How Baltimore's violent crime rate hit an all-time low: ‘This is not magic. It's hard work'

The Guardian

4 days ago

The end of violence in Baltimore is a litany of stories that weren't told in 90-second clips on the evening news, about shootings that didn't happen.
The untold stories sound different, said Sean Wees: 'The guys had guns pointed at each other. We got in between.'
One summer afternoon, two years ago, two men emerged from a corner store at Patapsco Avenue and 5th Street, steps from Wees's office at Safe Streets, in Baltimore's Brooklyn neighborhood.
'They had a little face-off in the store,' Wees said. 'Words were exchanged when they stepped out the store.'
A woman in the neighborhood saw what was about to go down and banged on the door of Safe Streets, a longstanding city-run violence-prevention program and a fixture in Baltimore. Wees knows his community, and knew one of the men well – a guy with a high potential for violence. A shooter. The other guy was new, Wees said.
The neighborhood was still reeling from a mass shooting that June. Safe Streets had de-escalated five fights at a Brooklyn Day block party, but weren't on the scene when a gunfight started there late that night. Two people died, 28 were injured and Wees was on edge.
He and his co-worker Corey Winfield rushed outside to find both men shouting at each other with guns drawn.
'We stood in between,' Wees said. 'Corey was talking to one, and I was talking to a guy that was from the community.' Wees and Winfield carefully talked them back from the cliff.
'That's why having that rapport and being very active in your community is real important with this work,' Wees said. 'Because if you don't have that rapport, you're not going to get them to put away those guns, because you don't know what this man is thinking. You don't know if he had that respect for you, enough to not blow your brains out along with the next man.'
Violent crime in America's big cities has been receding from pandemic highs for about two years. But even in comparison, Baltimore's improvement is breathtaking: fewer people have been killed in the city over the last seven months than in any similar period in the last 50 years.
As of 15 August, the running 365-day total for murders in Baltimore stood at 165 dead. Assuming the city remains on that pace, its murder rate would finish below 30 per 100,000 residents for the first time since 1986. If it remains on the pace set since 1 January, it would finish 2025 at 143 murders, a rate of about 25 per 100,000, last seen in Baltimore in 1978.
It confounds Baltimore's bloody legacy. An army of social workers, violence interventionists, prosecutors, community leaders and even cops all pulling in the same direction for once has made David Simon's stories from The Wire or Donald Trump's exasperating trash talk less relevant.
But this metropolitan renaissance is born of agony.
Before Ahmaud Arbery or Breonna Taylor or George Floyd, there was Freddie Gray, rattled to death in the back of a Baltimore police department van.
'We had, if you will, a head start with our uprising in 2015,' said Dr Lawrence Brown, a Baltimore historian and health equity researcher.
Gray's death in April 2015 of spinal injuries set off an earthquake of protests against police brutality across the country, with none as consequential or long-lasting as those at the epicenter. Protests in Baltimore turned into riots.
'Since 2015, there's been here in Baltimore this acknowledgement that equity needs to be a priority,' Brown said. The riots were as much about the conditions of poverty that led to Gray's death – people losing their homes in foreclosure to water bills, for example – as they were about police brutality, Brown noted.
But the heavy-handed response by cops to the protests and failures to hold police accountable for misconduct eviscerated the relationship between the Baltimore police and the public. Baltimore's state attorney Marilyn Mosby laid murder charges on the officers involved, and Baltimore's police union closed ranks in response, eviscerating the relationship between police and politicians. And a series of scandals at city hall and the state attorney's office – and the failure of Mosby's charges to result in convictions – eviscerated the relationship between politicians and the public.
Violence skyrocketed.
