America’s miraculous murder decline

0:00Knock, knock. Who's there? It's Miles Bryan, senior producer and reporter for this program. And Sean, I'm here with a good news story. Good news. Do Today Explained listeners like good news? Let's find out together. What is it, Miles? Well, the story is summed up in one statistic that I just find astonishing. The United States homicide rate is falling faster now than it ever has in the history of our data on this, which goes back to the early 1960s. And this year, Sean, 2025, is on track to have what could be the lowest homicide rate ever recorded. Hmm. Amazing, because I'm old enough to remember the great COVID-19 pandemic and the spike in crime that came thereafter.

0:44Me too. We covered it on this show. But quietly, the whole country has been going through a sort of miraculous recovery in the last couple of years. And I think the story of Baltimore helps explain how that happened. Take us to Charm City, Miles. See you there. Support for the show comes from Public, the investing platform for those who take it seriously. On Public, you can build a multi-asset portfolio of stocks, bonds, and options, and now generated assets which allow you to turn any idea into an investable index with AI. Go to public.com slash podcast and earn an uncapped 1 % bonus when you transfer your portfolio.

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2:23all right today explained here with miles brian who's here to talk about crime in baltimore miles how many seconds can we go without you mentioning the wire very few i actually zero i actually wanted to start this story with the wire you know for the listeners who haven't seen it it's this beloved hbo series about crime and policing in baltimore It ran from 2002 to 2008. It's where Idris Elba comes from. And Michael B. Jordan. Oh my gosh, what a show. Okay, what are we doing? Right. I wanted to start with the show because it's not just Baltimore's national reputation. It's where this specific story of crime and policing starts.

2:59I don't know if you've watched The Wire lately, but the police tactics in that show are pretty brutal. Some of the street-level cops are depicted as just being sort of head bashers. Hands on the wall, fucker. Hey, listen to me, you little fucking piece of shit. I'm going to tell you one thing and one thing only about the Western boys you are playing with. We do not lose. And this is the Baltimore that Brandon Scott grew up in. I am Brandon Scott, the 52nd mayor of the city of Baltimore, the greatest city in America. All right. Coming right out swinging. Scott's 41, but he looks younger than me, which is frankly offensive.

3:34Hmm. He grew up in a neighborhood called Park Heights, which has been poor and violent for a long time. And Scott says he got harassed by cops roaming around wire-style as a kid. When I was growing up in Baltimore, I was a data point, right? I was a young black man in park hikes. I was a data point. But I was a data point that they looked at as an issue to solve. Scott always wanted to get into politics, even as a kid. And he gets hired as a city council staffer right after college. In 2011, he's elected to Baltimore City Council. And that's where he is in 2015, when Freddie Gray dies in police custody.

4:09Freddie Gray, huge national story that casts an unfortunate light on Baltimore. Remind people what happened? Yeah, so he was a black man in his mid-20s. In the spring of 2015, Baltimore police arrest him near the public housing complex where he lived. They put him in the back of a police van with his legs shackled and hands cuffed. During the ride, he suffers a severe spinal cord injury. He died a week later. And his death set off these huge protests. We are not the enemy. I'm tired of seeing this. It's too much. It's gone too far. And all I'm begging them to do is hold these cops accountable.

4:48Those protests eventually turned into riots. Today, a small group of agitators became violent, targeting police with bricks and burning abandoned squad cars. We can tell you hundreds of police officers are now pouring into this area. The National Guard is now on standby. And Councilman Scott is out there. He's been doing anti-violence work for years at that point. And he's pleading with protesters to be peaceful and take cues from local leaders. Do you believe that tonight will be different than last night? Yeah, my hope is that it will be. I believe it will be because folks know that this is not the way to get answers.

5:21This is not the way to get justice. This is not the way to try to repair our city and heal our city. But a lot of people don't listen to him. And then something starts happening right after this period of unrest. There's a huge spike in gun violence in Baltimore. In 2014, the year before Freddie Gray died, Baltimore had 211 murders. The next year, it saw 344. For comparison, New York City, which has more than 10 times as many people, had about the same number of murders that year. Yikes. Yeah. And at the same time, instead of seeing the number of arrests skyrocket alongside the violent crime, you see the opposite happen.

5:59You know, Baltimore police pulled back. And this doesn't sit right with Scott either. He feels like the police slowdown was missing the point. Even during Freddie Gray, right? If you were talking to my grandmother and her friends, you never heard black people who have lived in Baltimore for a long time, who have lived and experienced these things, say that we don't want any policing. My grandmother never said she didn't want any police in my neighborhood. What she would say is that she wanted police in our neighborhood that were focusing in on who they need to be focused on. and not me or my brothers just simply because we were making a three-minute walk from her house to my house, right?

6:37That's the difference. But Baltimore's police keep making fewer and fewer arrests, and the city sees more and more homicides. This kind of happened across the country. I'm not sure if the timelines align, but we heard a lot of this after George Floyd. During the pandemic, a lot of police forces in response to, you know, ACAB and abolish the police pulled back. Yeah, Freddie Gray was a Baltimore thing, but the whole country went through basically the same experience five years later when George Floyd was murdered. The anger, the unrest, the police pullback and the spike in violence. And in Baltimore, gun crime just stayed elevated when COVID hit and when George Floyd was killed.

