kimberly Klacik the Unexpected Solution to Baltimore's Ills?
North Charles Street in Baltimore. Photo courtesy of Bruce Emmerling.
Few cities in America are as plagued by urban blight as Baltimore. Even more, with a majority African-American population, systemic racial inequalities are exacerbated in this city with strikingly high rates of poverty and crime. Conservative Kimberly Klacik says she may have the solutions for the city’s ills.
Klacik is an African American politician who ran as the Republican nominee for Maryland’s 7th congressional district, which includes Baltimore, in both the special election in April 2020 and the general election in November 2020. She garnered national attention when former President Trump endorsed her. Though she lost both elections, she achieved notably high levels of popularity and drew a striking contrast to the city’s former representative, Elijah Cummings. Her campaign video titled “Democrats Don't Care About Baltimore,” which featured her touring West Baltimore and pointing out its various problems, went viral. Evidence of the city’s decay certainly corroborates Klacik’s view that Baltimore has often been ignored or failed by politicians. In an exclusive interview with the Columbia Political Review, Klacik outlined what needs to change.
There is something almost viscerally surprising about Klacik that one can only glean from a personal interaction. Klacik is an anomaly, and not just because her politics contrast with the vast majority of America’s Black population, 89% of which voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Klacik’s rhetoric weaves between classical conservatism, Trumpian populism, and an ineffable third factor, which perhaps represents her effort to reconcile her partisan allegiances with the reality of being a Black woman in America today. During the interview, she is brazenly confident about her political stances and yet simultaneously open minded, eager to hear feedback both from her constituents and outside observers like myself. She also staunchly defends her political party while acknowledging the areas in which it desperately needs reform.
Klacik explained how Baltimore continues to fail its citizens in many respects. She cited the limited job opportunities, poor public education system, and lack of social mobility. In her campaign video, Klacik noted that garbage collectors rarely collect the trash. A 2015 Harvard study showed that poor children have the lowest likelihood of social mobility in Baltimore compared to any other large American county. Even before the pandemic, the city had an unemployment rate nearly twice the national average and one of the largest racial income gaps in America.
Baltimore City Harbor. Photo courtesy of Baltimore Bio Crew.
Klacik asserts that a Republican solution is necessary because the Democrats have failed the city miserably. According to Klacik, the Democratic municipal and congressional governments, in both legitimate and illegitimate ways, are to blame for the city’s dilemmas, and not the majority-minority population. She reasoned, “a lot of people have been depending on the government for the last 4 generations. It reaches a point where you have drug dealers and gangs as the only people in the community who are successful, so kids grow up aspiring to be like the gang members.” She also cited family structure a contributing factor. “The 1994 crime bill that takes fathers out of the home, and various government programs which don’t allow fathers to live in households in order to receive benefits, all lead to less income and the absence of someone to help modify the children's behavior. The child will go looking for father on the street, and nearly everyone I’ve talked to has explained that once they enter a gang, it's super hard to get out of, and so the cycle continues.” Beyond these phenomena, she explains that Democrats have controlled Baltimore for the last 50 years, “so it has been easy for them to leverage the urban struggle in order to receive funds from the state and federal level, which are supposed to go to solving problems on the ground, but don’t get there. Each year they request more funding, but it goes elsewhere — to other projects, or sometimes themselves. This level of corruption is due to the essentially one party mob rule of the city.”
Klacik alludes to the city’s historical success in her campaign ad. From the mid-18th to the late-19th century, Baltimore was very prosperous, rivaling New York and Philadelphia. It faced a steep decline into urban blight starting in the early 20th century with the erosion of the manufacturing and trading industries. Baltimore became one of the first cities to implement widespread residential segregation. Throughout the past century, the local and federal governments created racialized public housing, road development, and redlining in order to protect the property value of white neighborhoods, which ultimately impoverished and alienated Black communities. The Baltimore government circumvented the 1917 Supreme Court case Buchanan v. Warley, which ruled that residential segregation ordinances were unconstitutional, by instead strategically creating districts. Resulting segregated areas faced detrimental urban renewal projects such as the construction of disruptive express highways that solely benefited white business interests. In the 1990s, studies revealed the city had the highest rates of drug abuse and violent crime in America, as well as one of the lowest performing school systems.
Klacik ran on a platform of job creation, and her program to revitalize the manufacturing industry is reliant on crime reduction. “When you look at cities like Detroit, and Baltimore, as soon as jobs went overseas, the opportunities left the city. People call it white flight, because the people dependent on the government couldn't leave and they are who still remain today. As the population declined, the leadership didn't do enough to replenish it and didn't act fast enough in combating emergent problems like crime.” Due to this, many investors and businesses no longer consider Baltimore. She brought up the example of Amazon, which she explained considered the city for its headquarters 2 years ago, but ultimately decided against it due to the high rates of crime.
One of Klacik’s solutions was to increase funding for the police department, which she believes is “extremely understaffed.” Yet Klacik is not among the many members of the Republican party who deny police brutality and institutional racism. Alongside increased funding, Klacik endorses widespread police reform. “When we see police brutality, that goes back to what they are trained to do. We must fund the police so that they can have better training, and recruit great candidates. So much that needs to be changed, but defunding is the opposite of how to solve it.”