Three months after Gray's death, Baltimore's homicide count set a 42-year record high. Baltimore's mayor canned the police chief, then abandoned her re-election bid. In the previous year, 211 people had been killed in Baltimore, about 33.8 per 100,000 residents. That was high at the time relative to other large US cities, but reflected incremental improvement by Baltimore's historical standards. After Freddie Gray's death turned the city upside down, the count rose to 344 in 2015 – a 63% increase and a multidecade high – bucking a long national trend of declining violent crime. The rate at which police made arrests in homicide cases cratered.
The Gun Trace Task Force scandal in 2017 exacerbated problems.
Baltimore's police culture revolved around statistics-driven measures of productivity, which Baltimore street cops often achieved by busting whomever happened to be convenient without concern about the quality of an arrest or the real criminality of a suspect, according to an internal report in the wake of the scandal.
GTTF had a reputation for aggressively pursuing arrests and putting up big numbers, insulating it from internal scrutiny. But a federal investigation revealed that the taskforce had long abandoned its mission to track down the source of illegal guns and had instead become a criminal gang prowling the street to rob drug dealers. Its officers planted guns and drugs on suspects and fabricated testimony to cover their tracks. More than a dozen police officers went to federal prison.
Baltimore had tried more than one way to attack violent crime, from zero-tolerance 'broken windows' policing to relying on neighborhood crime statistics to motivate police officers into making more arrests. Efforts to get guns off the street backfired spectacularly from political interference, incompetence and, with GTTF, corruption.
The scandal destroyed whatever public faith in Baltimore's police department remained. By 2017, Baltimore's homicide rate had risen to the highest of any large city in the US.
'We had a police unit that was committing crimes. They were contributing to the crime,' Brown said. This history makes it hard to attribute the city's current gains to police work, he added: 'Who do I give credit to? Police are the lowest on my scales. It may be 5%. In some cases, at least with that Gun Trace Task Force, it's negative.'
Snake-bitten, adrift and in a state of profound civic despair, Baltimore's leaders came to a fundamental consensus: reducing violence had to take priority over everything else. It was defining the city and was the only thing voters cared about.
The first time Brandon Scott saw someone get shot in Park Heights, he wasn't quite seven years old.
Scott, a former city council member, had long been a keen observer of violence-prevention strategy before becoming mayor in 2020. An academic consensus looking at research done in Chicago and elsewhere about violence had long suggested that a dollar spent on policing reduced violence less than a dollar spent on intervention. But political leaders find it hard to justify cuts to police budgets under the best of circumstances. And Baltimore in 2021 did not have the best of circumstances.
Scott had been mayor of Baltimore for about three months when the American Rescue Plan Act passed in Congress, giving him an option to supercharge his violence-prevention strategy without a massive political battle. The $1.9tn economic stimulus package passed in March 2021, sending $1,400 checks to taxpayers, paying unemployment benefits at a higher rate and granting money to cities to recover from the pandemic however they saw fit. Using ARPA money, the city could fund the new data-driven project without using the police budget, sidestepping the thorny 'defund the police' rhetoric that had hamstrung previous efforts around the country.
'When we said we were going to reduce violence by 15% from one year to the next, folks laughed at me,' Scott said. 'Folks said that we couldn't do it this way. The only way that we could do it is we went back to zero-tolerance policing, which actually didn't do it in the first place.'
Against a Baltimore police budget topping half a billion dollars – the largest police budget per capita of any large city in the US – Baltimore's political establishment gave its new millennial mayor room to experiment with $50m in Washington's money.
Trust was in short supply after years of scandal. The first step was to get everyone on board – the cops, the hospitals, the jails, the schools, the social services teams, state government and the feds. Scott appointed Richard Worley as the city's new police commissioner in June 2023; Worley was a life-long Baltimore officer picked in part to bring the rank and file in line with Scott's antiviolence program. Scott emphasizes partnerships as an important part of the plan's successes.
Other federal grants, from the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, emerged in 2022 to help support the network of non-profits needed for the plan. The funding came from the first federal gun-control legislation enacted in 28 years, with the support of 15 Senate Republicans and $250m over five years for community violence intervention programs under the Department of Justice.