7:17And Baltimore is sort of going through it politically during those years. The mayor during that time, Catherine Pugh, is indicted and forced to resign when she gets caught trading city contracts to organizations willing to buy large amounts of copies of her children's book. Relatable. But this creates an opening for Scott. He decides to run for mayor, and he runs on a platform of getting gun violence down. As mayor, I will focus on addressing the root causes of crime and investing in our communities, all while acting with the urgency to address the violence we see on a day to day basis. And in late 2020, he won.

7:53The goal was very simple. We were going to reduce the number that has sunk many Baltimore mayors for years by 15 percent from one year to the next. And that was homicides. OK, so Mayor Scott's coming to this with perhaps unique vantage. He's seen over policing as a kid where he was profiled a bunch. And now he's seeing under policing as a politician who's trying to get the crime rates down. What's he do? So Scott goes all in on a crime fighting strategy known as focused deterrence. It was developed in Boston in the 90s, and it's based on this fact. There's a small group of people, mostly young men, in every city who are most likely to be both gun violence victims and gun violence perpetrators to shoot or be shot.

8:41Every week, the cops, the prosecutors, the mayor's office and anti-violence groups, they meet to discuss recent shootings and find people in those shootings orbit. the people in that small group. And what that looks like on the ground is that we actually go to many of these folks first and give them the opportunity to change their life. That approach comes with a carrot and a stick. And they actually get a letter from me as the mayor that says, I know who you are. I know what you do, essentially. And we want you to stay alive for you and your family. But in order to do that, you have to change the way that you're living.

9:15The letter says, like, sincerely, Mayor Scott. Yeah, we can show you a copy of one of the letters. Quote, first, we would like to help you. We can offer you education, job training, job placement, emergency assistance and other services. We're eager to help you succeed and we'll do anything we can to support you and your friends. That's nice. Yeah. And that's what's new here. Baltimore's tried focus deterrence before, but never with this kind of concerted effort to provide social services to people at risk of being involved in gun violence. But there's also the threat of the stick if you don't take the carrot.

9:48Here's more from the letter. We will be looking at probation and parole violations, outstanding warrants, open cases, cold cases, drug sale and possession violations, unpaid fines and child support, weapons charges, any and all legal violations committed by members of violent groups. Basically, we're watching you and we're going to find a way to get you if you don't stay on the straight and narrow. OK, so this letter's got the carrot and it's got the stick. Also, it's a piece of paper that's tried to affect gun violence. How does it go? Well, you know, it's a whole strategy. But at first, the strategy does not look like it's going great.

10:26Mayor Scott starts ramping it up in 2021, but the number of killings that year stays high. 2022 is even worse. That spring, Maryland's then governor, Republican Larry Hogan, attacked Scott for the lack of progress. It's pronounced Hogan. Hogan. The first year, we didn't hit our goal. And there was a lot of pressure to change, but we did not change the strategy. I said when I first took office that I'm going to do the right thing, not the popular thing, even if it means I get unelected because I've lived it. If zero tolerance policing was the solution to public safety in Baltimore, I wouldn't be here because we would have been a safe city when I was a child and I've been chosen to do something else with my life.

11:08Right. And slowly the numbers start going their way down. Yeah. 2022 saw 333 killings. In 2023, that number was 261. In 2024, it was 201. And so far this year, Baltimore has only seen about 80 killings, the lowest number for that stretch in 50 years. Okay, we're going to find out more about what's going right in Baltimore. Was it just the letter? Or was there something else going on? And the rest of the country. What's going on there when we return on Today Explained?

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16:01Sean Ramos, I'm here with Miles Bryan, who went down to Baltimore to find out how they got their violent crimes to go down. Right. So the strategy that Baltimore is pursuing is focused deterrence, focusing on the small group of guys at high risk for shooting or being shot. And there's a shift in the policing part of that. They start making more arrests and prosecuting more gun crimes. But the other part of the strategy is outreach. The people I talked to for this story kept pointing me towards an organization called ROCA. It's a nonprofit that does outreach to 16 to 24-year-olds who are considered high risk, who are on that list.

16:34What's ROCA stand for? I think it's just ROCA. No way. Oh, it's low case. Interesting. ROCA is one of the main partners working with the police in Baltimore's Focus Deterrence Program. The police find these people and refer them to ROCA, and then ROCA goes out and tries to get them to join up. And if they do, they're signing up for a combination therapist job training program, and there's even a gym. Nice. Yeah, they learn cognitive behavioral therapy to try and get a handle on their impulses. They get paid work doing things like cleaning up city parks. They can get their GED. When I was talking to the program staff about this, I was thinking like, okay, this sounds good to me, a nerdy reporter, but what kind of teenager wants to do all this stuff?

17:17Then I ran into a crew of guys who'd been out working who were back for lunch. Why you ain't bringing me bread with the oranges? You ain't asking the oranges. I don't ask for the oranges? No. How many more than I'll see you with the oranges? What's for lunch, guys?

