A ballooning income gap. Shifts in law enforcement. A massive spike in murders.

These are just a few ways Baltimore changed in the decade after Freddie Gray’s death and the unrest it sparked.

Reverberations continued long after the cameras shut off and the national consciousness moved on. The Baltimore of 2025 is markedly different than it was ten years ago — and, in some ways, exactly the same.

Gray was arrested after running from police. Arrests decreased dramatically following Gray’s death, in part because court-monitored oversight programs scrutinized police practices, though significant tensions remain between police and residents.

As arrests decreased, an even greater share of those arrested were Black people.

Gray had been arrested for drug charges before. Drug-related arrests were common in Baltimore until decriminalization and, eventually, legalization of cannabis. In 2014, drug charges represented five of the ten most commonly cited reasons people were taken into custody.

Gray lived in an incredibly segregated city. Decades of exclusionary policies had rigidly limited where Black residents could live, producing a city with stark racial divisions. Segregation continues to define Baltimore.

The two Baltimores are on profoundly different economic trajectories. In 2014, Census tracts where at least half of residents were white out-earned majority-Black tracts by more than $20,000. That gap has widened greatly.

Segregation in Baltimore has remained incredibly resilient. Neighborhoods in the Black Butterfly and in the White L show almost no demographic change.

Gray’s neighborhood was plagued by vacants. Sandtown-Winchester, like many other neighborhoods across the city, has faced high vacancy levels for years — a generation-spanning byproduct of segregationist policies, white flight and a 40% shrinkage in the city’s population from its all-time high decades ago.

At the time of his death, efforts were underway to remedy or demolish vacant housing units across the city, but the number of properties under vacant building notices — issued to buildings the city says are uninhabitable — was static.

Since 2015, demolitions have significantly cut into the number of properties with vacant building notices in Baltimore, though thousands still remain.

At the schools Gray attended, students were often absent. From 2005 to 2009, during the years he would have been in high school, an average of nearly 40% of students at Gray’s high school missed more than 20 days of school each year.

Across the city, the rate of students missing this much school was largely unchanged between 2010 and 2015.

In the decade since — and after it decreased during pandemic lockdowns — those numbers have increased. More than half of high school students routinely miss at least 20 days of school. So do a third of elementary and middle schoolers.

Gray’s death was ruled a homicide. Homicides spiked after his death.

Between 2010 and 2014, around 200 people were killed each year. It was a welcome respite from the 1990s crime surge when the city recorded at least 300 homicides every year.

In May, June and July 2015, the city recorded 115 killings total— nearly twice as many as during the same period in 2014.

Baltimore ended 2015 with 342 homicides. Yearly counts would stay near record levels until 2023, when the city experienced one of its largest-ever reductions in killings.

Homicides fell even further in 2024, putting the city on the cusp of the 200-killings mark. And while it’s still early in the year to predict the 2025 murder rate, early signs are promising: In the first three months of this year, police have tallied about three dozen homicides.

That’s among the lowest three-month counts in the last 50 years, and one-third lower than the murder rate between January and March ten years ago, just before Gray died.