New research shows that Baltimore’s relatively new violence reduction strategy may have reduced gun violence by 25% in the city’s western district, an area that for much of the last decade has seen the highest rates of homicides and non-fatal shootings.
Scholars from the Crime and Justice Policy Lab at the University of Pennsylvania analyzed 18 months of data from January 2022 through June 2023 to understand the early impacts of the Group Violence Reduction Strategy– a program reimplemented by Mayor Brandon Scott in 2021 that intends to bring law enforcement and community partners together especially to tackle gang-related gun violence.
The western district contains neighborhoods including Mondawmin, Sandtown-Winchester and Harlem Park although in July 2023, new district boundaries went into effect.
University of Pennsylvania’s Aaron Chalfin and Max Kapustin from Cornell University led the study by analyzing police records from January 2015 - June 2023 for crimes that “often involve firearms” like homicides and shootings, assaults, robberies, and carjackings. The team followed that trend to create an estimated crime rate for a scenario in which no GVRS had been implemented which was then compared to the actual numbers reported by the Baltimore Police Department for that same 18 month period.
That comparison showed a “notable decline” of 25% in homicides and shootings with little noticeable change in assaults and robberies. Carjackings, a crime that has dominated local public safety conversations, are actually down by about a third in the Western District, researchers found.
Meanwhile, researchers wrote that they found no evidence that crime was being “displaced” to other areas of the city. They also found no evidence that the arrests, which had been trending down previously, increased as a result of the GVRS (in the studied time period there were 140 individuals reportedly arrested by BPD’s group violence unit).
Rev. Marvin McKenstry, Jr. is a pastor and GVRS mentor. He says that out of the 12 youth he has worked to connect with services, 10 of them are living a life outside of crime.
“I can text each and every one of them every day and know what they’re doing. They’re bragging about their jobs.They didn’t want to stay in that life or what was going on– they just needed the right opportunity,” he said after a city press conference announcing the results of the study.
Resources available through GVRS could include resume assistance, job connections, and mental health services among others.
GVRS strategies are not novel to Baltimore nor is the city’s first go-round with the program – attempts under former mayors Kurt Schmoke and Stephanie Rawlings Blake were unsuccessful in the 1990s and 2014.
Mayor Scott had set a goal to expand the program citywide by 2024 but it has faced delays, including a high vacancy rate in the police department. Regardless, the mayor insisted that it is better to move slowly and be sustainable than to falter like in the previous attempts.
“The folks that are dying in the streets of Baltimore are more than numbers to me,” said Scott, remembering growing up as a young man in Park Heights who lost “ many” friends growing up.
“We lived in a city, quite frankly, that didn't care about us. As somebody who grew up through that and had that experience, I made it my life’s goal to be different,” said the mayor.
Meanwhile, homicides dropped by historic numbers across the United States in 2023 according to multiple studies so it may be difficult to parse out the exact impacts of the GVRS from the wider national trend.
Chalfin, one of the researchers from University of Pennsylvania still thinks that the drop from 2022 is still too great to simply be a reflection of the national trend.
“We look at the Western district, we find other parts of Baltimore. We take a weighted average of other parts of Baltimore such that we're finding places that have similar levels of homicides, carjackings of other crimes, also similar trends,” explained Chalfin. By comparing those two data sets, he said, “They're in very, very similar trajectories. And then starting in January 2022, they diverge in a really obvious way.”
In Baltimore, 2023 was the first year in a decade that the city has come under 300 homicides, a number politicians have used for decades to set city crime reduction policies. Scott has touted the GVRS for a large part of that reduction.
Scott, a Democrat, is up for reelection this year. He faces a competitive primary challenge from former Mayor Sheila Dixon in May, Dixon has positioned herself as a traditionally more “tough on crime” candidate.
