By Tashi McQueen
AFRO Staff Writer
tmcqueen@afro.com
Baltimore City Mayor Brandon M. Scott (D), local leaders and community members gathered Jan. 5 in West Baltimore to highlight the city’s historic reductions in violent crime in 2025. They also briefly addressed strategies to sustain that progress into 2026.
Baltimore, a majority-Black city long plagued by violence, ended 2025 with a record low of 133 homicides—the fewest in nearly 50 years. Throughout the last five years, homicides have declined by 58.69 percent and nonfatal shootings by 57.33 percent, according to the mayor’s office.
“Five years ago, before we laid out our comprehensive approach to gun violence, we were losing 300 people in Baltimore every year to homicides,” said Scott. “We were largely leaving it up to the police to solve this problem. While they do great work, each and every day, they cannot do it alone.”
Scott and other officials said the improvements are largely due to an all-of-government approach to ending violent crime, including initiatives such as the Group Violence Reduction Strategy.
“It takes a collective, to get inch by inch, yard by yard foot by foot,” said State Sen. Cory McCray (D-Md.-45).
GVRS was launched in January 2022 to center revitalizing resources on people at the highest risk of being involved in gun violence.
“We didn’t meet our goal in the first year or the second, but in September of 2022, that progress started to come to fruition,” said Scott. “We first set a record by bringing homicides down by 21 percent. We then set it again by bringing it down another 23 percent. In 2025, we reduced homicides by another record of 31 percent.”
Scott also highlighted that youth victims of homicide have fallen by 78 percent.
“We know what we can accomplish now and we have to keep going and maintain our focus,” he said.
The mayor announced a new five-year plan to be released later this year that will guide and support their accomplishments.
“We will maintain our focus on reducing homicides by at least 15 percent each year,” said Scott. “We will keep investing in the strategies that are working as we work to build a better, safer Baltimore.”
Scott added that community input has and will continue to be taken into account in creating this expected plan.
“This won’t be something that myself and my team and elected officials will just come up with on our own,” he said.
McCray, a Baltimore native, reflected on how far the city has come, pointing to investments aimed at addressing violence and long-standing inequities.
“It’s not lost on me that our city has celebrated four brand-new rec centers; I’ve never seen that in my lifetime,” said McCray. “We just cut the ribbon on the first library in the city of Baltimore in 15 years. We just opened the new Furley Elementary, which was falling down a decade ago.”
Baltimore City Council President Zeke Cohen (D) highlighted the importance of the citywide effort, both in recent years and going forward.
“Whether you live in Brooklyn or Bayview, Roland Park or Park Heights, you deserve to live without fear or bloodshed,” said Cohen. “We will not stop until violence has been eradicated from every community in Charm City.”