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Cities are claiming significant crime reductions by providing services to potential offenders.
They are downplaying the role of cops and embracing social programs.
This article focuses on Baltimore, but its principles also apply to other cities that take credit for crime reductions.
What reduces crime? What does the data say based on accepted research practices? Communities and funders like the idea of change through support and compassion. “Help and hope” sells better than “stop or else.” But in reality, deterrence is what stops the bleeding. Services may come later, and we should invest in them. But let’s not fool ourselves into thinking they are the engine of short-term violence reduction.
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Yahoo News: In Baltimore, officials say they have seen historic decreases in homicides and nonfatal shootings this year, and those have been on the decline since 2022, according to the city’s public safety data dashboard. Carjackings were down 20% in 2023, and other major crimes fell in 2024. Only burglaries have climbed slightly.
The lower crime rates are attributed to tackling violence with a “public health” approach (emphasis added), city officials say. In 2021, under Mayor Brandon Scott, Baltimore created a Comprehensive Violence Prevention Plan that called for more investment in community violence intervention, more services for crime victims and other initiatives. Scott accused Trump of exploiting crime as a “wedge issue and dog whistle” rather than caring about curbing violence.
Opinion
There are times when I believe that people claiming crime reductions are not being completely honest with the public. A report from the Baltimore Mayor’s Office may fit my notion that government or advocacy groups are not telling the full story. The city where I grew up and participated with officials numerous times when I was the director of public information for the Maryland Department of Public Safety, offered a report showing multiple reductions in violence.
The essential question is whether the cited interventions reduce crime, and the data backing up these assertions. Baltimore’s crime story received international coverage in Vox; The Guardian, and Yahoo News; thus, others will be influenced by Baltimore’s narrative.
It’s Not Just Baltimore-Chicago-The City Is “Doing The Things That Work”
But it’s not just Baltimore. City officials and violence interrupters in cities throughout the country are taking credit.
Chicago Sun Times, Chicago’s crime decline is part of a national trend, researchers say. Mayor Brandon Johnson has touted the numbers as proof that the city is “doing the things that work” when it comes to shootings and murders.
Some have credited investments in community anti-violence efforts, but Lopez (a senior research specialist at the Council on Criminal Justice) said there is not enough evidence to support that violence intervention is driving this decline, nationally or in Chicago.
“For any city, when we analyze these city trends, we try not to ascribe a specific cause to either the increase or to the decrease, without having better data. And so while it’s encouraging that cities are implementing a variety of programming, we do not have much confidence to say that they’re effective without clear evidence,” Lopez said.
Crime Counts
States and cities continue to struggle with their crime counts. “California says crime is down. But officials know the data is flawed,” is an article in the San Francisco Chronicle. “It happened again. The California Department of Justice this week published a major report, and a corresponding press release, touting a drop in violent crime across the state. But the data underlying the report is substantially flawed — thanks to a big mistake that the DOJ was made aware of last year after Chronicle reporting, but did not fix.”
Now, the Trump administration is investigating crime statistics for Washington, D.C.
Some cities and states find it challenging to obtain and provide accurate crime data.
Baltimore’s Group Violence Reduction Strategy
Per the city’s Group Violence Reduction Strategy, “This is the power of implementing a strategy that doesn’t solely rely on law enforcement (emphasis added). We are interrupting cycles of violence and proving that when people, their families, and communities are given support that’s responsive to their needs — including life coaching, behavioral health services, housing support, and case management—they will often make the choice to step away from the life,” see “Baltimore City Outlines Next Steps for Group Violence Reduction Strategy (GVRS) Expansion.”
It stated that “At Thursday’s event, the external evaluation team at the University of Pennsylvania’s Crime and Justice Policy Lab (CJP) talked extensively about the preliminary assessments of the impact of the Group Violence Reduction Strategy (GVRS) in the Baltimore Police Department’s Western District – the area with historically the highest rates of homicides and shootings in Baltimore, and among the highest in the United States. The UPenn (editor’s note, the University of Pennslyvania) team found that, in the 18 months after its introduction in January 2022, GVRS was responsible for reducing homicides and shootings in the Western District by roughly a quarter, and carjackings by about a third, with no evidence that these crimes moved to other parts of the city. A summary of evaluation findings can be found on MONSE’s website.
Crime in Baltimore
Baltimore is currently rated as the fourth most violent city in America and one of the most dangerous cities in the world.
Three Challenges To Baltimore’s Report
Why do I have an issue with the report? Crimes “reported” to law enforcement (the vast majority are not) are declining throughout the country, per the FBI and independent analysts for 2024 and 2025. Thus, what’s happening in Baltimore may be (and probably is) part of a pattern happening in many cities in the US.
