Baltimore homicides hit nearly 50-year low as violence falls again

Baltimore closed 2025 with 133 homicides, the fewest in nearly 50 years, as killings fell 31% from 194 in 2024 and non-fatal shootings dropped 24% from 412 to 311. City leaders are treating the numbers as a historic turn, but the real question now is whether the decline can survive the summer months, when retaliation and street violence have often surged.

The midyear numbers showed the drop was broad, not a one-month anomaly. By the middle of 2025, homicides were down 22% year over year, from 88 to 68, while non-fatal shootings fell 19%, from 204 to 164. Baltimore police also reported that Group A NIBRS offenses were down 11% in the midyear tally, a sign that the improvement extended beyond the city’s most visible violence.

Officials have tied the decline to a three-part strategy: focused policing, violence interruption, and school-based supports. By Aug. 23, police said they had seized 1,685 firearms so far that year. By Aug. 26, Safe Streets Baltimore violence interrupters had mediated more than 1,011 potentially violent conflicts. The city describes Safe Streets workers as screened outreach workers and credible messengers who handle public education, conflict mediation and violence interruption in neighborhoods where shootings have been most persistent, including Park Heights, Penn North, Franklin Square, Brooklyn and the Southern Police District.

That mix appears to be producing different kinds of gains. Gun seizures and focused police work are aimed at the weapons that drive the most lethal shootings. Safe Streets is aimed at the disputes that can turn into retaliation. Community schools, another piece of the city’s approach, are meant to blunt the conditions around violence before conflicts reach the street. Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health researchers reported that Safe Streets Baltimore reduced homicides and nonfatal shootings overall from 2007 to 2022, giving the program a research base even as city leaders lean on it more heavily.

The city’s progress did not start in 2025. Homicides fell 20% in 2023 and then another 23% in 2024, to 201, before dropping again to 133 last year. Mayor Brandon M. Scott, Police Commissioner Richard Worley and Johns Hopkins University President Ron Daniels have all pointed to the result as historic, but the durability test is still ahead. Funding uncertainty around Safe Streets has raised questions about whether the gains can be sustained, and the Police Department remains under the federal consent decree tied to the Freddie Gray case. Baltimore has proved it can drive violence down; keeping it there is the harder assignment.