Violence Prevention in Baltimore

Baltimore has long suffered from high yearly counts of homicides. During the 1990s, however, Baltimore experienced more than three hundred homicides per year between 1990 and 1997, with a 30-year high peak of 353 homicides in 1993. In 1996 and 1997, Baltimore had the fourth highest homicide rate in the United States among cities with more than 250,000 residents. Beginning in 1998, with the support of the Baltimore Safe and Sound Campaign, David Kennedy and Anthony Braga have facilitated a working group comprised of Baltimore Police Department officers, Baltimore State's Attorney's Office and U.S. Attorney's Office prosecutors, probation and parole officers, juvenile corrections officers, and federal law enforcement agencies (ATF, FBI, and DEA). The working group engaged a problem-solving enterprise to unravel the dynamics underlying the homicide problem, develop a comprehensive violence reduction strategy, and implement the strategy.

The overall picture that emerged from this research suggested that violent groups of chronic offenders immersed in Baltimore's drug markets were responsible for a bulk of the city's homicides. As such, the working group felt that a "pulling levers"-focused deterrence strategy was a promising way to reduce the city's homicide problem. The resulting intervention was targeted at groups in particular violent drug market areas. The first application of Baltimore's violence prevention strategy focused on a very violent drug market area in the Park Heights neighborhood. The strategy proceeded by delivering a benchmark intervention that focused a varied menu of criminal justice interventions on the violent groups in the target area. Selected members of the violent groups, usually those members on probation or under some form of criminal justice supervision, were then required to attend a forum where the new strategy was explained to the offenders. The forum was supplemented by a variety of other communication strategies including the posting of fliers in the area and the direct one-on-one communications with offenders on the street. Beyond the communication of cause and effect between violent behavior and law enforcement actions, the offenders were also offered access to social intervention and opportunity provision programs organized by the Safe and Sound Campaign. The violence prevention strategy was designed to ensure compliance in the targeted area while new violent areas were addressed until the strategy was implemented citywide. Although a formal evaluation of the strategy has not been completed, preliminary analyses suggests that the intervention was associated with a 74% reduction in shootings and a 22% reduction in homicides in Park Heights during the five months following the intervention relative to shootings and homicides in the target area during the same time period one year earlier.

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