Baltimore's approach is tailored and personalized. The social worker who knocks on someone's door carries a letter written for that person from the mayor, with an offer of help – and a threat.
'We focus on the individuals and groups that are most likely to be a victim or perpetrator of that gun violence, and we go to them,' Scott said. 'They actually get a letter from me. And if they don't do that – if they don't take us up on that help to operate their lives in a different way, to not put themselves at risk of being a victim or perpetrator or get involved in illegal and violent activity, then we remove them through our law enforcement partnership with the police department that obviously works at my direction, or with our attorney general, our state's attorney and our federal law enforcement partners, and we're holding people accountable.'
Crime charts start showing the decline in September 2022, when the comprehensive plan had been up and running for about a year, Scott said. About three out of four people offered services by the program accepted them, and the city today has less violence than at any point in his life, he said.
'Of the folks that we've been able to work with through our partners … 95.7% of them have not been re-victimized, and 97.7% of them have not recidivated,' Scott said. 'You're talking about, in any city, a very relatively small group of people who are at the highest risk. For us to be intensely focusing on them, and to have that few of them become victims again, or recidivate into their previous life, is very impressive.'
No one got killed in Baltimore last week. Also, the local paper's reporters are quitting in droves. Surely, this is a coincidence.
Summers bleed Baltimore. School is out. People congregate. Tempers flare. But between 27 July and 2 August, the homicide line of the Baltimore police department's weekly crime report posted a shutout.
Baltimore's strategy revolves around focused deterrence. Take the kind of targeting advertisers use to put an ad up on your phone for mouthwash on a day you forgot to brush your teeth, and apply it to murder. Only, instead of an ad, someone at high risk for violence gets a case worker knocking on their door.
'We're talking about young people at elevated risk,' said Kurtis Palermo, who runs the youth violence-prevention non-profit Roca in Baltimore. 'We're not talking about the young person who says f-you to his teacher, or tells Mom, Dad, Grandma they don't want to do XYZ. We're talking about kids who literally have probably two tracks: jail and death.'
Palermo knocks on doors while a cop is carrying the mayor's letter. As often as not, he has to knock on a door a dozen times before he finds his charge.
The process often begins after a shooting. Case workers at local hospitals treating gunshot victims will take note of a patient's history and their friends and family. The data is combined with school records, police records, social services records and whatever else might be relevant; then the violence-prevention team will have a quick meeting. When they determine someone has enough risk factors, they intervene.
'It could be anything from information that is gleaned on jail calls, video evidence, you know, whatever it is, and then the connections to other people,' said Terence Nash, chief of the group violence reduction strategy in the mayor's office of neighborhood safety and engagement.
About 570,000 people live in Baltimore. If 200 people are murdered in the city in a year, the average person's risk would be about one in 2,850. But almost all the violence is concentrated among a tiny, impoverished and identifiable subset of that 570,000: 2% or less of the city, Nash said. If 80% of 200 murders are in this cluster, then most people are facing a murder risk of a bit less than 14,000 to one, while the high-risk cluster's odds are about one in 71.
There's no single factor that is perfectly predictive, Nash said. But as connections accumulate with other people at risk for violence, a threshold is crossed. The process is epidemiological, treating violence like an infection to track.
Two types of people are most vulnerable, Nash said: people in their early 20s who are feuding over trivial matters, 'someone looked at somebody wrong, somebody bumped into somebody'; and older people in the drug game, 'more around violence that has to do with their criminal enterprise, and so it's much more calculated'.
Critically, it's not every young person with Instagram beef, and not every Sandtown neighborhood street dealer that rises to their attention. The risk factors create a reasonable, articulable – and legally defensible – basis for contact. The team looks at each person individually, and crafts an approach for each one, Nash said.
'This is not magic. It's hard work,' Nash said. 'It takes attention to detail.'
