Fewer teens have been shot in Baltimore during the first half of this year than in any in the last decade, a Banner analysis of police data has found.
The number of high school-aged teens shot in Baltimore has fallen by more than two-thirds compared to last year’s 10-year-high watermark.
The Banner has been tracking youth gun violence since teenagers began being shot at exceedingly higher rates in 2022.
This downward trend follows an overall decrease in homicides in Baltimore. Homicides began to fall in 2023, but youth gun violence surged. Between January 1 and July 11, the most recent day we have data for in 2024, 91 high school-aged teens were shot, 15 of whom died.
So far this year, 30 have been shot, seven of whom have died. That is the fewest shot in any year in Baltimore’s crime database that has reliable publicly available data, which includes every year from 2015 to 2024.
The Banner has focused its analysis on high school teens between 13 and 18 years old since it first identified that many juveniles ages 17 and younger were shot near a school during school hours. The same was true for 18-year-olds, but not 19-year-olds.
Baltimore’s drop in gun violence is one of the largest in the nation, following Philadelphia. There is an overall decrease in gun violence in most American cities.
Learn more about our analysis and reproduce these findings by visiting our GitHub page.
Former data fellow Shreya Vuttaluru contributed to this analysis.
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