Outside the laundromat on litter-lined Joplin Street, Ivan Bates stood with his hands in his pockets and a solemn look on his face as Bayview residents rattled off complaints. Baltimore’s state’s attorney had been invited to the edge of town on this early November afternoon to walk the working-class neighborhood.

He and his staff met a group of residents at the 7-Eleven on Eastern Avenue to start their trek. They made it less than a block before the floodgates opened.

There’s drug dealing here every day, Bates was told. Young people loiter and drug users leave trash. There’s a sex worker who takes clients into the car wash across the street. The police won’t get out of their cars and City Hall won’t pick up the phone.

“What we want is action,” said David Jones, the community association president. “We want action on these issues.”

Bates listened intently and said little. He ran on a campaign promise of making sure low-level offenses like these would be prosecuted.

His first three years in office have been largely defined by the remarkable decrease in gun violence in the city. It’s a stark reversal of predecessor Marilyn Mosby’s eight years in office, when Baltimore recorded more than 300 killings each year.

Mayor Brandon Scott, who oversees city police and has implemented his own comprehensive anti-violence strategy, was in office for the last two years of Mosby’s tenure. Data shows a modest reduction in gun violence in the last six months of 2022, coinciding with the start of Scott’s anti-violence initiative. But the reduction became precipitous in 2023, Bates’ first year in office.

Every year of Bates’ tenure has seen fewer killings than the year before, and the 133 homicides recorded in 2025 are the fewest since 1970, the earliest year for which there is a reliable total. In fact, crime of most kinds is down from years past, police data shows.

But for all the progress, the concerns of Bayview residents and others across the city still weigh on Bates.

A week earlier, at a legislative town hall in North Baltimore, Bates asked a crowd of about 60 people, almost entirely Black, almost entirely middle-aged or older, whether they wanted to see more focus on quality-of-life issues.

“When we say quality of life, I’m talking about loitering and trespassing, people sitting out there, in front of your house, selling drugs,” he said.

Virtually the entire audience raised their hands.

He invoked “Ms. Johnson,” an amalgam of his congregation’s members at the New Metropolitan Baptist Church in Upton, to explain the problem.

An older adult, Ms. Johnson lives alone but wants to do things, like go to a church dinner, only she’s scared to go out after dark. There might be a group of young people, usually men, loitering on her block. Maybe they’re selling drugs, maybe they’re just hanging out, but they seem like they might be menacing, which inevitably keeps Ms. Johnson from going to church.

“You have a lot of Ms. Johnsons,” Bates told his audience, most of whom nodded along.

Bates says there’s a solution — he wants police to write citations for these offenses, which he stresses are different from arrests. People who get cited would go to a special court and be offered mental health services, job training and drug treatment, and they’d do community service. He’s trained Baltimore Police on how to write these citations, and insists that doing so would not violate the terms of the department’s decade-old federal consent decree, which is the result of an investigation that found city officers routinely violated individuals’ constitutional rights.

Data from the state’s attorney’s office shows police, as of Dec. 18, wrote 225 citations for Bates’ special court docket that were considered legally sufficient.

“I’m not going to lie,” Bates told the room. “I’m very frustrated.”

He asked for another show of hands, this time if they thought police should write those citations. Not as many raised their hands as before, but a vast majority did.

An ideological rift

Publicly, Bates rarely criticizes Scott directly. He is careful to thank the mayor for his partnership. Sometimes, when an opportunity to take a shot comes up, he limits himself to saying he’s “frustrated,” like at the town hall.

But it’s clear his frustrations largely begin and end with his peer in City Hall.

In the last three years, Baltimore’s two public safety leaders have, on occasion, been at one another’s throat. They have not gotten on well since Bates won the Democratic primary in 2022, and their long-running feud has made headlines ever since. Bates even went so far as to endorse and appear in advertisements for former Mayor Sheila Dixon, Scott’s challenger, in the 2024 mayoral primary.

The city has not seen such a public rift between mayor and prosecutor since Martin O’Malley and Patricia Jessamy were in office. People are starting to grow tired of it. Mark Anthony Thomas, president and CEO of the Greater Baltimore Committee, has urged Bates and Scott to get along. So has City Council President Zeke Cohen.

“I don’t think it’s helpful to fighting crime to air differences in a public setting, because I think it can tend to cause people to lose confidence in their elected officials,” said Gregg Bernstein, Baltimore state’s attorney from 2011 to 2014 and a Bates ally.

At the core of the disagreement is the fact that they see criminal justice differently, something Bates acknowledged.

