BALTIMORE — Rosalyn Gross was on her couch on the evening of Aug. 18, watching TV and worrying about starting a new position at work the next day, when her phone started blowing up.
There was an emergency at a basketball court in East Baltimore’s Oliver neighborhood, where her son, Anthony Martin, had been shooting hoops like he did every Sunday. A motorcycle group operating a clubhouse across the street was hosting a memorial cookout for a member who died. There was a dispute over a parking spot. Gunfire erupted.
Soon, Gross was rushing to Johns Hopkins Hospital, where Martin, who went by Chris, was being treated for nine gunshot wounds. Hope turned to horror when a doctor came out and told her he was gone at 36, leaving his 9-year-old son fatherless and his fiancée without her soon-to-be husband.
“My heart sank into my stomach,” Gross recalled in an interview. “It was so painful.”
When gun violence hits close to home, it probably matters little to grieving loved ones that homicides and shootings have dropped at historic rates overall in the city this year. Baltimore recorded 201 killings in 2024, the fewest since 2011. The city had over 60,000 more residents back then, however. Accounting for population changes, the city is poised to record its lowest homicide rate since 2014, with around 35 killings for every 100,000 residents.
Still, the 23% decrease compared to the 261 homicides in 2023 — the first time Baltimore had dropped below 300 killings in eight years — is not something to necessarily celebrate, said Mayor Brandon Scott.
“Two hundred too many,” Scott said in an interview.
Scott said violence is personal to him. As he mentioned during his second inaugural address, he saw his first shooting before his ninth birthday in a church parking lot where he grew up in Park Heights. So, he’s trying to strike the right tone while marking a milestone in the city’s fight against pervasive gun crime while acknowledging the hundreds of families grieving loved ones lost this year.
“I want us all to pause and take acknowledgment of the history that the city is making in reducing violence, in particular homicides and nonfatal shootings, through my comprehensive violence reduction strategy,” Scott, a Democrat, told The Baltimore Sun.
‘All-of-the-above strategy’
Those who have either been through or studied the city’s struggles to reduce crime agree with Scott that this year’s drop-off is worth acknowledging. They say the decrease, on the back of last year’s, shows violence reduction efforts are working.
Nonfatal shootings dropped even more than homicides, with 414 shootings in 2024 compared to 635 in 2023. That’s a 34.8% decrease, coinciding with a decline in crime overall, according to an analysis by The Sun of city crime data.
For a second year in a row, Baltimore surpassed the downward trend nationwide in homicides, which was approximately a 17% reduction in 2024, said Rob Wilcox, deputy director of the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention. “The reductions that Baltimore is seeing are certainly some of the highest in the country, without a doubt.”
He said reducing homicides and nonfatal shootings requires a multifaceted approach, including community and hospital-based violence intervention, prosecuting those who traffic firearms and carry them, and targeting ghost gun manufacturers and dealers with civil litigation.
“What we’ve seen from Baltimore is an all-of-the-above strategy,” Wilcox said.
While homicides and nonfatal shootings affect a statistically small percentage of the city compared to other offenses, they are the crimes that grab the headlines. Mayors have been voted out of office and police commissioners fired over the homicide counts during their tenures. The number of killings is inextricable from the discourse over public safety; it permeates dinner-table talk and investor meetings.
“It’s been a major measure in the past for lack of success for police, government, the whole system,” said Roger Hartley, dean of the University of Baltimore’s College of Public Affairs. “That is why this is such a monumental accomplishment.”
What’s working?
Daniel Webster, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said there are at least two factors unique to Baltimore that could help explain why its homicide count dropped more than the national average — and more precipitously than ever before in the 30 years Webster has been tracking gun violence in the city.
The expansion of Scott’s Group Violence Reduction Strategy has been effective, according to Webster. The partnership between the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement, Baltimore Police and the city State’s Attorney’s Office seeks out those most likely to be victims or perpetrators of violence and offers them a different path.
