Baltimore’s Safe Streets program celebrated a milestone Friday, as three more sites went over 365 consecutive days without a homicide.
Officials with the city’s flagship gun violence intervention program said they successfully reduced shootings and homicides in its Belvedere, Franklin Square and Park Heights catchment zones. The three sites join Penn North, which reached the same milestone earlier this year.
As of Friday, Safe Streets Belvedere last recorded a homicide in its area 436 days ago on June 28, 2023, while Park Heights has gone 404 days without a homicide since July 30, 2023, officials said. The Franklin Square area had no homicides for 373 days between June 26, 2023, to July 3, officials said, though that streak ended when Baltimore Police reported a 29-year-old man died in the 1600 block of Argyle Avenue.
City officials, program coordinators and staff gathered at the Belvedere site to celebrate, and welcomed the public with music and food. Stefanie Mavronis, director of the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement, called it an “amazing” milestone, adding that it’s important to take stock and have conversations with the community.
“This work changes the fabric of communities This model is really all about the interventions and community engagement, but it’s also making sure we’re never accepting it as normal for some of our neighborhoods to be hit by violence,” Mavornis said.
Safe Streets programming covers roughly 3 miles with 10 locations in some of Baltimore’s most dangerous neighborhoods, including Belair-Edison, Belvedere and Cherry Hill, with the oldest site in McElderry Park since in 2007.
Baltimore saw fewer than 300 homicides in 2023 and is on track to record fewer than 200 killings this year. In June, a White House official called the city’s reduction in homicides the “greatest success story” in the country.
At the celebration on Friday, Mayor Brandon Scott praised the efforts of Safe Streets teams at the Belvedere, Franklin Square and Park Heights sites, saying they’re a critical part of the city’s violence intervention ecosystem.
“Their dedication to the work of preventing potentially violent conflicts before they spiral out of control is necessary and critically important,” Scott said.
The three sites are overseen by the LifeBridge Health Center for Hope. Adam Rosenberg, executive director of the center, stressed the importance of the three locations being connected to Sinai Hospital and Grace Medical Center, both in the LifeBridge Health network. He said firearm injury admissions at Sinai Hospital’s emergency department are down 42% from their peak in 2020, thanks in part to the collaborative efforts with neighboring Safe Streets sites.
“What makes this unique throughout the city and even throughout the nation, frankly, is that we really are the only health system that is operating both a neighborhood community violence interruption program as well as the hospital violence interruption teams, and the community support network to be able to have that whole holistic ecosystem to make that happen,” Rosenberg said.
