Today, we continue our series of Conversations with the Candidates with the first of several conversations with people who are running to be the next Mayor of Baltimore City. Tom's guest for the hour is one of 15 thus-far announced Democratic candidates for Mayor, Thiru Vignarajah.

Mr. Vignarajah is a veteran city and federal prosecutor who’s spent most of his legal career in public service. He attended Yale University and Harvard Law School, where he served as president of the Harvard Law Review. He went on to clerk for Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer. He later served as a federal prosecutor at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Baltimore. He also headed the Major Investigations Unit in the Baltimore State’s Attorney’s office. In 2014, he was appointed Deputy Attorney General for Maryland, a position he left to work on the transition team for the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign in 2016.

Mr. Vignarajah is currently a litigation partner at the law firm DLA Piper in Baltimore.

Thiru Vignarajah is 43 years old. He lives in Federal Hill. This is his second campaign for a city-wide office. He ran unsuccessfully for Baltimore State’s Attorney in 2018.

He is promising a dramatic reduction in the number of people murdered in our city, pledging that if elected, fewer than 200 people will be killed by the end of his first term in office.

That pledge seems all the more ambitious given that in 2019, our city suffered the highest per capita murder rate in history. 348 people, mostly African American men, were killed, mostly by being shot. More than twice that many were shot and injured.

This conversation was live-streamed on WYPR's facebook Page. Watch the video here.

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