A few years ago, the City of Baltimore, Maryland introduced a new, community-led program to combat gang violence and hopefully reduce the city's spiraling homicide rate. Known as "Safe Streets," the program dispatched civilian "violence interrupters" wearing distinctive orange t-shirts who would seek to step in when gang members appeared to be preparing to exchange gunfire. The most violent neighborhoods were broken up into ten Safe Streets zones. These unarmed violence interrupters planned to replace firearms with clipboards, dissuading gangbangers from taking up arms. This month, the program celebrated something of a milestone, or at least that's how the organizers were describing it to the Baltimore Sun. Of the ten Safe Streets zones, three of them recorded a one year period with no homicides. But a closer look at the figures suggests that the success of the program remains marginal at best.

Shamise Jacobs has noticed a change in the six years she’s lived in Baltimore’s Park Heights neighborhood. The area is quieter, and streets feel safer.

She attributes that, at least in part, to the work of Safe Streets violence interrupters, the workers clad in orange T-shirts who mediate conflicts and who Jacobs said “are recognized almost like superheroes around here.”

Three of Baltimore’s 10 Safe Streets sites recently marked a year without a homicide in their “catchment zone,” the city’s term for the sites’ boundaries. Streaks continue in two of the three, Belvedere and Park Heights, which have not experienced a homicide since June 27 and July 30 of last year, respectively. The third, Franklin Square, went more than a year between killings until an early morning July 4 fatal shooting.

Right off the bat, we should offer some congratulations to the organizers of the Safe Streets initiative. At least they're trying to do something to reduce the violence in the streets of Charm City. After decades of setting records for gang violence and murders, somebody had to do something and they should receive credit for their efforts.

With all of that said, however, this "victory" appears a bit more modest than the initial headlines made it appear. If three of the ten Safe Streets zones recorded no homicides for a one year period, that means that 70% of them (a very significant majority) were unable to make the same claim. In fact, three or four of the worst saw almost no decrease in killings at all.

As for the three that did record zero homicides, they didn't all do it in the same calendar year. As the linked report shows, two of the zones - Belvedere and Park Heights - recorded no murders between the beginning of August of 2023 and the end of July 2024. But the third zone - Franklin Square - recorded a homicide on the July 4 weekend. So they had to go back to the beginning of July 2023 and track the results forward through the end of June of this year to eke out a 12-month period with no murders.

To be clear, these numbers still represent a marked improvement over recent decades. That's particularly true in the three neighborhoods in question where records were frequently set for violent crime and gun violence, especially among underage offenders. I will confess that I was dubious about the structure of the Safe Streets initiative when it was first launched, but it's possible that I underestimated its potential efficacy. How much of this decrease in violent crime can be attributed directly to the young people in orange t-shirts with their clipboards and how much was caused by other factors remains unknown, but these efforts clearly haven't backfired. 

Of course, these improvements have come at a daunting price as I predicted when the program first launched. At least five violence interrupters have been killed by the same gun violence they sought to prevent since the program launched, with the last one coming in July of this year. Baltimore has been a hub for gang violence for decades and that was never going to change overnight. But who knows? Perhaps there is still some hope left for Baltimore to return to its days of glory.