Baltimore launches Safe Summer push to curb violence year-round
Safe Streets opened its sixth Safe Summer at Druid Hill Park, with outreach, giveaways and youth events slated for Cherry Hill, Penn North and other neighborhoods.
Druid Hill Park became the city’s latest violence-prevention stage as Safe Streets Baltimore opened its sixth Safe Summer campaign with Mayor Brandon Scott, MONSE Director Stefanie Mavronis, Catholic Charities of Baltimore and LifeBridge Health Center for Hope. For families in Safe Streets zones, the promise was practical: outreach workers, recreation staff and violence interrupters will be back in the same neighborhoods all summer, not just for a kickoff event.
The city tied this year’s campaign to Baltimore City Department of Recreation and Parks and the Mayor’s Office, making the launch part of a broader summer safety push rather than a stand-alone announcement. The slogan, Breaking Chains, Chasing Change, reflected a strategy that blends violence interruption with visible neighborhood programming. Scott cast the effort as part of Baltimore’s historic progress in reducing homicides and nonfatal shootings, while saying Safe Streets is meant to keep working year-round.
That message matters because the program’s summer calendar is built around everyday needs as much as violence prevention. Safe Streets sites held about 60 events in 2025, ranging from block parties to school supply giveaways, and this year’s lineup again reaches beyond enforcement and into family support. In neighborhoods including Cherry Hill, Penn North, Sandtown, Park Heights, Brooklyn and McElderry Park, residents can expect food giveaways, employment and resource expos, gun lock distribution, firearm safety education and youth-focused events.
The timing also comes with numbers city leaders are eager to point to. Baltimore ended 2025 with 133 homicides, the fewest in nearly 50 years, and the city said homicides fell 31.44% last year while nonfatal shootings dropped 24.51%. The declines extended over five years as well, with homicides down 58.69% and nonfatal shootings down 57.33%. In the first half of 2025, police reported 68 homicides and 164 nonfatal shootings, down 22% and 19% from the same period a year earlier.
There is also some neighborhood-level evidence behind the city’s confidence. A Johns Hopkins study published in Injury Prevention in May found Safe Streets was associated with a 42% reduction in homicides involving youth ages 15 to 24 and a 21% reduction in youth nonfatal shootings at the neighborhood level, based on 11 sites operating between 2007 and 2023. City materials describe Safe Streets, established in 2007, as an evidence-based public-health program modeled after Chicago’s Cure Violence approach. The wider violence-intervention network also includes Roca, hospital-based violence intervention, victim services, life coaches and case managers.
Baltimore has also been highlighting site-specific milestones. In May, the city said the Safe Streets Penn North site had gone more than 365 days without a homicide in its catchment area, while Catholic Charities marked 10 years of partnership at the Sandtown-Winchester site. Together, those markers suggest the city is trying to make summer safety look less like a campaign and more like an operating system for the neighborhoods that need it most.
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