By Megan Sayles
AFRO Staff Writer
msayles@afro.com
Violent crime in Baltimore has reached record lows, with the city experiencing its lowest homicide numbers in over 50 years as of September 2025.
Still, Baltimore City State’s Attorney Ivan Bates believes the city has work to do when it comes to tackling quality-of-life crimes that occur on a day-to-day basis. These offenses include car break-ins, open-air drug use, public intoxication, vandalism and more.
“Unfortunately, it feels like the message to the citizens has been, ‘Look, you didn’t get murdered, so you should be happy.’ That’s crazy to me,” said Bates. “My feeling is that we need to focus now on quality-of-life problems.”
To address those problems, Bates said his office created a citation program two years ago to hold offenders accountable without criminalizing them. The system allows law enforcement to issue citations for low-level offenses — like petty theft and drug possession — that bring people into court, where they can be ordered to complete community services or connected with services such as inpatient drug treatment.
Bates said he doesn’t think Baltimore police have taken advantage of the tool as much as they should. In the two years since the program started, just over 1,000 citations have been written citywide, with only about 300 coming from the Baltimore Police Department.
“I do recognize that there’s an officer shortage, but if we’re writing citations, we begin to hold those individuals who are consistently stealing packages off stoops, graffitiing or, no matter what it is, accountable,” said Bates. “But, we are not doing that. We have phenomenal partnerships in the violent crime arena. We need to have those same partnerships in quality of life.”
While Bates criticized the city for its handling of quality-of-life crimes, Baltimore City Mayor Brandon M. Scott pointed to measurable declines. According to information released by Scott’s office, carjackings are down 21 percent, robberies are down 26 percent and auto thefts are down 32 percent compared to last year. These decreases are on top of declines that took place from 2023 to 2024.
He also highlighted his strategy for curbing public drug sales and use.
“We’re not going to go back to the days of, ‘Hey, there’s a group of people standing out there on the corner, everybody that’s out there is selling drugs, we’re going to arrest them all,’ because that doesn’t make the city safer,” said Scott. “We’re doing it in a very intentional way.”
From Aug. 28 to Sept. 4, Scott said police made nearly 1,400 controlled dangerous substance arrests alone. He emphasized that tackling Baltimore’s drug market goes beyond arresting individual dealers—it requires targeting the networks behind them.
“When you’re talking about breaking down an open-air drug market, pulling off a corner boy isn’t going to make that go away,” said Scott. “What’s going to make it go away is actually doing an investigation and tearing down the organization.”
Scott also pointed out that arrests don’t necessarily coincide with drops in crime. For example, in 2004, there were more than 91,000 arrests and 278 homicides in the city of Baltimore. In 2024, the city experienced 201 homicides, but there were only 17,872 arrests.
“It’s never been about how many, but about who you’re arresting, and that’s why we’re focused the way we’re focused,” said Scott.
The efficacy of Safe Streets
One mechanism of public safety in Baltimore that Bates questioned was the city’s Safe Streets program, a public health-based violence prevention program started in 2007. The program employs outreach workers and violence interrupters, including returned citizens with firsthand experience of street life, to de-escalate and mediate conflict.
Though he said he understands the program’s concept, he is unsure about how effective it’s been.
“With Safe Streets, there’s no data. If we’re supposed to have reformed criminals convince current criminals to drop their weapons and guns, how is that happening? If it’s a phone call, what’s the number?” said Bates. “Where’s the data? How many times have there been interventions? How many times have there been mediations? Where are these mediations happening? We don’t know.”
The mayor, however, argued that Safe Streets’ effectiveness has already been proven.
“I think the state’s attorney must be living in a different reality than everyone else. There’s been multiple, multiple reports done on Safe Streets, including one done by Dr. Daniel Webster at Johns Hopkins — one of the most well-respected people when talking about gun violence in this country — that talks about its success,” said Scott.
Webster’s report, released in 2023, analyzed Safe Street’s effect on gun violence in Baltimore from 2007 to 2022. It found that the program was associated with reductions in homicides and non-fatal shootings ranging from 16 to 23 percent and that the program generated $7.2 to $19.2 in economic benefits for every $1 invested in it. However, the study also noted that some neighborhoods—especially newer sites or those with staffing issues and implementation delays—showed little or no measurable improvement.
Scott called on the state’s attorney to sit down with the directors of the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement and Safe Streets to get a better understanding of the initiative’s success.
“These folks do great work. The data has been proven time and time again that they do so,” said Scott. “Anybody that is saying otherwise is just being disrespectful and perpetuating, quite frankly, racist-based tropes that folks who used to be involved in the life of the street can’t turn their life around and be involved in preventing violence in the streets of Baltimore.”
