The morning after someone shot up his Northeast Baltimore carryout, Hameed Dulah swept up the broken glass and hoisted the metal rollway covers, revealing about 40 bullet holes in the storefront windows.
The shots on Dec. 15 just before 11 p.m. also shattered the refrigerator case where Dulah displayed homestyle sweet potato pie and potato salad.
They left a giant hole in the steel counter, pockmarked the “employees only” door and pierced the heart of an “I love Safe Streets” sticker in the window.
The intended targets, four young men, were injured. But Erica Sterling, a 54-year-old esthetician and mother of six who was sitting nearby inside NY Chicken Fish and Grill, was killed.
This mass shooting is not the kind of thing that happens in a safe city. And it was preceded almost every day this month by other fresh horrors.
Yet the scene belies the fact that, for the third consecutive year, violence in Baltimore has dropped dramatically and, in turn, historically.
For nearly a decade, the city could not stanch the bloodshed that had spiked frighteningly following the police killing of Freddie Gray in 2015, recording more than 300 victims annually for eight straight years.
But since 2023 Baltimore has seen the number of victims fall below 300, then below 200 and now below 150 — the first time since the 1960s, when gun violence soared and then rarely abated.
It is also a place where, in the span of a few days this month, two teenage boys were gunned down in one neighborhood, two others were killed in a quadruple shooting in a drug house, and a man was shot to death across the street from the city casino.
Two things are true: The past three years have seen historic declines in gun violence in Baltimore, and people are still getting killed at an alarming rate.
How did this happen?
Everyone wants to know how the declines are being achieved, what may have finally clicked.
Depending who you ask, it could be one thing — such as Ivan Bates’ election as Baltimore’s top prosecutor — or several, such as the expansion and endurance of Mayor Brandon Scott’s comprehensive neighborhood safety strategy.
Maybe it’s just part of a national trend, as cities across the country experience a reprieve. Or even a fluke, bound not to hold as underlying conditions persist.
Don’t tell Kurt Palermo the drop is a fluke. Eight years ago, he came to Baltimore as part of the Massachusetts-based program Roca, a nonprofit funded by government and private donors that intervenes in the lives of young men at the greatest risk of shooting someone or being shot.
Palermo and his team are relentless in their efforts to get young people to buy in to their program, which among other things tries to get these men to “rewire” their mindset and make better choices.
Weekly, Roca meets with area hospital officials to take stock of young men who have been shot. It also meets regularly with police and other law enforcement agencies such as parole and probation and the Department of Juvenile Services. It’s become part of the city’s Group Violence Reduction Strategy to target the young men whom service providers need to help, and whom law enforcement needs to go after.
Ninety-eight percent of 350 young people Roca worked with this fiscal year have seen significant behavioral health outcomes, including improved mental health and reduced use of substances; 84% have no new arrests.
Every year, about 10 of them die.
“A lot of these young people are racing the clock,” Palermo said.
Roca is among the organizations making a difference. But it has been at it for years, including when the needle on the city homicide rate was not budging. Can its efforts really be credited with being part of the decline?
“You have to remember, it takes about 18 months to see behavior change,” Palermo said. “It’s not gonna happen in 30 days. It’s not gonna happen overnight. You look at everything we did in 2020, 2021, 2022. That’s how we got to where we are now.”
The difference Roca is making could be how well it works with the mayor’s office, which by most accounts is quarterbacking such efforts as never before.
That’s all fine and good to Bates, the top prosecutor. But, in his view, putting more of the right people in jail — and the warning it sends to others engaged in crime — has made the change.
His prosecutors, by Bates’ account, are more prepared for court and tougher once they get there, and they have been dismissing fewer gun cases and securing more significant sentences. From January 2023 to July 2025, more than 2,100 people were sent to prison, compared with about 1,000 from January 2020 to July 2022, according to their statistics.
Perhaps the biggest driver of this increased prosecutorial effectiveness? Morale, his deputies say, offering as visual evidence a tour of the four floors of their office that are decked out as part of a new holiday decorating contest. Every unit went all out to decorate its wing; the misdemeanor unit stole from each of the others to compose its display.
Despite the progress, Bates said, people don’t feel safe.
“The numbers say one thing, but if people don’t feel it — your perceptions are reality — then it doesn’t matter,“ he said. ”And right now the number of people who just don’t feel it, they see the numbers and they’re like, ‘Oh yeah, I don’t feel it.’”
Ask Baltimore Police how they’re getting the job done a decade into a consent decree, and they’ll point to increased collaboration within the department. The moment a shooting or homicide occurs, street-level enforcement teams — “the worker bees,” as Col. John Herzog called them — are lighting up the internal messaging platform, sharing information and helping detectives. Those efforts had been more siloed and delayed.
