In the spirit of “Auld Lang Syne,” Mayor Brandon Scott and State’s Attorney Ivan Bates are making sure past acquaintances are not forgotten by rekindling their long-simmering feud this week amid the latest round of credit-claiming over Baltimore’s plummeting homicide rate.

A TV interview with Bates that aired Monday evening defrosted the beef. It got warmer Tuesday at a news conference Scott held at City Hall with Gov. Wes Moore and other dignitaries attending. Bates was conspicuously absent, sending a deputy in his place.

Scott was pressed at the news conference about Bates’ Monday remarks, where the first-term Democratic prosecutor said the mayor’s hallmark Group Violence Reduction Strategy had nothing to do with the city’s historic reduction in homicides over the last two years. Scott, also a Democrat, sounded off.

“We all are part of a team,” Scott said. “When you think about the city of Baltimore, the mayor’s the quarterback. I am the person who ultimately everyone is going to look at when things go bad.”

“The [police] commissioner may be Derrick Henry,” the mayor said, referring to the Baltimore Ravens’ star running back. “We might have someone else that is [wide receiver] Zay Flowers. We don’t need any Diontae Johnsons refusing to come to the table and be partners.”

For the non-NFL fans, Johnson is a talented wide receiver the Ravens cut this season because he refused to enter a game and was, overall, a malcontent. And for those who need the tea leaves parsed, the implication was Bates is Johnson.

Just don’t tell Bates that.

“I didn’t really take it as Diontae Johnson as me,” Bates said in an interview Wednesday. “Because without a doubt, I have to be the biggest partner with GVRS, and anything we’ve done, we’ve always been their partner.”

He didn’t stop there, opting instead to turn on the broiler.

“The mayor says things that you just, kind of, you can’t believe sometimes. I think he says them sometimes for shock value or he just wants to say whatever is on his mind,” he said, adding that statements like these “just go in one ear and out the other.”

If anything, Bates said he is the real leader of Baltimore’s public safety team, and that others have said as much. He suggested Scott’s Ravens’ analogy was actually a response to a November remark from U.S. Rep. Kweisi Mfume, where Mfume called Bates “the quarterback” while introducing him at a news conference.

And as to his absence at Tuesday’s news conference, Bates has a good reason for that. He was supposed to be at a previously scheduled Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives demonstration in Bethesda — something he said he communicated to Scott’s office. That demonstration was canceled. But then Bates’ had child care issues to deal with.

“I’m a single dad, and my daughter did what all these little kids did. She played out in the snow, and she came home crying and upset and sick as a dog,” he said. “So I was up with her all night, with a sick child.”

Sports references and alibis aside, the state’s attorney doubled down Wednesday on his comments in the television interview, saying it was his office’s tough on crime approach that’s driven down gun violence. More than twice as many people arrested on gun charges in Baltimore have been sentenced to prison in the two years Bates has been in office compared to the two years preceding him, according to figures his office published Tuesday.

Scott’s GVRS identifies those at highest risk of gun violence and seeks to connect them with services, reserving punitive enforcement for people who opt to continue criminal behavior. The program is active in four of the city’s nine police districts and, since its inception in the second-half of 2022, 201 people have accepted services. Another 355 have been prosecuted under Bates, according to the Baltimore State’s Attorney’s Office.

“We have seen this sustainable progress and back-to-back historic years in reducing homicides only because we have as a city invested in comprehensive, evidence-based public health solutions to tackle the disease of gun violence,” Scott said Tuesday.

“In the streets, they’re not worried about services,” Bates countered. “They’re worried about staying alive. They’re worried about getting the money that they need to get. They’re worried about ‘If I go get these services, people think I’m snitching.’”

This week’s spat is the latest flare-up between the two, a running series of disagreements that dates back to Bates’ election in 2022. The duo clashed after the primary on how to clear squeegee workers out of downtown, but a staged lunch at The Capital Grille was an attempt at making peace.

Tensions flared again in April 2024 during Scott’s reelection bid when Bates went public with what he called a growing rift between the two men. Days later, the state’s attorney endorsed Scott’s rival, former Mayor Sheila Dixon, and appeared in ads with her.

Later that month they issued a joint, one-paragraph statement which said that a “frank discussion” had laid the foundation for an “effective partnership moving forward.”

Now that partnership appears to be in jeopardy. Scott’s administration plans to expand GVRS citywide this year (expansion has repeatedly been delayed) but Bates said if that does happen, it will likely do so without the help of his office.

“Our state’s attorney’s office, we just don’t really have the people,” he said. Bates asked the City Council in 2024 for money in the budget to expand his staff but the request was denied.

In remarks delivered during Tuesday’s news conference — before Scott’s loaded NFL comparison — Moore made a plea for partnership.

“Anyone who tries to singularly claim credit for success is either naïve, being silly or just, truthfully, being just plain disingenuous,” the Democratic governor said. “That’s not how success happens.”