Police cars line a Baltimore street. Photo courtesy of Kena Goebel.
Baltimore law enforcement certainly needs radical reform. In large part due to the Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights passed 50 years ago, police in Baltimore work with little transparency or oversight; the city’s police oversight board cannot even investigate police misconduct. Baltimore currently incarcerates the highest proportion of its population of any American city. Evidently, the vast policing in the status quo is not solving the issue of crime, and if police presence increases, there is no indication that the trends will shift. Black neighborhoods are policed far more than white ones, which leads to more arrests there—an especially pernicious problem in racially segregated cities like Baltimore. In America, a Black man is 6 times as likely as a white man to be incarcerated in his lifetime. For the same crime, his sentence will be 20% longer on average than a white man. Mass incarceration results in higher poverty levels in predominantly Black communities by blocking Black men’s work potential and creating more single parent homes. Furthermore, the current recidivism rate in America is over 80%, revealing that imprisonment largely fails at its mission of reforming people and thus does not eradicate violence in the long-term.
Klacik says she wants to end the school-to-prison pipeline. Yet in order to stop the school-to-prison pipeline, more solutions must be provided than merely contending with the police. There are few other opportunities in kids’ neighborhoods besides crime. Studies show that after-school programs for kids, which are often not provided in low income areas, can make them less likely to commit crimes and provide them with intellectual and emotional support that leads to higher academic achievement and improved well being. Often, schools that are over-policed have few guidance counselors, social workers, or other resources. In fact, almost 2 million American students attend schools with police but no counselors.
One of Klacik’s justifications for increasing police funding, and for various other proposals, is that it is what the people of Baltimore want. In fact, she claimed in her campaign video that she has never met a resident of West Baltimore who did not want to increase the police presence. At one point in our interview, she politely inquired as to whether I had ever visited West Baltimore myself. She reasoned, “It's so hard to explain what West Baltimore is really like to people not from here.” The campaign video could not present the full picture, she explained, because it did not portray the locals. “A lot of people here see that life shouldn't be this way, and really want it to change.”
According to Klacik, many African Americans align themselves with the Democratic Party because of misconceptions. “A lot of them believe that if you are anything other than a Democratic, you are a racist. There is this mindset that Democrats are socially good and Republicans are socially bad.” She has a response for that. “I ask them if their life has gotten better or worse over the last 30 year, and they say worse, but they don't see a correlation between that and the people who are running the city. A key part of getting people to vote Republican is simply to inform them of what is going on and how the current politics are affecting their daily lives for the worse.” Klacik stated that a key tenet of the Republican party is “going to church and honoring God,” which she views as intimately connected with one’s political stances. She continued: “Most Black people grow up in the church, so it's surprising that not more of us sway towards the Republican party.”
A 2015 march in North Baltimore in support of criminal justice reform legislation. Photo courtesy of Stephen Melkisethian.
Though on one hand, Klacik stresses the complete ineptitude of the Democratic governments that have led Baltimore to its current state, she also understands that many of these issues pose entrenched challenges and require comprehensive solutions. A key aspect of Klacik’s reform efforts centers around her desire to create school choice, which she claims will improve the education system and reduce the school-to-prison pipeline.
The issue of school choice exemplifies the intertwined nature of socioeconomic barriers, the education system, and crime. School choice involves the state giving vouchers to families so they can choose where to send their child to school, including public schools out of their district or private schools that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive. It takes funding away from public schools, especially underperforming ones, which further deteriorates them. However, many still lack practical choice in this system. Low-income families often send their children to these underperforming public schools because they cannot afford transportation to other schools, they need after school care or other programs the public school offers, or they struggle to provide their kids with the resources to gain acceptance into well-funded schools.
Klacik acknowledges that school choice is far from a perfect solution. While it may not come across in her campaigning content, she is actively seeking to remedy its problems. “With the few charter schools in the area now, kids can use the public transportation system to get there, which removes this cost burden, but some zip codes dont have the opportunity to send kids to these schools.” She explains that five years ago, the government planned to put a bus line through Baltimore city to nearby suburbs, but the idea was shut down. “Everyone asked why the government would stop this plan, which would help the communities who need it the most.” She theorized that the government likely worried that it would allow for the spread of crime from the city to more areas.
As I spoke with Klacik, she was enroute to a church in West Baltimore, where she would spend the day volunteering with a Maryland food bank. She plans to continue her non-profit community work as well as run for political office again, but is hesitant about another campaign bid in a deep-blue area. Beyond her lack of support within a liberal population, she confided that “the old guard was not happy with minorities running for office. The Maryland GOP didn't support me running, and whether it was because I’m Black or not, I'm not sure.”
Yet Klacik does have some hope for the 7th district. She explained that in the special election in April, she received roughly three thousand votes, while in November, she garnered close to thirteen thousand. Voters can certainly expect to see Klacik on a ballot again—whether she is the cure to systemic injustices remains to be seen.
Claire Schweitzer is a freshman at Columbia College studying Political Science and Middle Eastern Studies. At CPR, she is a staff writer and enjoys writing about domestic and foreign policy issues.