“Our information sharing is phenomenal,” said Herzog, who oversees the Criminal Investigation Division.
Police have done this without dramatically increasing the number of people they arrest — a tactic that has been used before but heavily criticized for dragging in too many innocent people. Although arrests are up about 6% over last year, by year’s end police expect around 17,000 lockups — a far cry from the zero-tolerance days when more than 90,000 arrests were made.
“It’s not just that we did it,” Scott said, referring to the violence declines. “It’s how we did it that matters.”
A violent history
You don’t earn the moniker “Bodymore, Murderland” for nothing.
Baltimore was one of the biggest cities in America for two centuries, and it has long been synonymous with violence. It was nicknamed Mob Town during the Civil War, with roving gangs in the 1840s and Election Day riots in the latter half of the 19th century.
Baltimore’s population peaked in the 1950s, at just under 950,000. The tumult of the 1960s saw violence surge to unseen levels and the ramping up of a population exodus. The number of people killed annually more than doubled to over 200 by the end of the decade, then exceeded 300 victims in 1971.
The crack cocaine epidemic and gang wars of the 1980s led to another murder rate spike, and by the next decade the city recorded 300 or more victims every year.
So in 2011 officials celebrated when the number of killings fell below 200 for the first time since the late 1970s. But, starting in 2015, the numbers jumped again, with 352 people slain by 2019.
Baltimore has no shortage of naysayers. Former Police Commissioner Fred Bealefeld, whose tenure overlapped with the 2011 reduction, used to mock critics who wanted to chalk up improving gun violence numbers to luck, cold weather, better trauma care, bad aim, lunar tables and the tides.
Common refrains from armchair critics are that the homicide drop is a result of violence migrating to surrounding counties or a byproduct of the city’s population drop.
The latter is partially true; Baltimore, one of America’s perennially largest cities, is 40% smaller than its peak, having lost 50,000 people since 2015 alone. Large swaths of the east and west sides of the city remain marked by decaying homes and cleared-out grassy lots.
And there is no denying the hollowing out of the same neighborhoods that were epicenters of gun violence even as some exciting development projects are taking off in areas such as Park Heights.
But, even accounting for population change, the murder rate sits at about 25 per 100,000 people. That’s still the lowest since the 1970s, a time critics likely look back on with nostalgia, when William Donald Schaefer was mayor and the nickname “Charm City” was born.
The argument about displacement to the counties is pure hogwash; it simply hasn’t happened. Regional crime stats don’t show the surrounding counties experiencing spikes.
Hope for the future
Back at NY Chicken Fish this month, when one of the shooting victims ran out, they left a trail of blood.
It meandered like a river down the sidewalk. It skipped across the street and up the block, then around the corner onto Lake Avenue for about 700 feet until stopping at the home of Brittany Stringfield, a 35-year-old mother of three boys.
She was asleep on the night of Dec. 15 when her kids told her there was “some stuff going on outside” — the collapse of the fleeing shooting victim at their front door. Discarded medical gloves remained in the gutter the next day.
So on that day it might have felt a little strange to ask her if Baltimore feels safer amid the historic gun violence decline.
She paused before answering.
“It’s hard to say,” she said. “I feel like sometimes we get a breather, but then it goes from incident to incident, like a domino.”
People here have long been dulled to the incessant nature of violence. The next morning, Dulah, the carryout owner, was open for business, serving fried chicken and fish and lamb over rice. He shrugged, concluding, as long as there’s drugs, there will be violence.
But something else happened later in the week that marked what has become a newfound resolve.
About 50 people, mostly Black men, gathered at the city’s direction to fan out and start trying to make contact with anyone in the surrounding area to offer services, support or just a dap and a kind word.
While they were primarily sticking flyers in residents’ front doors, they also washed away the blood trail.
Deashia Gibbs thinks all of this is leading to a long-awaited culture shift. The 27-year-old who works as a violence prevention coordinator for Safe Streets said, growing up in Baltimore, violence was expected and accepted.
“Our communities follow the culture. And, for years and years, most of my life, the culture in Baltimore was violence,” she said at the grand opening of a Safe Streets office in East Baltimore.
“Violence is a disease,” she continued. “So, because we are caring for it as if these people are sick, we’re putting them into remission. Once that mindset changes, it is contagious, just like the diseases. It bounces from the next person to the next person to the next house to the next neighborhood, and hopefully to the next city.”
Banner reporter Lee Sanderlin contributed to this article.
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