Five years ago, Baltimore was on track to lose more than 300 residents to homicide annually. Today, the city has posted three consecutive years of double-digit declines in homicides and nonfatal shootings, with just 133 homicides recorded in 2025 — the lowest figure in nearly half a century. A new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research finds that Baltimore’s reductions ran about 25 percent ahead of trends in comparable cities, and this progress came without a surge in arrests.
That turnaround did not happen by accident, nor did it come from enforcement alone. For decades, Baltimore relied on aggressive zero-tolerance policing, making as many as 100,000 arrests a year in a city of roughly 600,000 residents. That approach swept residents into the criminal justice system, eroded public trust, and failed to curb violence. While arrests, prosecutions, and incarceration have a role in public safety, unfocused enforcement caused real harm in non-white communities without a measurable impact on violent crime.
In 2022, Mayor Brandon Scott’s administration shifted strategy. The city made violence reduction its top priority and built a plan around a well-documented fact: violence is highly concentrated among a small number of people, groups, places, and conflicts. Data showed that fewer than 2 percent of residents were connected to groups responsible for as much as 75 percent of serious violent acts.
That insight changed where the city focused its attention. Instead of casting a wide net, Baltimore targeted the people and conflicts driving the most harm. The Group Violence Reduction Strategy begins with in-person outreach co-led by trusted community leaders. The message is direct: help is real and available, but continued violence will bring a focused response. Those who accept help receive life coaching, job training, education, housing, and relocation when needed. Those who continue to engage in violence face accountability from police and criminal justice partners.
Equally important, Baltimore built a service infrastructure capable of reaching people who had previously been visible to the government only through enforcement. This combination of focus, support, and accountability produced measurable results. In the Western District, where the strategy first launched, homicides and nonfatal shootings dropped by about one-third in the first 18 months, with no displacement to surrounding neighborhoods and no uptick in low-level arrests. Of the hundreds of people who accepted support, more than 94 percent have not been victimized again.
Baltimore had attempted similar strategies before and failed, but Mayor Scott argues the problem was implementation, not the underlying concept. This time, the city was intentional: a five-year timeline, a start in the historically most violent Western District, and expansion one district at a time only when people and infrastructure were ready. That meant absorbing criticism from those who wanted faster results or doubted the city could deliver. As Scott put it, the job was to do the right thing, not the popular thing.
Violence reduction must be managed and disciplined. No single agency can solve a problem this complex alone. Every week, police, prosecutors, outreach workers, service providers, community partners, and city agencies review incidents, flag emerging risks, and coordinate responses. Residents and grassroots leaders helped shape the work from the start, because the people closest to the problem are closest to the solution. Research in other cities points the same way: focused, partnership-based strategies work when they are managed well and sustained beyond four-year election cycles.
The impact is visible across Baltimore: families feel safer, young people have more support, and new businesses are opening on revitalized blocks. The work is far from finished, and one life lost to violence is one too many. But Baltimore’s progress shows that government can still solve hard problems when it stays focused, follows the evidence, and builds the partnerships and infrastructure to turn its values into results.
The larger lesson is that cities do not have to choose between accountability and support. With hard work, they can build a system that delivers both — a message that resonates beyond Baltimore as other cities grapple with violent crime. As the national political landscape shifts, with debates over policing and public safety intensifying, Baltimore’s success offers a rare bipartisan data point: focused enforcement plus community investment can reduce violence without mass incarceration. This approach has drawn attention from policymakers and researchers alike, and it may inform future public health and safety funding decisions in other jurisdictions.
Mayor Brandon M. Scott, the 52nd mayor of Baltimore, has spearheaded these historic reductions alongside investments in education, recreation, parks, and affordable housing. Anthony A. Braga, Ph.D., the Jerry Lee Professor of Criminology and director of the Crime and Justice Policy Lab at the University of Pennsylvania, co-authored the NBER working paper and has been a key academic partner in evaluating the strategy.