Webster said the police districts where GVRS has been implemented have seen the largest decreases in gun violence. The program is active in the Western, Southwest, Eastern and Central police districts, and Scott has said he plans to roll it out in the five remaining districts during his current term.
“What Baltimore is doing now is much more robust, much more coordinated, a full model rather than ‘We’re just going to go in and start arresting the bad guys,’” Webster said. “It’s hard to do, but when it works, it works dramatically.”
He also pointed to the change of administration in the state’s attorney’s office, from former top prosecutor Marilyn Mosby, who chose not to prosecute low-level offenses, to Ivan Bates, who is entering his second year in office after campaigning on prosecuting quality of life crime and taking a strict approach to firearms offenses.
“Bates has been, in essence, taking a tougher stance on these,” Webster said, referring to gun cases. “He’s less inclined to make plea deals that lead to just probation or very short sentences. So that could be playing a role. I think a lot of people think it is. I’m not saying it is or isn’t, but it’s hard to ignore these changes in the last two years coincide with that transition.”
In an interview, Bates touted greater collaboration between law enforcement agencies — local, state and federal — as critical to tampering violence in Baltimore, saying “no one can be successful on their own.”
“We’re happy in that regard, but by no means are we ready to celebrate,” said Bates, a Democrat. “We’re happy, but we have a lot of work to do.”
Bates also said he believes his office’s emphasis on pursuing mandatory minimum sentences for certain gun crimes has had an impact.
“It’s had a major, major impact. When these individuals are off the street, and they know we’re serious, then they’re not pulling the trigger,” he said, describing the prosecution as interrupting a dangerous cycle. “They graduate from just having it. Then they have a felony. Then they’re selling drugs with their gun. … Before you know it, they pull the trigger and this person is dead.”
Police Commissioner Richard Worley also credited the rate at which detectives are solving homicides and nonfatal shootings.
Worley said police “cleared” — made an arrest, had a warrant issued or closed the case because of other reasons, like a suspect dying — approximately 70% of killings in 2024, up from about 40% in recent years. Investigators also closed 44% of nonfatal shootings this year, compared to about 29% in 2023. Despite a staffing shortage of at least 500 officers, he added, “Detectives are getting more time to investigate, and we have a great relationship with the state’s attorney’s office.”
“If last year you had a 60% chance of getting away with murder. This year, that’s cut in half. … You’re going to think twice about it,” Worley said.
Statistics versus perception
Though 2024’s figures represent consecutive, historic year-over-year declines, it could take a while for that to resonate with residents. Experts say the public’s perception of crime may not align with the numbers for a variety of reasons, from a person’s news consumption to their lived experience.
“I could never believe that there’s a drop in any numbers right now. I would never believe that. And if that is the case, it’s just not showing,” Gross said. “I feel for every last mother that has gone through this misery, loss, pain, and it seems to keep happening — when you look on social media it’s some every day, so I don’t know how there’s a drop in numbers.”
The pain for Gross is palpable every day — no longer can she count on Martin’s morning FaceTime calls — but especially so around the holidays, when his absence is obvious because, as she put it, “he brought the good time to all of the family gatherings.”
She is left to wonder what could have been of his dreams. He wanted to start his own trucking business. He and his fiancée had already picked out colors and the destination for their wedding.
“I really feel like it could’ve been avoided,” Gross said, citing concerns neighbors raised with the city over the motorcycle group. “He didn’t have to die over a parking space.”
A memorial made up of balloons, flowers and bottles of liquor marks the place where Martin was gunned down in the 1300 block of North Spring Street. On a brisk Wednesday in December, Gross was tidying up as a man shot hoops on the adjacent basketball court.
She stops here every morning on her way to the building she manages downtown, detouring from the most direct route, parking next to the now vacant warehouse where the motorcycle group once held court, to reflect for a few moments.
“I make a point to come pay my respects and say ‘good morning’ to my son,” Gross said.
Baltimore Sun data editor Steve Earley contributed to this article.
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