Furthermore, because of the dramatic increase in crime from 2019 through 2023, it may be nothing more than crime returning to normal patterns (what researchers call a regression to the mean).
The Major Cities Chiefs Association stated that homicides nationally increased by 50 percent, and aggravated assaults increased by 36 percent from 2019 to 2023. With increases like these, crime would inevitably decrease.
But the most interesting thing when I was reading Baltimore’s report was the similarity with their current Group Violence Reduction Strategy and a program deemed successful by the US Department of Justice, Project Safe Neighborhoods.
When reading about Baltimore’s program, I said to myself that it’s Project Safe Neighborhoods, branded under a different name. They are downplaying the role of law enforcement and playing up the ideology of violence prevention. Project Safe Neighborhood worked because of the pressure put on targeted groups by the police and community representatives to either comply or suffer enhanced enforcement (i.e., arrest or prison).
The final item to consider was the role of programs offered to targeted offenders. The plain truth is that programs for offenders rarely change human behavior. Recidivism based on new crimes and reincarcerations for adjudicated people is sky high, regardless of the programs they participated in.
Why Downplay The Role Of Law Enforcement?
First, we need to understand that, per a USDOJ-funded literature review, from the National Academies of Sciences, police related initiatives were the only modality with a track record of hundreds of methodologically correct evaluations indicating that police practices reduce crime.
Second, there is a concerted effort to downplay the role of law enforcement and emphasize “violence prevention” as an ethically preferred approach. To my knowledge, there isn’t a review of the literature indicating that a violence reduction approach has an impact on crime based on good, independent, replicated evaluations. Most evaluations indicate that a program approach to crime reduction failed to have the desired impact.
Project Safe Neighborhoods
I participated in a Project Safe Neighborhoods (PSN) initiative in Washington, D.C., and Baltimore. The program was designed to reduce violent crime by focusing law enforcement attention on the small number of individuals driving most of the violence, with the promise of programs to escape a life of violence or a warning that law enforcement would come down hard on crews (gangs) that did not comply. Call-ins were a focus of the program, where groups would be warned by community members and law enforcement to comply or go to prison.
The model showed promise in D.C (but Baltimore-at that time-chose not to participate), and for a brief period, the strategy worked. Shootings dropped. Violence subsided. And then, just as quickly, the initiative lost steam.
“Overall, PSN was associated with a statistically significant reduction in violent crime of approximately four to five percent relative to comparison sites. Sites that fully implemented PSN principles—targeting high-risk offenders, increasing federal prosecution, engaging the community, and building local partnerships—saw larger reductions, averaging up to nine percent.” In some cities, reductions exceeded nine percent per an evaluation by the National Institute of Justice titled, “The Effects of Project Safe Neighborhoods on Violent Crime.”
What struck many of us involved was this: it wasn’t the programs or services offered that changed behavior.
Most of us openly doubted that the social service referrals or job training programs could seriously alter the life trajectories (i.e., brain injuries, victims of violence, child abuse and neglect, anger management) of the high-risk individuals we were targeting. These services were often underfunded, overburdened, and symbolic.
What worked was the focused attention—the law enforcement pressure and the very real threat of federal prosecution. That, combined with credible messengers and direct communication, seemed to produce reductions in violence.
Fast forward to today, and we see similar models resurfacing under different names. The University of Pennsylvania evaluated the Group Violence Reduction Strategy (GVRS), implemented in West Baltimore. Their language is familiar to anyone who has worked in PSN or other focused deterrence efforts:
- Identification of the individuals most at risk
- Notification through direct communication
- Action involving a combination of support services and targeted enforcement
GVRS, like PSN, targets the people most responsible for gun violence. It uses community moral voices—pastors, survivors, educators, and mentors—to send a clear message: the violence must stop. At the same time, it offers services and support for those willing to change. But the real weight behind the message is law enforcement’s focus on those who don’t.
It’s Not The Programs That Drive Success-It’s The Pressure
So I asked Chat GPT for its appraisal. What follows is from them:
The social services aspect of these initiatives is often aspirational. High-risk individuals typically face immense challenges—addiction, homelessness, trauma, poor education, and repeated system failure. A job referral or case management handoff is rarely enough to trigger sustained change.
This is consistent with what researchers like David Kennedy, the architect of focused deterrence, have said for years: the goal is not to fix every individual. The goal is to stop the shooting. And the most effective way to do that is through a combination of targeted enforcement and a credible promise of consequences for continued violence.