“I think he [Scott] came up during a time period of mass incarceration where the police would just come and step to you because you were Black or brown, and the interactions with police weren’t very good, and I understand that 1,000%,” Bates said.

Bates, who went to high school in Hampton, Virginia, said his lived experience with policing is different. Officers were more closely connected to the community and focused on “small, little things.”

Scott has been lauded nationally for his administration’s work to treat gun violence as a public health problem instead of being overly reliant on policing. This, in part, contributes to why Baltimore Police are not writing Bates’ requested citations.

Nowhere in the city charter does it say that the state’s attorney and the mayor have to see eye to eye on everything. The developer Doug Schmidt, who has given generously to Scott’s and Bates’ campaigns, said he thinks the city is better off because of their differing views.

“I think they’re complementary to one another,” he said.

Scott and Bates go out of their way in public settings to downplay the severity of their rift and chastise the press for giving it oxygen.

“There are so many people that want to just keep this story of two successful Black men arguing with each other, that it’s good for them and what their goals are. But that’s not good for the city of Baltimore,” Scott said at a news conference last month.

The politics of it all

High above the streets of downtown, Bates sat behind the desk in his corner office, lips pursed as he turned the question over in his head.

For the last hour he’d spoken animatedly about the progress he’d made on public safety and turning around what was widely considered a beleaguered agency. He was not being especially braggadocious. Whether it’s his fellow elected officials or run-of-the-mill social media posters, there’s broad consensus that Bates has been effective.

“I don’t think it’s an over exaggeration to say he’s done a terrific job,” Bernstein said.

Bates is running for reelection this year, and, given his lack of a challenger, the remarkable improvement in violent crime statistics and his immense popularity (the most recently available public poll pegged his approval rating at 64%), a second term is all but assured.

So, given all of that, is there anything he would have done differently over his first three years?

“Give me a second to think,” Bates said. The pause stretched for nearly a minute.

When he spoke again, his voice was quieter, his tone introspective.

“I would say, I would want to handle things, sometimes, in a little more mature manner,” he said.

Bates can be blunt about his feelings for fellow politicians, which can make him his own worst enemy. Nowhere is this more demonstrable than in his relationship with Scott.

Some close allies and advisers have counseled him to handle his beefs with Scott in private, the prevailing thinking being that a lower profile will only help him, and the city, going forward.

But is there a political upside to all the fighting? Someone, no one will say on the record who, circulated a poll in late October to measure Bates’ political standing. It asked respondents to assign responsibility for the city’s public safety improvements. Bates has acknowledged that some want him to run for mayor in 2028, when Scott has already said he’ll seek a third term.

“I hear everybody,” Bates said of the prominent people reaching out to him. The encouragement is flattering, he said, but he sought to pour a little cold water on the idea.

“I just love being London’s dad,” he said of his 9-year-old daughter. “And I love this job. I love the people I work with. And I think before you can even figure out what’s next in that regard, I have to finish what I’m doing.”

Credit claiming

For more than a year, the state’s attorney has found himself having to downplay the idea that he deserves more credit than others, specifically Scott, for Baltimore’s public safety improvements. In an interview, he further downplayed this notion by saying “no one deserves 100% and no one deserves no credit.”

“Everybody will make up their own mind in terms of who deserves credit for this and credit for that,” he said.

This hasn’t stopped the man who once said the biggest misconception about him is that he is self-centered and arrogant from noticing when he is, and isn’t, mentioned.

On Nov. 5, Gov. Wes Moore posted on X that Scott had been a “tremendous leader and partner” in the effort to lower the homicide rate. The post also mentioned the contributions of “other allies.” Bates’ office complained to Moore’s about the state’s attorney not being mentioned, according to people familiar with the discussion, and the governor’s account responded to the original post a day later to specifically mention Bates’ “crucial” leadership.

Bates has spent the last year raising doubts about various initiatives overseen by the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement, or MONSE, which oversees the bulk of Scott’s public safety programming. Bates said, for example, that Safe Streets, a program that seeks to stop violence without police involvement, was not helping public safety in “any way, shape, form or fashion.”

The tension has ensnared Bates’ and Scott’s staffs, and it is now threatening their ability to work together. Last summer, one of Bates’ top lieutenants, Hassan Giordano, traded several emails with Stefanie Mavronis, the executive director of MONSE.

For nearly two months, Mavronis sought a meeting with Bates to talk more about her agency’s work and their partnership. At the end of August, Giordano asked Mavronis to call him. The email exchange, which was obtained in a public records request, lapsed for a few days, but the next email offers clues to what they discussed.