Jaylen was in a hospital bed recovering from a gunshot wound when a life coach with Youth Advocate Programs approached him. Jaylen had, he said, been in the wrong part of West Baltimore at the wrong time. He wasn't especially receptive at first to a life coach, of all things, he said.
'I thought there was a catch,' the 20-year-old said. 'I thought I'd have to pay them back in the future.'
Jaylen couldn't say much about his life or where he was: people might still want to hurt him. But it took a couple of months of outreach for the offer of help from Teshombae Harvell, Jaylen's life coach, to look real. It took consistency.
'It's about the follow-up,' Harvell said. 'Today they might say get the f out of here. Tomorrow, they could be wanting services, because something tragic happened where they need change.'
When someone gets shot, Jaylen expects someone to retaliate, he said: 'Back and forth, back and forth. It's never-ending.'
What Harvell offered – what no one had offered in a credible way before – was a plan for the future, and perhaps the realization that he had a future. Jaylen had thought about killing someone before, he said. He felt like the prospect of surviving long enough to have a legit life wasn't worth considering.
Now he has a driver's license and wants to become a plumber. Helping fix some of Baltimore's stubborn oversupply of abandoned houses would be a living, and ironically would be paying back the city for its help.
'The only way programs like YAP or GVRS are going to be successful is for people to buy in,' said Harvell. 'They can't be spectators on the outside, looking in, wondering if it's going to be a success or a failure.'
Brandon Scott's approach offers benefits to get people out of the street and off a violent path: housing, victim assistance, drug treatment, mental health services, job training.
'There's the carrot and stick,' said Ivan Bates. 'We're the stick.'
Bates had a pretty good track record of getting drug dealers off the hook before winning election as Baltimore's state's attorney – what most places call the district attorney and chief prosecutor. Baltimore's history of light prosecutions for handgun cases is a legacy of questionable policing practices – weakly supported cases landing in court – and a negative view of mass incarceration by prosecutors.
'I was the one who was beating the brakes off the state,' Bates said. 'Look, my law partner and I went 25, 26 straight jury trials against Baltimore city prosecutors representing some pretty rough people, you know. And when I come and say that the street – the criminal elements – do not respect that approach, I'm not saying it because I read in a book. I'm saying it because I lived it.'
After defeating Mosby and assuming office in January 2023, Bates immediately reversed her policy of non-prosecution for low-level offenses like drug possession, prostitution and trespassing. He successfully lobbied the Maryland legislature to increase the penalty for illegal gun possession from three years to five years. And he started putting people in prison.
In Mosby's last two years in office, 2,186 people faced felony gun charges. Mosby dismissed about 34% and another 30% received plea bargains, mostly without imprisonment. In Bates's first two years, the number of cases increased a bit, to 2,443. Bates only dismissed 19% of the cases, and only 10% received plea agreements. The rest were convicted – an increase of about 1,000 people sent to prison – which includes a 70% increase in homicide convictions.
'Everybody has a plan. The mayor had his plan. The police department, they have their plan,' Bates said. 'And when I came and I ran for office, I had my plan. The plans have to work together as one.'
Bates is quick to attribute the city's reduction in violence to a team effort. For example, without victim assistance – which is supported by a federal grant – prosecutions that would have fallen apart in previous years concluded in a conviction because witnesses could be found to appear in court. Police now are actually focused on removing illegal guns from the street, he said.
It also requires people to have an out. Without a path off the street, people on the edge in Baltimore will do what they must to survive, he said.
He rejects the suggestion that his approach is a return to mass incarceration. Prosecution is not zero tolerance and it is not indifferent to a defendant's conditions.
'We have focused on violent repeat offenders, not the first-time kid,' Bates said. 'Remember, five- to six-thousand individuals are doing this type of behavior. So, we're not here to go back to mass incarceration.'
But he's sensitive to how this approach plays out in five years.