17:33Oranges, Miles. You just said it. Look, I can't say I wasn't awkward, but they were nice enough to let me ask those questions anyway. And I asked them what they thought was working in the city to get gun violence down. Huh? It's not. And these guys were like, look around you. But Rutler, probably the best thing that ever happened for Baltimore. Like, it changed a lot of people's lives. I was like, everybody in here. You guys aren't just saying that because we're out real quick. No, you're saying that because it changed my life. I've been in this program since what? 2023, right? I came home in 2023.

18:08January 10th, 2023, I came home for real. I got booked for a gun for real. I was locked up when I came home. Like, I'm saying from then to now, my whole mindset changed the life. I think we different. You learn mannerism. You learn mannerism. That's the word, right there. You know, it's nice. Yeah. Roka reaches hundreds of young men in Baltimore every year. According to their own stats, for young guys who stay enrolled in the program for at least two years, 80 percent have no new arrests and 92 percent don't go back to prison. OK, so the kids are really impressed with Roka and it sounds like Roka is working for Baltimore.

18:45But how do you get someone who's like, I don't know, just immersed in a gang or in some turf war or something or making money dealing drugs to come to Roka? Yeah, I think that's the real sticky question here. Like, my sense is when they're in, they're in. But getting them to get involved can be tough. It's a lot of door knocking, a lot of following up. I actually went out with a Roka outreach worker who goes by Pastor John. I'm a youth worker, technically, from 9 to 5, but the guys know that I'm a pastor 24-7. I never turn that off. Pastor John got into being a youth worker after doing a stint in prison for dealing drugs.

19:27These days, he's all about his guys. We went to check in with one of them. Yes, he's actually going to come down. Okay. What's this fellow's name? His name is James. James. Hold on, Pastor John, I'm coming down. I'm on a jail call. I'm coming down now. James hopped in our car. What's going on, James? Another day, another day. Off. I'm off today. The whole time we talked, he kept his phone on speaker. I'm on a jail call with my brother here. Just give him some motivational, you know, advice. You feel me? And that's all just cooling. I'm just chilling. Everything going good with the job? Yeah, everything going good.

20:00It's a cool job for real easy money. James is 19, and he's doing great now. But a couple of years ago, he was struggling. He got arrested for a gun charge, identified as a high-risk person, likely to shoot or be shot. and refer to Roka. When I first started off, it was rough for me. I wasn't talking to my mentors, none of that. They was reaching out to me. I wasn't reaching back. It was rough.

20:25His initial introduction into Roka was rough. James and the pastor were obviously tight. And on the way back, I asked him how that came to be. Unfortunately for him, the catalyst, the thing that triggered him to really get him on the right track was his brother was killed. He was the guy that was on my caseload. And I ended up being the pastor at his funeral, and I preached at his funeral. That's when I met that young man. And he just came and gave me a hug, and he was weeping. And he was like, I need Roker. I really need Roker. From that point on, he'll pick up the phone. Pastor John, I need to talk to you.

21:03This happened at work today, Pastor John. I got robbed. They stole my paycheck. You know, I'm feeling some kind of way. You know, all my guys are like, come on, let's go get him and doing stuff like that. But he's never acted on that. That is so much work and luck and coincidence just for one guy to help pull him on the right path. It's kind of amazing. Yeah, it is. It's absolutely amazing. But I don't take any credit for it. Like I said, Roka was here long before I ever did. I just thanked him for giving me the opportunity to share that with these young men.

21:40Okay, Miles, help me with something, because this sounds great, but the program itself doesn't sound new. We've talked about violence interrupters on this show before. They've been doing this stuff for a long time in cities across the country. What makes something like ROCA so special in this moment, or are there other factors here? You know, I think Baltimore's focused deterrence strategy and stuff like ROCA has actually moved the needle, but I don't think it explains the whole picture. Baltimore has seen this huge decrease in gun crime, but so have many other American cities, right? Like the whole country.

22:11And after talking to a bunch of experts and more helpfully that group of kids at lunch, I think there's at least three other national factors worth mentioning. What are they? Okay, first, most obviously, the end of the pandemic. They closed all the fields and all the gyms, so we had nothing to do but be outside. In most cities, gun crime spiked in 2020, right? During that time, schools were shut down, Malls were closed. Basketball hoops were taped off. All that stuff's back open now. I feel like what's stopping everything is, it's more stuff to do now. Like, it's more activities, more, you feel me, the pool's open now.

22:46Okay, so everything opens back up, and that helps. What else? The second factor, I think, can be sewn up in one word. Exhaustion. A lot of older guys locked up, for real, for real. Like, they really pay a certain influence on young niggas, for real, for real. Gun violence feeds on itself, right? One shooting leads to two retaliatory shootings, which leads to four more, and on and on. I talked to Daniel Webster, a criminologist at Johns Hopkins, who says that cycle tends to exhaust itself. A lot of the people involved in the shootings are either killed or maimed or arrested. And others just look around and decide, like, hey, it's not worth it.