Two hundred people have been killed in Baltimore this year, the Baltimore Police Department says. That represents a 23% decrease from the number of homicides, 259, on the same date last year. It corresponds with a decline in nonfatal shootings. There have been 413 nonfatal shootings in 2024 as of Monday, compared to 627 by the same time last year. That represents a 34% decrease, reports the Baltimore Sun. For decades, the number of homicides in Baltimore has served as a litmus test, fair or not, for the success of mayors and police commissioners in fighting to tackle pervasive violence. Before 2023, the city recorded 300 homicides for eight years in a row. There was hope among residents and public officials that this could be the year Baltimore dropped below 200 killings for the first time in more than a decade, and in so doing, mark a grim but symbolic milestone. But the Dec. 26th shooting of Deangelo West was reclassified as a homicide Sunday, after police said “hospital staff notified detectives that the victim succumbed to his injuries,” making the 27-year-old the 200th person killed in the city in 2024.
Baltimore nevertheless appears poised to record the fewest number of killings since 2011, when there were 196 homicides. That year was the only year since 1978 that the city notched fewer than 200 killings.
When Mayor Brandon Scott took the city’s top office in 2020, he pledged to reduce killings by 15% per year throughout his tenure. The city failed to achieve that goal for the first two years under his leadership. Baltimore exceeded his benchmark last year, recording a 21% decrease, and it appears set to do so again in 2024. “They are more than just numbers,” said Scott in his second inaugural address this month. “Those are hundreds of lives saved or prevented from being altered forever as the result of a nonfatal shooting. We know that violence is devastating to those it impacts.” Scott credited his comprehensive gun violence reduction strategy, which pairs law enforcement with community-based interventions, with bringing down homicides and nonfatal shootings. State’s Attorney Ivan Bates pointed to greater collaboration between local, state and federal as an impetus for reducing violence. He said that his office’s tough-on-gun-crime approach to prosecution has been instrumental, while giving credit to the city’s Group Violence Reduction Strategy, a partnership between his office, the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement and the police department that seeks out those most likely to be victims or perpetrators of violence and offers them a different path or, in the alternative, prosecution. Scott pledged to expand the strategy that targets group violence to all nine police districts in the city, saying they would “keep working to improve lives through our public safety plan rather than just tossing folks in cuffs and throwing away the key.”
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