'My No 1 worry is, when individuals come home, we have to have something for them,' he said. 'Did we actually prepare them to come home? … Look, I believe everybody pays a debt to society. We move on, and then we as a society put them in a place that they can win. And if we didn't, then we're going to see these numbers bounce back up.'
Sean Wees from Safe Streets said stopping a shooting might come down to noticing that a kid on a street corner has holes in his shoes.
'So, we asked the little kid, are you hungry?' Wees said. 'That could lead to a conversation where you find out this kid is not eating. But we have the resources, or if we don't have them at that time, we find the resources to help this family out. And now that key individual, that target individual, is the father of that child … we fed his child now, we've started to build a rapport with this guy, because he's going to be appreciative of the work that we just did. That's how this works.'
One might think that the thing that prevents expanding the work is personnel. Very few people have the street credibility, the devotion and the nerve to be successful. But Wees said the constraint is actually money.
'I love this work, because I'm always trying to save an individual life,' he said. 'I'm good with this work. The time and the money don't match right now, but guess what? I still do this work. … You get more money, people will put in more time.'
For the first time in forever, Charm City's leaders are all pulling in the same direction, and crime is falling through the floor. They've placated violence in inventive and predictable ways. They are, of course, justifiably concerned that Donald Trump will undo their successes on Republican 'screw cities' general principles.
Trump closed the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention on the first day he took office. Three months later, the Department of Justice cut the $300m allocated to community violence intervention grants in half, including many in Baltimore. The cuts were part of a larger $811m culling across the Office of Justice Programs, Reuters reported. Funding for gun-violence victims' services, conflict mediation, social workers, hospital-based programs: gone.
Scott blasted the cuts to the program's partners as dangerous and reckless.
'You're talking about an administration who has said for years that they want to drive down crime in these cities,' he said. 'The truth is no one cares if the mayor is a Republican or Democrat in any city when it comes to gun violence.'
The youth antiviolence organization Roca had three grants terminated, one in Baltimore with about $1m left unspent. The termination letter said the grant did not align with its priorities including 'directly supporting certain law enforcement operations, combatting violent crime, protecting American children, and supporting American victims of trafficking and sexual assault'.
As applied to Roca, the rationale is absurd. But they could see it coming, said Dwight Robson, a Roca executive.
'Initially, it was a huge blow. We were estimating that we were going to serve roughly 60 fewer young people a year,' Robson said. After an outcry, funders outside the federal government, including the city itself, started to step in, who 'made it clear that they don't want to lose momentum' in Baltimore.
Support in other places, like Boston, is fleeting, in part because they've done their job too well, Robson said: 'Boston is the safest big city in America. And you know, the homicides and crime just aren't on people's radars to the degree that it is in Baltimore.'
Roca has appealed the decision to cut their grant, and a coalition of non-profits is suing the Trump administration, arguing that the cuts were made unlawfully.
The real threat posed by the cuts is continuity, said Stefanie Mavronis, director of the mayor's office of neighborhood safety and engagement (Monse). The violence-intervention plan has worked in part because it has been consistent. People are so used to the presence of Monse staffers around crime scenes and in high-violence neighborhoods that some people have come to expect a knock on the door after a shooting.
If Monse's partners start disappearing, and if they can't back up promises of help made to victims – or shooters – then things may fall apart, she said.
'We've got to make the investment in the service side of things,' Mavronis said. 'We can't just make empty promises to folks who we are telling we have the services for you to change your life.'
Baltimore's leaders, both in city hall and in the streets, have been putting their reputations and capital on the line, in some cases risking their lives.
Budget cuts while they're winning makes it look like they want Baltimore to lose. The exasperation is plain.
'We have the lowest amount of violence that we've seen in my lifetime, and I'm 41 years old,' Scott said. 'If everyone says that they agree that this is the top issue, that we have to make sure that more people are not becoming a victim of these things, why change it? Why disrupt the apple cart, if the apple cart is producing the best results that we've seen in a generation?'