Inside Baltimore’s Gun Violence Reduction Strategy

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Baltimore, Maryland, has been a city synonymous with serious crime across modern American history. Its cultural depictions in television (Homicide, The Wire, We Own This City) have been inspired by real-life incidents and trade heavily on the notion that Baltimore, and particularly its Western district, exemplifies America’s serious violent crime problem and the populace’s fraught relationship with policing.

Baltimore has consistently competed for the dubious title of ‘America’s Murder Capital’ with New Orleans, Memphis, and St. Louis. The city’s annual homicide rate has been at or near the 95th percentile among American cities with populations of at least 250,000 for the past 60 years. In 2021, the homicide rate was the second highest among large U.S. cities— at 58 per 100,000.

Then came 2022.

Baltimore’s homicide rate fell by roughly 60% between 2022 and 2025, a striking decline in a city that experiences hundreds of murders annually. But this sea change goes beyond the normal ebb and flow of crime and its contributing factors. It was not achieved by a systemic increase or decrease in policing.

Baltimore has consistently competed for the dubious title of ‘America’s Murder Capital’ with New Orleans, Memphis, and St. Louis. The city’s annual homicide rate has been at or near the 95th percentile among American cities with populations of at least 250,000 for the past 60 years. In 2021, the homicide rate was the second highest among large U.S. cities— at 58 per 100,000.

Then came 2022.

Baltimore’s homicide rate fell by roughly 60% between 2022 and 2025, a striking decline in a city that experiences hundreds of murders annually. But this sea change goes beyond the normal ebb and flow of crime and its contributing factors. It was not achieved by a systemic increase or decrease in policing.

Researchers from Cornell University and the University of Pennsylvania recently published a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper titled Reducing Gun Violence at Scale, which examined Baltimore's remarkable success in curbing violent crime. The key to this success? A multidisciplinary policy intervention called "focused deterrence" that brought together law enforcement, prosecutors, policymakers, academics, and non-profit organizations.

Focused deterrence operates on a straightforward principle: identify individuals at heightened risk of becoming either victims or perpetrators of gun violence, notify them that they've been identified, and then intervene with targeted social services or criminal investigations as appropriate.

Building on this approach, Baltimore launched its Group Violence Reduction Strategy (GVRS) in January 2022. The GVRS initiative was a collaborative effort between the Mayor’s Office, Baltimore Police Department, prosecutors, and community-based organizations. Through a series of meetings, the coalition identified individuals and groups at elevated risk of gun violence involvement.

Once identified, these individuals and groups received visits or were invited to “call-ins” where they were connected to a team consisting of a detective, an outreach worker, and a community member. The message was clear: they were at elevated risk and had become a focus of the GVRS and law enforcement. From there, subjects were connected to outreach organizations offering supportive services, while those suspected of having committed acts of gun violence faced targeted enforcement and prosecution.

Before expanding citywide, the program was piloted in Baltimore’s Western District, an area representing one of the highest-violence neighborhoods in America and ranking among the nation's most disadvantaged. More than one third of residents live below the poverty line, and 36% of buildings are vacant, with many boarded up and visibly deteriorating.

Despite comprising only 5% of the city's population, the Western District accounted for 16% of Baltimore's homicide victims and 15% of its non-fatal shooting victims, according to statistics from 2021. Rates for homicide and non-fatal shooting victims in the Western District were about three times higher than those in the rest of the city, with 0.5% of the district’s population wounded or killed by gun violence. Among the 323 police districts across 27 large American cities, the Western District’s homicide rate ranked fifth highest.

In preparation to launch the GVRS, Baltimore began working with the University of Pennsylvania’s Crime and Justice Policy Lab. Analysis found strong overlaps between victim and offending populations in the Western District. More than 95% of victims and offenders were black, 80% were male, and more than 70% were ages 16-34. Approximately 81% were well known to the criminal justice system, with a mean of 12 prior arrests.

Services ranged from intensive mentorship and crisis management to counseling and cognitive behavioral therapy, employment and licensing assistance, education and vocational training, emergency relocation, microgrants, and stipends. Delivered through community-based organizations whose legitimacy with GVRS subjects often exceeds that of law enforcement, these supports reinforced the credibility of the strategy’s broader message.

Researchers estimate that within 18 months of beginning the GVRS program, shootings and homicides in the Western District fell by roughly one third and carjackings fell by about 40%. Researchers found no spillover effect, indicating that these crimes were not displaced into other districts. After 2022, bolstered by the program’s success, officials expanded the GVRS program into other city districts.

Even as violent crime declined, overall enforcement levels remained stable, with the focused deterrence strategy primarily redirecting police resources toward the most serious violent offenses.

Despite no discernible change in total arrests, the GVRS program increased arrests for serious violent crimes by 81% and increased the violent crime clearance rate from 8% to 10%. The GVRS program did not produce a detectable change in overall property crime or in assaults, but increased aggravated assault arrests.

The program also bears potential benefits for the relationship between police and community. Many campaigns of increased police presence in high-crime areas result in a spike of low-level arrests, creating increased safety risks for both police and civilians, and contributing to a negative perception of police in the community at large.

The GVRS program redirected use of police authority in the Western district towards serious violence and away from high-volume routine enforcement exposures to the criminal justice system.

Gun violence is highly social, criminologists and public health officials have studied the similarity of its spread to a pandemic disease. Gun crimes are highly retaliatory, occurring within relatively small social networks of interconnected people, this means preventing one shooting can prevent subsequent shooting incidents.

This commonality and closeness of these social networks means it is possible to concentrate law enforcement attention and social service delivery on the same small set of people, who are already known to police and social services.

Law enforcement can deter group members from engaging in violence, or incapacitate them through arrest and detention. Social services can target the same group members with pro-social interventions, targeting outreach, transitional jobs, housing assistance, and other supports to the group, offering credible alternatives to violence and reinforcing the deterrent message.

Focused deterrence was pioneered in Boston, Massachusetts in the mid-1990s. It was designed to curb youth gun violence amid the crack cocaine epidemic. It involved a similar collaboration between law enforcement, social services, community and academic partners. Large reductions in gun violence immediately followed the implementation of Operation Ceasefire in Boston.

A systematic review by criminologists at the University of Pennsylvania, Michigan State University, Hebrew University Law School, and George Mason University found that focused deterrence programs consistently reduce serious violence. Fifty controlled evaluations of focused deterrence programs showed they were associated with an average 23% reduction in crime, with the largest impacts produced by programs focused on gang and group violence.

The success of these programs relies on emphasizing deterrence, where law enforcement can pull all available enforcement levers through a concentrated and coordinated use of investigations, low-level stops, warrant service, surveillance, and probation and parole conditions.

But these programs also significantly rely on social services and on enlisting community members and stakeholders to mobilize informal social control, enhance police legitimacy, and reduce crime opportunity through situational crime prevention.

Baltimore had tried focused deterrence programs in 1998 and 2014-2015. These early efforts showed promising results but were soon dismantled due to political infighting and turnover in upper management.

The success stories associated with focused deterrence, particularly the GVRS program’s recent gains in Baltimore, a city synonymous with violent crime throughout modern history, demonstrate that creative and collaborative use of existing justice-system and community partners can make meaningful new headway.