While they're not quite the reasons Ray Lewis was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame on Saturday, his impassioned vocals and rhetoric on and off the field were hallmarks of the linebacker's career.
Even though he hasn't played a snap in five years, that part of the former Raven's personality is still as active as ever. His latest grandiose statement requires a bit of inspection, however: He claimed to have an effect on crime in Baltimore during his career.
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Ray Lewis said the contagious positive energy surrounding his induction reminds him of his playing days. "When I played, crime went lower in Baltimore," Lewis said. "It’s like, nobody needs to be mad now. It’s like everybody wants to be happy and celebrate."
— Jamison Hensley (@jamisonhensley) August 3, 2018
It would be difficult to prove that any change in crime statistics was a direct result of an athlete's presence in a city, but Lewis is right to a certain degree.
In 2017, The Baltimore Sun examined the city's homicide totals since 1990. The accompanying graphic showed that between 1996, Lewis' rookie year, and 2012, the last regular season of his career, homicides dropped from 333 to 216 and went as low as 197 in 2011.
STEELE: Ravens' image, identity still Ray Lewis even as he enters Hall of Fame
When fact-checking a claim from former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley about crime in Baltimore, The Washington Post found that the overall crime rate — the number of crimes per 100,000 people — fell 48 percent from 1999 to 2009. The city also experienced the third-largest drop in violent crime during that span, trailing just Los Angeles and New York. City-data.com found that the downward trend of Baltimore's crime rate continued from 2009 to 2012.
It's far more likely, of course, that these directional trends were a result of the tougher policing strategies O'Malley enacted as mayor of Baltimore (1999-2006) and governor of Maryland (2007-15) and not Lewis.
This wasn't the first time Lewis had claimed a correlation between crime with football. In 2011, when NFL owners locked out the players, he told ESPN he believed crime would increase if the lockout lasted into the regular season.
"Do this research if we don’t have a season — watch how much evil, which we call crime, watch how much crime picks up if you take away our game,” Lewis said. “There's too many people that live through us, people live through us. Yeah, walk in the streets, the way I walk the streets, and I’m not talking about the people you see all the time."
With his induction into the Hall of Fame, Lewis' legacy as a football player is sure to last a long time. That legacy might last even longer if he stays away from topics related to crime.