If you haven’t looked lately, you might be surprised to see that Baltimore’s violent crime rate has come way down in the past couple years.
Baltimore achieved a historic reduction in homicides in 2025, recording the lowest number in nearly 50 years, as city leaders and community groups joined forces to address gun violence.
Crime statistics released Thursday reveal a decrease in violent crimes, including carjacking and assault, with homicides falling from 194 in 2024 to 133 in 2025, a reduction of over 30%. Non-fatal shootings also decreased from 413 in 2024 to 311 in 2025.
Of course crime is down everywhere in the past couple years, but in the not so distant past, Baltimore was an outlier in terms of violent crime. The question is what happened.
Today the Free Press has a story arguing there are really two answers to that question and depending on the politics of who you ask you might get either one of those two answers. The first answer is a violence prevention program put in place by the mayor. The general concept comes from a criminologist at the University of Pennsylvania.
In parts of some American cities, research has shown, young men have a higher rate of homicide death than did U.S. soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. This hyperconcentration of violence has shown up in Washington, D.C.; Chicago; Oakland, California; and elsewhere. The networked nature of the violence is important. Killers and victims are often tied up in the same social networks, meaning that beef between group members can continually escalate in a cycle of retaliation.
Baltimore follows this pattern. In Baltimore’s Western District, 72 percent of murders between 2015 and 2021 were attributable to a small number of men, mostly organized into gangs. The same analysis estimated that the area’s gang members accounted for just 2 percent of the district’s population but as much as 75 percent of its shootings and homicides.
That’s why Brandon Scott, then a mayoral candidate, reached out in 2019 to Anthony Braga, a criminologist now at the University of Pennsylvania…
…mostly the focus is on deterring the cycle of escalation. GVRS has yielded about 600 arrests in its five years of operation. For every shooting, GVRS prescribes reaching out to known associates of the victim. A second weekly meeting brings together law enforcement officials with service organizations and “community moral voices”—respected neighborhood figures who can put pressure on a would-be shooter to stand down…
They will be offered services—job training, tattoo removal, relocation, whatever they need to get out of the “life.” But they will also get a clear message, delivered verbally and in the form of a letter from Mayor Scott: Baltimore is watching them—and will come after them.
In short, gang members are directly confronted and given a stark choice before things escalate. Braga argues this is sometimes misreported as a soft on crime approach but he says it’s the opposite. It’s applying accountability to the individuals who need it.
The other major factor, the Free Press argues, is a new prosecutor who replaced a progressive, Marilyn Mosby, with a tough on crime approach to prosecuting violent crime and putting the offenders in prison.
In 2015, Baltimore elected Marilyn Mosby as its state’s attorney. She was the nation’s youngest big-city prosecutor, part of the wave of “progressive prosecutors” that swept into office…
In 2021, her office stopped prosecuting drug possession, prostitution, trespassing, and “other low-level offenses” entirely. Unsurprisingly, the ensuing surge in crime made her unpopular with voters…
Mosby’s replacement was Ivan Bates, a former defense attorney who had represented one of Gray’s alleged killers. On the campaign trail, Bates took Mosby to task for her corruption and the city’s crime problems, promising to focus on gun violence and on building bridges between the community and law enforcement. Since taking office, Bates has made prosecuting violent offenders his top priority…
Bates said that his office has identified about 6,000 frequent, violent offenders and put between 3,000 and 3,500 of them in prison. The cooperation of federal law enforcement has helped take a number of these offenders off the streets.
And while GVRS helps, Bates said, it’s not the proverbial magic bullet. “The previous state’s attorney, when there was GVRS, didn’t prosecute. We had 342 murders,” Bates said.
Ultimately, there’s enough good news in Baltimore that there’s credit to go around. What seems to have worked in the city is the oldest idea in the book, the carrot and the stick. The gun violence reduction strategy offers help to gang members who need a way out and the prosecutor makes sure those who refuse the carrot wind up in the clink. The two approaches reinforce one another.
“If you’re seeing your friends all going to prison, you’re going to go: ‘What? I don’t want to go to prison,’ ” Bates said. “Now all of a sudden, that job or that program someone’s offered you before that you didn’t want to talk about—now it looks pretty appealing.”
Again the Free Press wants to credit both halves of this effort and I’m fine with that, but I still think you can’t skip over what Ivan Bates said. Marilyn Mosby had the same gun violence reduction plan in place and crime didn’t come down. What changed was taking the violent people off the streets. This is a point the Free Beacon made last year.
Homicides and other types of violent crime are dropping precipitously in the crime-ridden city of Baltimore. It started shortly after voters fired their progressive Soros-backed prosecutor in 2022—and experts say that’s no coincidence…
“The numbers don’t lie,” Maryland Public Policy Institute fellow Sean Kennedy told the Washington Free Beacon. “Ivan Bates’s model of targeting the most violent or violence-prone offenders (gun carrying criminals) is the primary driver of Baltimore’s miraculous success.”
“Homicides only started dropping when Bates came in and signaled that carrying guns meant prison,” Kennedy said.
This can work in other blue cities too. But there’s a third contributor that is necessary. You not only need a prosecutor who will prosecute, you need judges who aren’t committed to putting every crook back on the street as quickly as possible. This has been a problem in places like San Francisco and Washington, DC.
Editor’s Note: The American people overwhelmingly support President Trump’s law and order agenda.
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