Baltimore is days away from finishing 2025 with its lowest homicide total in at least 48 years — read that again.
The city could end the year with fewer than 150 killings, the lowest since the Baltimore Police Department reported 171 homicides in 1977, before two-thirds of Baltimore residents were born, according to the 2024 American Community Survey by the Census Bureau.
The drop, which began in 2022, is one of the longest sustained periods of homicide decline on record, a Banner analysis showed. This year will mark only the fifth since 1970 with fewer than 200 homicides. It will be the first time since 1978 that the city has recorded fewer than 200 killings in back-to-back years.
The city has had four record-low months on its way to the historic total. February, April, August and October set marks for fewest homicides since 1970. Each month this year saw fewer homicides than the average since 2020. In fact, the homicide total every month has been lower than we’d typically see in any month this decade.
In Southwest Baltimore, a corner of the city with one of the steepest rates of declining gun violence, community leaders noticed that things felt different. But they were divided on the source of the change.
Unique Garrett, president of the Shipley Hill Community Association, largely attributed it to grassroots organizing. That has centered around a “Peaceful Pink Park” that has served as a hub for events including community baby showers, where diapers, strollers and formula are made available, and a Father’s Day cookout.
“The people that are out here, these nonprofit organizations, have their own mentorship for these young Black adults in our community,” Garrett said. “They do more work than any city official, and I see it. I witness it.”
In the nearby Union Square neighborhood, Bif Browning, president of the local community association, said changes in how the Baltimore Police Department operates have made a difference.
Specifically, he cited redistricting, which unified the neighborhood under one chain of command, along with improved community policing under the current major, Michael Mercado.
“He and his team, they’re much better about talking to the community and gathering feedback from the ground up,” Browning said. “They reach out to us on a monthly basis, sometimes even more.”
Gun violence prevention experts might tell you that neither of them is wrong. Changes in how the city is policed have had a meaningful impact on the homicide rate, but those who view gun violence as a public health issue — a group that includes the city’s mayor — also believe there is a social element, a fatigue from decades of bloodshed, behind the steep decrease.
Even in the midst of similar declines in other cities with high homicide rates, Baltimore’s has fallen faster and more sharply.
According to the Real-Time Crime Index, a tool for tracking crime trends across cities, Baltimore recorded about 10 more homicides per 100,000 residents in 2018 than any other city. The city led the nation in homicide rate as recently as 2021. As of October 2025, the homicide rate has dropped below those in Detroit, New Orleans, Cleveland and Memphis, Tennessee.
That has thrust the city and its flagship approach, the Group Violence Reduction Strategy, to the center of a nationwide debate about the reduction in homicides. Among other things, the strategy reorients police resources, narrowing the focus of law enforcement from policing entire swaths of the city to prevent gun violence to focusing on dozens of people thought to be most at risk for engaging in it or becoming victims. Mayor Brandon Scott has taken to national airwaves to trumpet the program’s success.
“It’s never been about how many people you arrest but who [you arrest],” Scott said on MSNBC in July. “None of us are saying that there’s no role for policing, but having police officers go out and focus on every single solitary thing, and not be laser focused on the small group of people who are doing the violence, is insane.”
But changes to city demographics could also be at play. Many West Baltimore communities, for instance, look vastly different than they did when the homicide rate began to skyrocket in the 2010s.
And Southwest Baltimore — which includes the Carrollton Ridge, Union Square and Shipley Hill neighborhoods — has seen its population decline more than 20% since 2013. The area that includes Sandtown-Winchester and Harlem Park has lost nearly a third of its residents.
Thomas Abt, a criminology professor at the University of Maryland and founder of the Center for the Study and Practice of Violence Reduction, stressed that crime is “inherently complex and multifactorial.” Therefore, a steep drop in gun violence is likely dependent on a combination of local, regional, national and perhaps even international factors, “all of which are poorly understood.”
“The way these crime trend conversations go with experts, the first thing we’re all careful to say is ... ‘I’m not sure,’” Abt said. “The second thing you say is, ‘It’s probably a bunch of things’ ... and then you try to pick out what seem to be the largest drivers.”
For Abt, those drivers could include a “reduction to the mean,” meaning cities with the highest rates of gun violence would therefore necessarily have some of the steepest drops. Second, Abt said, the city’s group violence reduction strategy has been “very successful,” and independent evaluations have backed that.
Beyond homicide, other crimes that often involve a firearm are down considerably. Crimes involving a firearm are down 13% since the same time last year.
Aggravated assaults have fallen 11%; rapes, 28%.
Abt also said the dwindling rate of gun crimes aligns with the tenure of State’s Attorney Ivan Bates, who has taken a tougher approach on prosecuting gun crimes.
Also, Abt said, the modernization of police technology has given law enforcement new tools to solve gun crimes. In Baltimore, the rate at which homicides are solved has steadily ticked up as rates of gun violence have plummeted.
“The police are the single largest piece on the board,” he said. “So the police department is likely part of the story, positive or negative.”
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