The secret to Baltimore's extraordinary year
This April, Baltimore saw five homicides. That is the fewest of any month since 1970, when the city began tracking monthly homicide numbers. In the first six months of the year, homicides were down 22% compared to 2024, and non-fatal shootings were down 19%. This is the latest in a string of historic declines in violent crime. In 2024, homicides dropped 23% from 2023 numbers, and non-fatal shootings dropped 34%. In 2023, the city also saw record-breaking decreases.
What has made Baltimore — which President Trump and other conservatives deride as a “filthy” Democrat-controlled “slum” — so successful in making its streets safer?
Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott (D), who was first elected in 2020, has brought the city’s homicide rate down by treating violent crime as a public health crisis. That means treating violent crime as a symptom of multiple factors, including racism, poverty, and past violence. Addressing violent crime as a public health issue involves going beyond arresting people after violence is committed and taking proactive and preventative measures.
“What Baltimore did that's so impactful is really invested in a whole ecosystem of community–oriented interventions,” The Vera Institute for Justice's Daniela Gilbert told Popular Information. Under Scott, Baltimore has fought violent crime not only through policing but through a network of programs that provide support for housing, career development, and education.
In today's political environment, these approaches are frequently derided as "woke" and "naive." But the dramatic decline in violent crime in Baltimore over the last few years suggests that there is a better word to describe its holistic strategy: effective.
Targeting the root causes of gun violence
In December 2020, Scott announced the creation of the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement (MONSE), which oversees city agencies and community partners working to reduce violence in the city and “work[s] to ensure accountability across Baltimore’s holistic violence reduction strategy.”
In January 2022, MONSE launched the Group Violence Reduction Strategy (GVRS). The strategy, launched in partnership with the Baltimore Police Department and the State’s Attorney’s Office, utilizes a collaboration between law enforcement, community members, and social services to “engag[e] directly with those most intimately involved in and affected by violence.” The GVRS aims to target the root causes of gun violence, such as poverty, mental health, and housing issues, by matching participants with a life coach. Participants are also provided with financial support while they seek employment.
The GVRS has delivered results. As of February 2024, the program had a recidivism rate of only 4.3%. An evaluation by the University of Pennsylvania’s Crime and Justice Policy Lab found that the GVRS significantly reduced violence in the city’s Western District, where the program was initially implemented. "[D]uring the first 18 months of implementation,” there was “a 33% approximate gun violence reduction, 60 fewer victims, and a 33% approximate carjacking reduction,” according to the study.
Baltimore also created multiple programs to provide young people with more resources and opportunities. The Summer Youth Engagement Strategy, for example, focuses on deterring violence during spring and summer vacations. The strategy, which was launched in 2023, provides “events, opportunities, and resources for young people to enjoy themselves in a safe environment,” including pool parties, block parties, and summer camps. The city also works with community violence intervention partners on summer weekends to engage with young people and mediate conflicts that could lead to violence in high-traffic areas. For spring vacation this year, the city launched “27 spring break opportunities with about 630 young people registered.”
In a press release from the Mayor’s office, Scott credited the program with helping to reduce youth violence. “Correlated with the strategy’s activation last summer, youth shooting victimizations decreased 66 percent and aggravated assault victimizations dropped 31 percent in 2024,” the release stated.
In December, Scott announced that the city was launching a School-Based Violence Intervention Program pilot, which involved pairing four high schools with community-based organizations. Specialists at each school worked to “shift community norms about the acceptability of violence,” “provide counseling for students at the highest risk for violence,” and strengthen “conflict management skills.”
In 2021, Baltimore also partnered with the nonprofit Everytown for Gun Safety to develop a data intelligence tool to help the Baltimore Police Department solve crimes involving firearms.
Mediation over incarceration
Another program that Baltimore has implemented in an effort to reduce violence in the community is Safe Streets, which involves community members mediating conflicts in ten zones throughout the city that have historically had high gun violence rates. In 2020, Safe Streets zones “mediated over 2,300 conflicts” and “hosted 451 community mobilization events with 58,000+ total attendance,” according to MONSE.
Safe Streets, which launched in Baltimore in 2007 and expanded under Scott, has successfully reduced shootings in key neighborhoods. Several Safe Streets sites in the city have even gone a full year or more without any homicides under the program.
A 2023 study by the Center for Gun Violence Solutions at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health found that Safe Streets Baltimore “reduced homicides and nonfatal shootings overall from 2007 to 2022.” The study, which was funded by MONSE, found that the program was “associated with a 23 percent reduction in nonfatal shootings,” with the five longest-running Safe Streets sites seeing, on average, 32% lower homicide rates in the first four years.
While the study found that implementing Safe Street sites did not always lead to fewer shootings, with some neighborhoods experiencing no effect or an increase in gun violence, it stated that the overall pattern was “very encouraging.”
A surgical approach to law enforcement
In addition to community interventions and services, traditional law enforcement also has a role to play in Baltimore’s efforts to reduce violent crime, but experts say it is a more narrow role than police have played in the past.
“People do have this natural idea [that] if you want to reduce crime, you have to lock people up,” said Ben Struhl, executive director of the Crime and Justice Policy Lab at the University of Pennsylvania, who helped Baltimore develop its GVRS.
But Struhl and Jeremy Biddle, who is the Lab’s director of Violence Reduction Policy and Programs and who worked for Baltimore City, including on the GVRS, said that in the past, indiscriminate arrests have put more people in the justice system without reducing crime.
Instead, Biddle said the Baltimore police are now focusing on a smaller group of people who are responsible for most of the city’s violence. Biddle has studied nearly every homicide in Baltimore over the last six years and said that the city aligns with a national trend: “A small fraction — typically under 2% of a given community — is tied to as much as 50 to 75% of all shooting and homicide incidents.”
Gilbert, from The Vera Institute for Justice, echoed that a narrow focus helps law enforcement better combat community violence. She also stressed that collaboration with the city can help build trust and accountability for the police department. The Baltimore Police Department has been under a mandate from a federal judge since 2017 to make reforms in response to multiple violations of citizens’ rights, including the death of a man in police custody during transportation. In April, a federal judge released the department from two clauses of the mandate related to officer wellness and the safe transportation of detainees.
Gilbert commended Baltimore for targeting the right people with law enforcement and otherwise focusing on "supporting people and connecting folks with the kind of support that is actually reliable for them.”
I've lived in Baltimore since 1970. We had a health commissioner who proposed this effective strategy 20 years ago, but mayors ignored it or paid lip service. Brandon Scott has followed through with great results.
This is an important topic and potentially a good lesson for Democrats willing to listen and not simply accept Republican framing on the incidence of violent crime in the United States. We don't have to keep throwing money at municipal police forces and arming them like they're military units.