Taking a hard look at Baltimore’s Gun Violence Reduction Strategy

This story was produced in partnership with The Baltimore Brew. 

Last Thursday, seven people were indicted for allegedly operating a drug trafficking organization in East Baltimore. Police said there had been an increase in shootings in the area where the group operated, though no one was charged with shootings or homicides.

“Sending young men and women to prison is not our goal. It is the absolute last resort and a necessary balance with the positive opportunities that we are providing,” Mayor Brandon Scott said. “But we will not tolerate drug trafficking, violence, gun trafficking, and these behaviors in our city.”

It was the 13th group indictment from the city’s Group Violence Reduction Strategy (GVRS) that Scott has claimed “played a critically important role in driving the largest year-over-year homicide reduction in Baltimore’s history in 2023.”

Indeed, as of July 1, homicides in Baltimore are down 36% compared to the same time last year.

This follows a steep decline in violence: there were 334 homicides in 2022, and 262 in 2023. The 2023 decrease ended the city’s eight-year streak of 300-plus murders per year.

Scott and other proponents of GVRS believe that the program is an alternative to mass incarceration and sweeps.

But it has often been viewed more cynically by people who see the program in action on the streets.

“From a community perspective, what we hear is that they see focused deterrence as just another ‘crackdown’ with a different name,” said Charles Ransford, director of science and policy for the violence interruption program Cure Violence.

Tried Before

The Garrison Project and Baltimore Brew obtained data on the program from the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement (MONSE).

To date, 279 people have been indicted under GVRS. Of these, 125 people were charged in 13 indictments focused on alleged criminal groups, while 154 people were individually indicted.

GVRS uses a “carrot and stick” model. It promises access to social services while charging people – often, many at once – in alleged criminal groups. The program involves federal, state and local law enforcement agencies.

Similar “focused deterrence” was tried twice before in Baltimore and failed.

It was deployed in the 1990s before it was shut down by Mayor Martin O’Malley.

It returned in 2014 when there were 211 homicides, only to unravel by 2017 due to a lack of social services and law enforcement buy-in. That year, there were 343 homicides in Baltimore.

Under the focused deterrence model, prosecutors and police identify groups of people they believe are committing acts of violence, and then they are called in and offered social services. If they decline, they are told that they will be investigated and likely prosecuted.

In an email, MONSE spokesman Jack French said that a group is defined as “three or more people that have a propensity to commit gun violence with or for each other.”

Violent incidents deemed “group involved” are reviewed at the district level. Suspects and victims are examined for their history of gun violence or gun crimes or if they “have self-identified as belonging to a violent social network.”

Once someone is identified as a prospective GVRS participant, French said, city staff, service providers and law enforcement officers agree on an intervention strategy and plan for that individual.

“We want you to stay alive, we want you to change your life,” Mayor Scott said in a 2022 interview. “We’re going to bring the resources to do that, whether it be job training, career, school education, drug counseling, behavioral health or housing, wherever it is.”

“But if you don’t take us up on that, then you’ll feel the full weight of local, state and federal law enforcement,” he added.

Scott has repeated this plea and warning in numerous interviews about gun violence.

But critical questions remain about GVRS:

• Has the program been a significant driver of violence reduction in Baltimore?

• How many Baltimoreans have been indicted under GVRS?

• What are the social costs of a program where dozens of people often face long prison terms under serious criminal charges like conspiracy?

Causation Questioned

GVRS began as a pilot program in the historically violent Western District in 2022.

In its first 18 months, GVRS “was responsible for reducing homicides and shootings in the Western District by roughly a quarter, and carjackings by about a third, with no evidence that these crimes moved to other parts of the city,” according to a 2024 report from University of Pennsylvania’s Crime and Justice Policy Lab.

The perceived successes in the Western District led to the implementation of the program in other districts. As he heads for his second term, Mayor Scott intends for the program to be citywide.

But the University of Pennsylvania analysis was an initial report. In academic research, it’s common to publish preliminary reports, though it means that there is no way to closely analyze its data or methods.

Complicating questions of efficacy, BPD district boundaries changed in July 2023.

The Western District expanded and took on additional neighborhoods where violence is prevalent. Earlier this year, MONSE said that redistricting makes comparisons before and after redistricting “impossible.”

As well, Baltimore’s significant reduction in homicides tracks with nationwide declines that occurred in 2023.

According to an April report from data analyst and consultant Jeff Asher, “murder is down 20.5% in 183 cities with available data through at least January, down 20.2% in 174 cities with data through at least February, and down 20.8% in 59 cities with data through at least March 20.”

These declines, according to Asher’s report, follow a “larger, potentially even historically large, decline in 2023.”

“Especially with gun violence and murder, we’re seeing dramatic declines on the other end of the dramatic increases that happened in 2020 and 2021,” Asher said. “It was a sizable increase. Now we’re seeing sizable decreases pretty much across the country.”

In 2023, Detroit saw its lowest number of murders in 57 years.

Murders in Philadelphia dropped by 21%. 2024 has brought similar successes. As of late June, in New Orleans murders are 44% lower than they were in 2023.

Rob Wilcox, deputy director of the Biden administration’s Office of Gun Violence Prevention, said that violence reduction “is happening everywhere,” but “happening with the most acceleration [in] places like Baltimore.”

“Refreshing Bit Of Honesty”

Unlike other cities, Baltimore didn’t experience a surge in violence in 2020, Asher notes. Instead, its spike in violence began in the mid-2010s.

In 2014, there were 211 homicides, followed by 344 in 2015. The murder rate increased from 33.8 to approximately 55.2 per 100,000 population. In 2022, there were 333 murders and a murder rate of 56.8.

