Baltimore finished 2024 with a second consecutive year of historic decreases in gun violence unlike the city has seen since the 1970s.

The decrease in gun violence from last year has brought needed optimism to a city that has long struggled to bring down its homicide rate, which still remains well above the national average. Police say 201 people were killed, with more than 400 people shot and wounded.

Experts in gun violence prevention, city officials and anti-violence workers attributed the decline to a variety of factors: statewide and national efforts to fight “ghost guns,” political stability in City Hall, and the maturation of the mayor’s approach to pairing policing with services and support.

Coinciding with the drop in gun violence, Mayor Brandon Scott’s administration has spent tens of millions of dollars in federal pandemic aid on the framework for its “public health approach” to stemming gun violence over the last two years.

Heading into Scott’s second term, that approach has taken root across the city with school and hospital-based intervention programs, a more cohesive network of nonprofits aimed at providing services, and law enforcement officials who have grown more comfortable and efficient in partnering with them.

“We are preventing violence, we’re intervening in likely violence, and we’re doing that in a targeted way,” said Stefanie Mavronis, who has led the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement since July 2023.

Joseph Richardson, a gun violence researcher and professor at the University of Maryland, credited Scott’s commitment to the holistic approach. Richardson also said it was important not to “get too bogged down on things that are unique to Baltimore.” Across the country, Richardson emphasized, social safety nets and other systems were slowly being “re-entrenched back into communities” like ”prior to the pandemic.”

“It seems like all of the cities in the U.S. are kind of shifting back to where we were at the time,” Richardson said.

Still, Baltimore and similar cities like Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., have experienced some of the country’s most dramatic declines in gun violence. Richardson said he believed Baltimore is beginning to see a “return on investment” in its community violence intervention. But determining which programs have been the most effective in Baltimore could take years, Richardson said, and would “be a little more difficult to untangle.”

For now, the decline in shootings has provided both a morale boost and a logistical respite for the Baltimore Police Department, which emphasized its improving clearance rates on homicides and nonfatal shooting investigations. Police Commissioner Richard Worley, appointed by Scott in 2023, also overhauled how the Police Department runs its shooting investigations.

“The reductions show what our men and women can do when they’re given time to do an investigation and aren’t running from shooting to shooting or homicide to homicide,” Worley said.

Data from the Police Department shows steep declines in gun violence in areas where the agency’s Group Violence Reduction Strategy (GVRS) has expanded. The strategy convenes federal, state and local law enforcement officials and partners them with local, community-based nonprofits that offer social services. The groups then have meetings focused on information sharing and targeting enforcement toward people most likely to be involved in shootings. Those individuals are then offered services and simultaneously threatened with prosecution. The strategy has been tried twice before in Baltimore, and Worley pointed out he had been in the department for each one.

“The first two times, it failed, and that’s mainly because there was only one entity that was fully engaged,” Worley said. “This time ... the state’s attorney, the mayor’s office, and myself, we all want the same thing for the city.”

‘It’s needed love for many years’

The reduction in homicides hasn’t yet brought a renaissance to small, downtrodden parts of the city like Carrollton Ridge, an extremely blighted area west of downtown that for years had the highest number of homicides of any neighborhood in the city.

Fourteen people were killed there in 2021, and 15 were killed in 2022. Among them: Miguel Soto-Diaz, a 35-year-old suspected marijuana trafficker from California who in May 2022 was abducted, held for ransom, tortured, fatally shot and set on fire in a vacant home on Furrow Street, where nearly every home is vacant.

But each of the past two years, there have been three homicides there, along with significant reductions in nonfatal shootings.

On the surface, little has changed in Carrollton Ridge.

“That area needs some love,” said Baltimore Police Maj. Jennifer McGrath, who has spent 23 years working in the neighborhood in various capacities. “It’s needed love for many years.”

But there are also efforts underway to start to chip away at decades of disinvestment and neglect. A nonprofit located in a former recreation center, called The Food Project, offers fresh food to residents. Its mission has expanded well beyond that, to mentoring youths and offering an array of social services.

Representatives from St. Agnes Hospital and Health Care for the Homeless stop by, and the Motor Vehicle Administration has begun administering an oral driver’s test there.

“We’re doing more with what we have, and by bringing partners here has allowed us to increase our impact,” said Michelle Suazo, executive director of The Food Project.

There have also been long-needed improvements in public safety, including a redrawing of boundaries in 2023 that put Carrollton Ridge in one district, rather than split among three. With that came increased focus on the problems, police say.

“What we had been doing all these years just wasn’t working for us,” said McGrath, who oversaw the Southwestern District until recently and now works in the unit involved with GVRS.

In addition to the group violence strategy, officers in the area have taken on other new responsibilities.

They routinely flood the city’s 311 system with complaints about lighting, abandoned vehicles, vacant homes and illegal dumping.

“Having them do these 311s in the alleys, it got them out of the cars, walking around, engaging and having conversations,” McGrath said.

On a recent visit, the need for continued vigilance was on display. An area blitzed by city agencies a month ago was covered in trash, and someone had removed a board from a vacant home that had been sealed up.

Some factors were bigger than Baltimore

Experts also believe that national and state policies have helped.

