Baltimore is outpacing the nation on violence reduction — here’s how

Five years ago, Baltimore was losing more than 300 people each year to homicide. Today, homicides and nonfatal shootings have fallen by roughly 60 percent.  Baltimore's homicide rate has dropped steadily since September 2022. In fact, the city has posted three straight years of double-digit homicide declines, recording just 133 homicides in 2025 — the fewest in nearly 50 years. What's more, a new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper finds Baltimore’s reductions ran about 25 percent ahead of trends in other cities, without a corresponding increase in arrests. That did not happen by accident. It did not happen overnight. And it did not come from enforcement alone. For decades, Baltimore tried to arrest its way out of violence. At the height of zero-tolerance policing, Baltimore was making as many as 100,000 arrests a year in a city of roughly 600,000 residents. Residents were swept into the system, trust in government eroded, and the violence continued. Arrests, prosecutions and incarceration have a role in public safety. But aggressive, unfocused enforcement on its own caused real harm in non-white communities, and did not have a measurable impact on violent crime. In 2022, Baltimore set out to do this differently, by making violence reduction its top priority and building a strategy around a fact the evidence keeps confirming: violence is concentrated among a small num…