Baltimore’s incredible crime-fighting success story

“Focused deterrence,” explained

A policeman is on duty in Baltimore. (Photo by aimintang via Getty Images)

Baltimore has been a notoriously high-crime city for basically all of my life. It is, statistically, a very high-crime city, but its reputation also stems from the fact that the American public’s main exposure has been the television shows “Homicide” and “The Wire,” both of which are largely about crime in Baltimore.

Of course, if you watched the excellent-but-short-lived series “Hannibal,” you’ve seen a different, more upscale side of Baltimore, including some of the city’s genuinely great cultural amenities. But even that one is about a cannibalistic serial killer.

In more recent times, though, Baltimore is best known (at least among policy heads) for one of the most remarkable crime drops in America. Even in the context of national good news about homicides and shootings, Baltimore stands out as the champion among major cities.

I think in a sane world the public officials who spearheaded this would be famous national heroes, but Mayor Brandon Scott hasn’t really gotten the credit he deserves.

That reflects, to an extent, some of his communications decisions. He talks about “gun violence” rather than crime, and his signature anti-crime initiative is called the Group Violence Reduction Strategy, avoiding the word “gang.”

But the actual upshot of Scott-era policy has not been to replace group violence inflicted by firearms with classy, Hannibal Lecter-style solo non-gun killings. There’s just less crime. And while I wish Scott would communicate about this somewhat differently, the thing that really matters here is the results, which are very good, and I want more people to understand how they came about because I think they’re broadly replicable in other large cities.

Baltimore is also interesting for some of its not-so-replicable qualities, though.

There are lots of American cities where ideally we’d see less crime. But Charm City is a place that is uniquely hobbled by crime, not just in the sense that crime is high but in the sense that the basic fundamentals on housing, jobs, and the built environment are otherwise pretty strong. A sustained low-crime spell in Baltimore could easily set off a positive cycle of in-migration and investment that unlocks a ton of new appealing neighborhoods and generates huge gains.

The Baltimore context

On the politics, Scott is an interesting case because he was elected in 2020 after a series of corruption scandals rocked the city’s political establishment. Against the backdrop of the Great Awokening, he positioned himself as a young progressive rather than a tough-on-crime candidate, which is probably one reason he hasn’t gotten the national press attention he deserves. Another notable thing is that if you look at the chart, Baltimore just skipped the entire murder surge that afflicted most of America in 2020 and 2021.