Daniel Webster, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, identified an executive order by President Joe Biden requiring “ghost gun” kits to have serial numbers. He also pointed to statewide and local efforts to curb the availability of the weapons, which can be shipped by mail and assembled at home. Ghost guns, which were omnipresent on the streets of Baltimore, “peaked” in 2022, then started to decline, Webster said.

“That’s a huge deal, and I do suspect that’s playing some helpful role in a lot of places,” Webster said.

Worley agreed that guns have become less available, saying his officers are recovering fewer of them on the street, and credited efforts by Scott to target manufacturers.

Webster, who has long studied gun violence in Baltimore, said the city has exceeded the national average for reductions over the last two years.

“I think that’s at least a starting place to feel like efforts in Baltimore are effective in addressing the most serious forms of violent crime,” he said.

‘It’s everybody partnering, working together’

In the first summer after he was elected in 2021, Scott unveiled his signature public safety policy, the “comprehensive violence prevention plan.”

Though the office was loaded with federal funding, ultimately $41 million, it struggled at times in 2023.

In the summer of that year, the office changed hands during a wave of high-profile departures from the Scott administration. Soon after Mavronis took over, the office was scrutinized for its handling of the Safe Streets anti-violence group following the Brooklyn Day mass shooting. But 2024 was a year of stability under Mavronis, as partnerships between the array of programs under the office strengthened.

Kurt Palermo, the vice president of Maryland for Roca Baltimore, which works with young men who are at risk of shooting or being shot, said the city’s network of violence intervention programs, which includes Roca, have matured considerably over the last year.

Palermo said the group has become much more efficient in working with city partners, and particularly credited hospital programs. He said that “out of nowhere” they evolved into a “very strategic, operationalized approach to how we’re doing the work.”

“It’s not one person, one group, one entity that’s responsible,” Palermo said. “It’s everybody partnering, working together, understanding what everyone is capable of doing and their expertise in this space.”

A reshaped policing strategy expanded

Under Scott’s tenure, Police Department officials have focused much of the agency’s resources on expanding its group violence reduction strategy.

The various partners of the program share information and strategize during regular meetings.

At one of those meetings recently, Scott said he watched as the city’s anti-violence workers, many of whom have personally experienced or engaged in gun violence, work with law enforcement officials to determine who would be “the next contact.”

“Sitting there and being in that group with those folks, I had a smile on my face,” Scott said. “I saw what people told me wasn’t possible happening right before my eyes.”

Later during that meeting, Scott said, it turned out one of the “contacts” the partners needed to approach was best suited for the mayor himself.

Palermo said the group violence strategy can be used to identify people who may or may not be involved in criminal activity, either as victims or perpetrators.

“You need to figure out: How do we make this work specific to Baltimore? I think that’s what we’re finally seeing,” he said.

Politics in city government stabilized

Though the relationship between Scott and Baltimore’s State’s Attorney Ivan Bates has been strained at times, politics in City Hall have largely stabilized over the last two years, a dynamic that was sealed in May when Scott beat back a primary challenger supported by Bates, former Mayor Sheila Dixon.

Even before then, local prosecutors were working more closely with the Police Department under Bates than they had under his predecessor, Marilyn Mosby, officials have said.

Webster said that Bates has been a key partner in the city’s new policing strategy. He said the prosecutor’s “tougher” approach to both gun- and drug-related offenses has likely played a “helpful role” in driving down gun violence.

Richardson, the University of Maryland professor, credited Scott’s commitment to a “holistic approach,” but worried about its future, and wondered if President-elect Donald Trump would fund such efforts.

“If this administration decides to pivot to more of an investment in law enforcement, CVI will suffer, and again, we’re right at the point where those returns on investment are starting to pay off,” Richardson said.

Scott said he remains committed to funding the efforts and that the city has “always had a balance” in how it funds its anti-violence programs. He said Maryland “still has the best federal delegation ever, and we understand and hope that they will continue to bring home funds to support this work.”

‘So many that had lost their lives’

Dorothy Cunningham stood before guests at St. Joseph’s Monastery Parish on Monday to recite the names of those who lost their lives to gun violence in 2024 in Baltimore as part of the church’s annual prayer walk for homicide victims.

Though Cunningham has done this before, even as recently as last year, the 67-year-old woman fought back tears and couldn’t continue reading the list.

”I thought I would be able to get through it tonight,” she said. “Just looking and seeing so many that had lost their lives, it just hit me.”

Cunningham lost her 16-year-old grandson in 2017 when he was caught in crossfire coming home from school. She attends vigils, like the one hosted by the Archdiocese of Baltimore, to show families who’ve lost loved ones they aren’t alone. She recognizes, though, that the heartache is still there.

”I’m still dealing with it six years later,” she said.

Nearly 100 candles illuminated the Irvington neighborhood in Southwest Baltimore as dozens of attendees recited victims’ names and prayed for their families at stops at Liberty Gas Station, Dollar General and My Brother’s Keeper, a community center, all on Frederick Avenue.

Many expressed bittersweet sentiments about decreasing homicides in Baltimore.

The Rev. Mike Murphy, the pastor of St. Joseph’s Monastery Parish, told the attendees even though homicides have gone down, “That is a number that doesn’t mean much. We pray for the day where there’s few or none.”