Multiple studies confirm this. A 2019 meta-analysis by Anthony Braga and colleagues found that focused deterrence strategies consistently reduce violent crime, with the biggest gains coming from enforcement and communication—not social services. The National Institute of Justice has echoed this, noting that while service components are valuable, they are rarely implemented at full capacity and don’t drive the primary outcomes.
So why hasn’t the country embraced this model more widely? If focused deterrence works, why is it so inconsistently applied?
There are several answers:
- Leadership turnover: These programs rely on sustained commitment from law enforcement, prosecutors, and community leaders. When that leadership changes, momentum dies.
- Politics: PSN has often been tied to “tough on crime” branding, which makes it politically unpalatable in some cities. The same model wrapped in a “public health” or “violence interrupter” narrative is often more acceptable.
- Underfunding: Most PSN sites received minimal federal support. Compare that to the millions spent on newer, less proven violence prevention models.
- Implementation complexity: These strategies require real coordination and data-sharing. Many cities simply don’t have the infrastructure.
- Lack of national leadership: Unlike programs like Cure Violence or GVI, PSN has no consistent national champion or nonprofit stewarding its legacy.
And perhaps most importantly, these programs struggle with public messaging. Communities and funders like the idea of change through support and compassion. “Help and hope” sells better than “stop or else.” But in reality, deterrence is what stops the bleeding. Services may come later, and we should invest in them. But let’s not fool ourselves into thinking they are the engine of short-term violence reduction.
It’s time to face the truth: we already have models that work. Project Safe Neighborhoods and its offspring, like GVRS, are grounded in evidence. They produce real results. But they require focus, political courage, and honesty about what drives change.
We don’t need a new strategy. We need the will to sustain the one that works.
Conclusions
So we have a continuing battle over law enforcement strategies and social science endeavors. Some people fervently believe that cops make things worse and that we need a softer and gentler approach to crime problems. I believe that Baltimore’s approach embraces that conflict. I believe that Baltimore is simply repackaging Project Safe Neighborhoods with a message more accepting to some.
Why? A social science or softer approach to crime control allows the city to target groups of people who have a high risk of violence. If it’s advertised as “violence prevention” and downplays the role of cops, targeting people deemed “dangerous” carries less onerous implications.
Police targeting of specific individuals or groups based solely on protected characteristics (like race, religion, etc.) without evidence of criminal activity is considered unlawful and violates constitutional rights to equal protection per the ACLU. But in truth, ANY attempt to create a list of “dangerous” people by law enforcement, regardless of the criteria, is deemed unlawful, objectionable, or overreach by a variety of groups.
Even objective criminal risk instruments predicting future criminality designed by the US Department of Justice for use by the courts, corrections, and parole and probation have been put on hold because researchers have not been able to eliminate race bias.
So the effort in Baltimore to repackage the basic elements of Project Safe Neighborhoods as violence prevention escapes the criticism while employing the very elements (targeting high-risk offenders) that make it successful.
The national debate over police initiatives troubles some people who insist that crime control does not need the heavy hand of proactive policing, while ignoring the literature review from the National Academy of Sciences, funded by the US Department of Justice, indicating that it’s the only study of sufficient scientific rigor that reduces crime.
Violence Interrupters “may” be effective, but the concept lacks independent, replicated, well-done research. Violence interruption may defuse current events, but participants remain embroiled in circumstances that promote violence. When I interviewed multiple offenders in the Baltimore City Jail for a governor’s crime summit, many insisted that violence was in their best interest.
There have been endless programs deemed a common-sense approach to crime prevention (i.e., the discipline of correctional boot camps, the personal involvement of judges in Hawaii’s Project Hope, social programs for offenders, etc.) that failed when replicated or properly evaluated.
We seem to be more than willing to take simplistic approaches to violence when the variables are immensely complicated (i.e., our willingness to ignore the trauma-related backgrounds of offenders as children, especially sex assaults). Child abuse and neglect make the provision of services problematic.
No one is against programs. But we shouldn’t mislead the public that short-term interventions can overcome years of abuse, neglect, brain injuries, and violent victimization within the young offender population. Victims of extreme trauma need focused long-term assistance that is beyond the abilities of most jurisdictions.
In essence, an evidence-based and cumulative research approach ends up taking a back seat to personal philosophy. Regardless, the decline in “reported” crimes (the vast majority of crimes are not reported to law enforcement) in multiple cities is likely due to crime returning to previous patterns, not initiatives touted by cities.
Crime rising and declining is a normal pattern, regardless of our inability to explain why.
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