Penn North Safe Streets marks 368 days without a homicide

Penn North's Safe Streets site has reached 368 days without a homicide, a stretch city officials are tying to violence interrupters, community events and dozens of mediations inside one of Baltimore's most heavily watched neighborhoods.

The city said the last homicide in the Penn North catchment area was on May 23, 2025, in the 1800 block of N. Woodyear Street. By May 26, 2026, the site had gone 368 days without another one, and Mayor Brandon Scott, the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement and Catholic Charities marked the milestone as a sign that the city’s violence-intervention strategy is working on the ground.

Officials pointed to more than 108 successful mediations and 45 community events at the Penn North site as part of that effort. Across all 10 city Safe Streets sites, workers mediated more than 1,752 potentially violent conflicts in 2025, a reminder that the homicide-free stretch in Penn North rests on constant, often invisible work rather than a single intervention or one-time event.

Safe Streets is Baltimore’s flagship violence intervention program, launched in 2007 as a public-health response to shootings and homicides. In 2022, Scott shifted the program from eight community-based administrators to two lead operators, Catholic Charities of Baltimore and LifeBridge Health’s Center for Hope. Catholic Charities describes the model as evidence-based violence prevention and interruption, built around outreach, public education, conflict mediation and violence interruption in high-violence areas.

The numbers also fit into a longer record that is more mixed than a celebratory milestone might suggest. Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Center for Gun Violence Solutions reported in 2023 that Safe Streets was associated with reductions in homicides and nonfatal shootings from 2007 to 2022, including a statistically significant average 32% reduction in homicides during the first four years across the five longer-running sites. That analysis supports the idea that the model can move violent crime trends, but it does not prove every neighborhood will see the same results or that one year without a homicide means broader public safety problems have been solved.

Penn North has been here before. The neighborhood had already gone more than a year without a homicide in March 2024, and local reporting said Safe Streets began there in 2019 after Penn North became the epicenter of unrest following Freddie Gray’s death. The fact that other Baltimore neighborhoods, including Sandtown-Winchester, Woodbourne-McCabe, Park Heights, Franklin Square and Belvedere, have also hit no-homicide milestones suggests Penn North is part of a wider pattern of neighborhood-level gains, not an isolated case.

For Baltimore, the practical question is whether Penn North’s results can be repeated. The answer appears to depend on sustained staffing, daily mediation and a local presence that can interrupt conflict before it turns fatal. So far, Penn North shows that those pieces can hold, and that in one of the city’s hardest-hit areas, consistent intervention has produced a measurable street-level result.