The drop in homicides in Baltimore over the past two years has significantly outpaced the decrease in the U.S. as a whole, a shift that academic and law enforcement experts largely credit to the work of State’s Attorney Ivan Bates and Mayor Brandon Scott.
Baltimore recorded 201 homicides in 2024 — a 40% decline over 2022, when police logged 336. During the same two-year period after the return of some normalcy after pandemic lockdowns, homicides declined nationally 25%, with available data through October 2024, according to a Real-Time Crime Index published by AH Datalytics, the Baltimore Sun reports.
“You have to have a lot of things working at the same time — stronger prosecutions, policing and prevention,” to produce such a decline, said Daniel Webster, a violence prevention expert at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Among the factors contributing to the decrease in homicides are efforts by Maryland U.S. Attorney Erek Barron, city police, community members and the state, which has contributed financially. Tougher prosecution of handgun offenses under Bates and increased crime prevention strategies under Scott have been the real game changers.
Bates kicked off his tenure as state’s attorney with a warning to people carrying illegal handguns in his January 2023 inaugural speech: “Grab your toothbrush,” because you’ll be going to jail.
His office has focused on prosecuting handgun offenses, specifically offenses involving felons in possession of handguns and handgun carriers who also possess drugs that they intend to sell.
“Those are the trigger-pullers. Those are the individuals that are repeat violent offenders,” Bates says. A big difference between Bates’ administration and that of his predecessor, Marilyn Mosby, is the frequency of requests prosecutors have made for the mandatory minimum prison sentence of five years without the possibility of parole, he said.
Under Mosby in 2021 and 2022, there were 2,186 cases involving handgun drug trafficking and felon-in-possession charges. Prosecutors called for the mandatory minimum sentence in 781 cases, or 35.7% of the time.
Under Bates in 2023 and 2024, that rate doubled. Out of 2,443 total cases, prosecutors asked for the mandatory minimum sentence in 1,723 cases, or 70.5% of the time.
The threat of spending a minimum of five years in prison can significantly deter crime, as opposed to probation or a lighter sentence, Bates said.
“One of the things that we constantly were hearing on jail calls, on wiretaps, is that, ‘Oh, my god, they’re not playing over there. They’re sending us to jail now,'” he said.
Cases are less likely to be dropped now, Bates said, with 19% of cases dropped under his administration, compared with 34% under the last two years of Mosby’s tenure. Bates attributes this to better use of the state’s attorney’s victim witness division and a state grant for the evidence review unit to examine body camera footage.
Former U.S. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein agreed, saying that although many deserve credit, the state’s attorney is the most significant factor in reducing crime in Baltimore.
“Violent crime — it’s not like the weather. It’s not random,” Rosenstein said. “You actually do have control through your attitude toward enforcement.”
Wwhile Bates has been clear about his efforts to be “tough on guns,” there may not be a direct connection between his strategy and the homicide drop, said John Cox, a criminal defense attorney who worked in the Baltimore State’s Attorney’s Office until 2007.
“I think it’s probably more the police department being more proactive out there, trying to find the guns,” he said.
Another factor in the homicide reduction, experts say, is the Group Violence Reduction Strategy launched by the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement (MONSE) in 2022.
It focuses on groups of at least three people — not necessarily gangs — who are willing to inflict violence on one another’s behalf, said Stefanie Mavronis, MONSE’s director. The idea is to look for opportunities to intervene in potentially imminent retaliations, she said.
In 2020, Mosby announced her office would no longer prosecute low-level crimes, including minor drug possession and prostitution, in order to reduce exposure to COVID-19. She said at the time that statistics show locking people up for drugs and minor crimes doesn’t make the city safer.
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