Mavronis sent a lengthy message to Giordano on Sept. 1 listing seven times the mayor had recently credited Bates for his role in public safety. Five were during national news appearances.

“I rounded up a handful of links that demonstrate the messaging rooted in partnership that the Mayor has been consistent in touting,” Mavronis wrote.

A day after Mavronis sent Giordano the list of times the mayor had credited Bates, she emailed the state’s attorney personally.

“I’m contacting you directly in light of recent inexplicable, incorrect, and misleading statements you have shared during multiple interviews in the past week concerning the Safe Streets program,” Mavronis wrote. She wrote at length about how the program works, what data it shares and its efficacy.

She closed her email by asking Bates to remember the “Baltimoreans who have dedicated their lives to ending violence in their communities, who should never be treated as a punching bag.”

In the same interview in which Bates said he wished he had been more mature regarding his personal feelings, he compared his role in Baltimore’s public safety ecosystem to that of Ray Lewis, the famed Ravens linebacker and enforcer — “you have to just sometimes smack them in their mouth to let them know you’re not going to play” — and said working with MONSE is like trying to wrangle his daughter when getting ready to leave the house.

“She means well, but she’s kind of slowing up the process,” Bates said of London. “MONSE, I think, means well.”

In December, Bates informed Scott he was severing ties with MONSE completely. In a letter, Bates claimed MONSE is deceptive, that it operates under a veil of secrecy and that its programming is ineffective. He claimed his prosecutors were going into court without knowing what benefits victims and witnesses were receiving, that MONSE won’t share who is affiliated with certain programs and that a juvenile diversion program was essentially paying children not to commit crimes.

Scott’s office responded by calling the claims “absurd” and the decision to cut ties “inexplicable” before it sent a letter back urging Bates to reconsider.

At least two more letters have been traded since, and the two men met in mid-December in an effort to clear the air. Bates has commented sparsely beyond the initial letter he sent Scott, which he said “speaks for itself.”

Asked to comment on Bates’ remarks in this article, Scott’s office issued a careful statement that largely fit the pattern of previous ones — defend the mayor’s record; acknowledge Bates’ impact and question his motives.

“The State’s Attorney Office has been a vital partner in the work to build a safer, stronger Baltimore,” Tracy King, Scott’s communications director, wrote in an email. “However, the Mayor has a clear mandate and a responsibility to look at public safety in its entirety, not just through the critically important but much narrower scope of prosecutorial work. That will remain true, even in the face of repeated disruptions from leadership in the State’s Attorney Office that seem to have a political motive and disappointing comments that seek to diminish the work being done by MONSE and others.”

What does Bates want?

Bates is arguably at his most effective when he is out talking with people. He’s smooth, and, thanks to his years as a trial attorney, he has a knack for saying the right thing to the right person.

People feel comfortable around him, so much so they approach him in public. Bernstein, the former Baltimore state’s attorney and a regular lunch companion of Bates, said he is still surprised at how often restaurant staff or people on the street will come up to Bates when the two of them are out.

These passing interactions could be treated as a nuisance. Bates, however, loves them.

The community aspect might be the part of his job he loves the most. Then there are the parts he doesn’t enjoy.

He is not shy about discussing the 50% pay cut he said he took when he left private practice — city salary records show he was paid just shy of $240,000 in the most recent budget year — which has coincided with an emotional toll.

Honestly, he’s been very lonely.

“I live in a bubble. I miss my friends. I miss going to court. I miss laughing and joking with my friends on the defense side,” he said.

That feeling isn’t unique. When Dixon was mayor, she remembered feeling like everyone wanted something from her, even if it was just her time.

“Time is very precious,” she said.

Dixon and others have been counseling Bates to get his message out more effectively. He’s been a regular on Fox45, the Sinclair Broadcast station whose owner helped fund Dixon’s last campaign for mayor. Advisers have told him to diversify: appear on other stations and in other media.

Bates needs to be “constantly reminding people of what he’s done and what he’s trying to do to make the city safer,” Dixon said.

Convince the public he’s right about public safety, and maybe they’ll think he could be right about other things, too.

Bates has always said he ran for office because he wanted to make Baltimore better for his daughter. The city is unquestionably safer now than it was three years ago. Life looks different, too. He married for a fourth time last year and his 84-year-old father now lives with the family. London is only getting older.

Run for mayor? What if he decides he doesn’t want to do politics at all?

“I don’t think anybody understands,” he said. “If you ask me what are the things that are most important in my life? My family. My daughter.”

Banner reporter Emily Opilo contributed to this story.