Crime was going up as the population decreased, only declining in the last ~2 years. Almost an inverse correlation.
Posted on 05/30/2026 2:56:23 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
The number of homicides fell to a 60-year low after city leaders finally decided to start taking violence seriously enough.
Say “Baltimore,” and people think of crime. Shows like The Wire and Homicide: Life on the Street depicted the city as gritty, gun-ridden, and plagued by gang violence. These fictional representations weren’t far off what statistics show about the city’s reality. Since the turn of the millennium, young black men have been three to four times more likely to die by homicide in Baltimore than in the nation as a whole.
And as violent as it already was, things got worse a decade ago. The 2015 riots, in response to the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray in police custody, inaugurated a retreat in Baltimore policing and a multiyear surge in street violence. In 2020, amid a national increase in killings, the Charm City saw homicide rates about eight times higher than the national average.
Then, in late 2022, Baltimore’s fortunes turned. Starting sometime late in the calendar year, murder rates started plummeting. The city reported 333 murders that year. Last year, after three years of steady decline, there were just 133 murders in the whole city—a more than 60 percent drop. That’s the fewest murders Baltimore has seen since 1965.
“It was shootings every day, every night,” said Kin Brown-Lane, a lifelong resident of Cherry Hill, one of the city’s most dangerous neighborhoods, about the situation prior to 2022. “People didn’t have their kids outside to play, because you just never knew what was going to jump off out here.”
Brown-Lane runs Switching Lanes Adult & Youth Institute, a nonprofit that gets community kids working with seniors. Now “the kids can go back outside and play,” Brown-Lane said, and Cherry Hill seniors are feeling the difference. “The most important...”
(Excerpt) Read more at thefp.com ...
Is it because Baltimore, a city with almost a million people in 1950, has lost nearly half of its population over the last 75 years?
As the populace gets older and older the crimes they commit get fewer................
I hear you, man. The older I get, the less criminally inclined I become. I mean, it's kind of a hassle, and if you get caught, there's too much paperwork. I'd rather just stay home nights. Crime is for youngsters.
Currently binge watching arrest videos on YouTube. Just finished the Akron series. On deck - the State Boys from Louisiana. Working my way up to Atlanta and Baltimore.
Let us know when you get all the way up to Chicago.
Or it could be that crime is as bad, but it’s being reported differently.
I think it was Jeanine Pirro who explained the “crime is lower” scam.
Cops would respond to a crime, say a bodega robbery, every time they were called. 12 robberies in a month would equal 12 reports. Cops got tired of it. So they told the business owners to keep a log of the robberies through the month, then the cops would collect the ONE log listing 12 robberies. One report would equal one crime — not 12.
On paper, crime decreased substantially.
I hear ya (with hearing aids). Holding the glock sideways is harder with arthritis.
Due to the SCOTUS Bruen decision, Maryland was forced to issue CCW permits.
Plus after so many murders they’re running out of bad guys to kill each other.
Bates is doing well as Prosecutor.
But the lunatic left keeps making laws preventing anyone under certain ages to be prosecuted for most crimes, even violent ones.
Ran out of victims?
Crime was going up as the population decreased, only declining in the last ~2 years. Almost an inverse correlation.
“I hear ya (with hearing aids). Holding the glock sideways is harder with arthritis.”
Glock needs to start making longer guns with longer recoil filtering springs....
I don't know about that. The older I get, the less "life in prison" is a deterrent.
“ One is the return of a program focused on deterring the small fraction of offenders in Baltimore who commit the large majority of violent crimes. The other is the election of a new tough-on-crime prosecutor, who replaced a scandal-plagued “progressive.”
Which story you prefer has increasingly become a partisan matter, producing unnecessary political feuding. The bigger lesson is that intelligently targeting the most violent offenders, both through deterrence and incapacitation, can yield large, durable reductions in murder. Baltimore's success shows that its homicide problem was, in reality, just the result of its past leaders’ failure to take violence seriously enough.”
Another possibility is that the worst killers got killed. Get rid of those guys, and it means homicides go down 3-4 for each one gone.
This is crap. Murders are gang violence. Get rid of the gangs, the drugs, the trafficking, and you get rid of the murders. Its not poverty or boys clubs. Its gangs and drugs. There are two reasons why murders are down. Police aren’t there to arrest people or investigate crimes. And there is a long list of other crimes that people are arrested for instead of murder. The stats are good. But the city is still a nightmare. Which tells you the stats are wrong.
What casued the deppul;ation, it was the loss of jobs that caused the loos of people, which probably also caused the rise in violence as gangs moved into the vasuum created by the loss of jobs.
It’s a bit harder to undercount dead bodies.
With all due respect, did you read the article?
From the article:
“In Baltimore’s Western District, 72 percent of murders between 2015 and 2021 were attributable to a small number of men, mostly organized into gangs. The same analysis estimated that the area’s gang members accounted for just 2 percent of the district’s population but as much as 75 percent of its shootings and homicides.”
And then:
“Bates said that his office has identified about 6,000 frequent, violent offenders and put between 3,000 and 3,500 of them in prison. The cooperation of federal law enforcement has helped take a number of these offenders off the streets.”
Try the Arkansas State Police. Tons of them, and lots of car chases to boot. PIT maneuvers galore.
CC
When I lived in Baltimore in the late 1970s 1 in 7 residents was on welfare.
I remember well the number of empty liquor bottles near Penn Station.
Deindustrialization hit Baltimore and Philadelphia hard.
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