“I would say that you’d most likely be seeing a decline with or without new strategies,” Asher said. “But Baltimore has kind of been this exception. You can’t prove the counterfactual: You can make the argument that maybe we wouldn’t have seen a decline without the new strategies.”

“I’m always skeptical when explanations are very specific to factors and trends that we don’t fully understand,” he continued. “I’m a believer that you could have both the national trend and some effect from the Group Violence Reduction Strategy at least.”

After homicides dropped to a 10-year-low in Philadelphia, officials there demonstrated “a refreshing bit of honesty” recently when they acknowledged they “just don’t know” why, tweeted John Arnold, co-chair of Arnold Ventures, a philanthropy whose focus areas include criminal justice.

“Generalizable drivers of crime trends are still very unknown,” he wrote, noting that three oft-cited causes of crime – police staffing, gun sales and arrests – had not changed.

As for GVRS’ impact on violence reductions in Baltimore, there was outright skepticism from Jonathan Ben-Menachem, a PhD candidate in Sociology at Columbia University who researches the politics of criminalization in the U.S.

“Focused deterrence works by creating social network maps of people at high risk of shooting or being shot,” he said.

“If you put everyone in that social network in Baltimore in prison, you’d probably see gun violence reductions in the short term. Is that a just outcome? Is that solving the problem of gun violence?”

A 33-Person Takedown

The largest group investigation to date is a March 2023 indictment of 33 people in an alleged drug trafficking operation run by James Brunson and Ernest Hudson.

According to the Maryland Attorney General’s Office and the Baltimore Police Department, the group began operating in southwest Baltimore in early 2021. By the end of the year, law enforcement initiated an investigation that included undercover officers, wiretaps and video surveillance.

The investigation revealed that Brunson and Hudson were in a shoot-out in May 2022, though no one was injured.

Later, Brunson and Hudson were caught on a wiretap discussing a rival. “I want him flew to Shock Trauma,” Hudson said.

On March 23, 2023, Brunson, Hudson and 31 other people were indicted for participation in a criminal organization, conspiracy to distribute controlled dangerous substances, and gun and drug-related crimes.

But only three people in the indictment were charged for shootings:

Brunson and Hudson were charged with attempted murder for the May 2022 shootout where no one was struck by gunfire. An attempted murder charge also stemmed from a shooting in December 2022 where the shooter also missed.

The three people charged with attempted murder in the March 2023 indictment represent the only shootings in any of the 13 group indictments under GVRS. The majority of the charges were for firearm possession and drug dealing.

French, the MONSE spokesperson, said none of the 33 were offered social services.

“These individuals are not offered services, as they are the subject of imminent or active enforcement due to violation of the anti-violence mandate of the strategy,” he said.

Some other data on the 33 person indictment:

• 15 individuals have gone to trial or are set to this summer

• 14 have entered guilty pleas.

• Warrants are still out on three people, and one person is engaged in inpatient drug treatment.

“The narrative is ‘we are making you safe. We are doing this sweep, we are grabbing up a whole group of bad people,’” CUNY Law Professor K. Babe Howell said.

“But the [March 2023] indictment covers a year and a half where they could have easily arrested the folks they wanted. Instead, they’re waiting and they’re watching. That’s not consistent with the idea that what we want are off-ramps and ways to address contributing factors.”

Swept Up

Data released by MONSE on the GVRS initiative reinforce these concerns:

• The 154 people charged individually under GVRS have a total of 608 charges against them.

• Of those 608 charges, 103 – or just 17% – involve alleged acts of violence.

• Nearly 400 of the 608 charges have been resolved because people went to trial or pleaded guilty.

• So far, 98 charges have been dismissed, and 122 charges are still active.

• Of the 154 people charged individually under GVRS, eight have been charged with murder and 13 with attempted murder or first-degree assault.

Howell sees echoes in Baltimore of the 2016 prosecution she and a co-author studied and analyzed – the indictment of 120 people in the Bronx on racketeering, firearms and drug offenses.

The case, known as “The Bronx 120,” was brought by Preet Bharara, then U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, who said it was the “largest gang takedown in New York City history.”

Yet nearly half of the defendants were not gang members, Howell’s analysis showed, and a majority were not convicted of violent acts and had no prior felony convictions.

And 35 defendants were convicted of RICO or narcotics conspiracy charges based essentially on marijuana sales.

“With these indictments, once you’re charged with conspiracy or criminal enterprise, it is a very easy charge to prove, and it’s a nearly impossible one to defend against,” Howell said.

“When the charge is conspiracy or criminal enterprise, prosecutors don’t need to prove that you did the bad things. They only need to prove that you belong to the group. And that you kind of knew that they were doing things.”

Unintended Consequences

GVRS seems like a significant policy shift from the mass arrests of the early 2000s under Mayor O’Malley’s zero tolerance policies.

That effort sparked a lawsuit from the ACLU alleging thousands of improper arrests by the BPD and a settlement promising reform.

But what does it mean to arrest and indict hundreds of people?

“It means that the group targeted for enforcement can get prosecuted for all sorts of behaviors not obviously related to gun violence,” Ben-Menachem said.

As Howell sees it, GVRS indictments “create cooperators” that can increase community violence as well as force plea deals that mark people as felons.

“If you’re at the bottom of the indictment, they may let you just take your felony and a little time or even probation, but then you’re a felon, right?” Howell said.

“You’re a felon for doing hand-to-hands or even possessing a gun that would normally get an alternative to incarceration and a second chance.”

French, the MONSE spokesman, hotly contests that interpretation.

“Mass incarceration is not the goal of the strategy,” he says. “At its core, GVRS is fundamentally a gun violence prevention and intervention strategy.”