For decades, Baltimore and New York City have occupied a particular place in America’s imagination. Both cities have neighborhoods that have become synonymous with violence. Baltimore’s struggles with homicide, concentrated poverty, drugs and neighborhood disinvestment have been portrayed nationally for generations. New York’s history produced an entirely different narrative. Broken Windows policing, courtesy of NYC, produced the idea that keeping America’s largest city safe requires an overwhelmingly enforcement-centered approach to public safety. Something important is now happening in both cities.
Violence is falling to historic lows.
And while no single policy, program, administration or institution deserves all the credit, the experience of these two cities offers compelling evidence for something the Community Safety Exchange has long argued:
Safety is strongest when communities combine effective law enforcement with prevention, intervention, services, community organizations and investments in the conditions that produce safer lives.
Baltimore: From a Symbol of Urban Violence to Historic Progress
The transformation underway in Baltimore is remarkable. Baltimore ended 2025 with 133 homicides which was the city’s lowest total in nearly 50 years. Homicides declined 31 percent in a single year, while nonfatal shootings fell 24 percent. Since 2021, homicides and shootings have fallen by nearly 60 percent. The progress has continued.
During the first half of 2026, Baltimore recorded just 50 homicides, compared with 65 during the same period in 2025 a further 23 percent decline. Nonfatal shootings also continued to decline. These results did not emerge from one intervention. Baltimore has deliberately developed a broader violence-prevention infrastructure involving the Baltimore Police Department, the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement, prosecutors, state and federal partners, community organizations, violence interrupters and residents. An independent analysis cited by Baltimore found that the initial implementation of the Group Violence Reduction Strategy was associated with a 25 percent reduction in homicides and nonfatal shootings and a 33 percent reduction in carjackings, without a corresponding increase in arrests or displacement of crime to surrounding districts. That is community safety in practice.
New York City Is Making History Too
Nearly 200 miles north, something similarly remarkable is happening. Through the first seven months of 2026, New York City recorded:149 murders, down 22.8 percent from the same period in 2025; 381 shooting incidents, the fewest ever recorded during the first seven months of a year; and 462 shooting victims, also a record low.
July itself established record lows for shooting incidents, shooting victims and murders for the month. New York City accomplished this after 2025 had already established a new record for the fewest shooting incidents in the city’s recorded history. Again, there is no credible reason to attribute these outcomes to a single program.
Community Safety Is Not Anti-Police. It Is Bigger Than Police.
- A police officer cannot create affordable housing.
- A police officer cannot give a young person a quality education.
- A police officer cannot create a job.
- A police officer cannot provide long-term mental health treatment.
- A police officer cannot rebuild a family.
- A police officer cannot undo generations of neighborhood disinvestment.
- And an arrest, by itself, cannot create the social conditions that prevent the next shooting.
Community safety asks a different question: What combination of institutions, people, resources and interventions makes violence less likely to occur in the first place?
Baltimore and New York City are increasingly demonstrating what becomes possible when cities begin answering that question more broadly.
For Community Safety Exchange founder, Dr. Maurice Vann, this work is also personal. Dr. Vann’s original dissertation research was conducted in Baltimore, including work centered on the Penn North community, an area that became internationally recognizable during the unrest following the death of Freddie Gray. His research examined returning citizens, desistance and the ways formerly incarcerated people could become contributors to community safety rather than simply being understood through the lens of crime and punishment.
Years later, Dr. Vann brought that perspective to New York. He served on Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s transition subcommittee on community safety while simultaneously teaching a multidisciplinary course on community safety at Lehman College and developing two books examining community safety and its emergence as a broader field of study and practice. Baltimore and New York City therefore represent more than interesting case studies for the Exchange. They represent two important chapters in the development of an idea.
Two cities that have spent decades being characterized as dangerous are now producing some of the most encouraging evidence about what safer urban communities can look like. Baltimore, the city of The Wire, has reached homicide levels not seen in generations. New York City, once synonymous with the urban crime crisis, is experiencing the fewest shootings and murders for this point in the year in its recorded history.
We should celebrate that!
What Could This Mean for Your Municipality?
The lesson from Baltimore and New York is not that another municipality should simply copy either city. Baltimore is not New York. New York is not Newark, Philadelphia, Trenton, Chicago, Atlanta or your community. Effective community-safety strategies must reflect local conditions. That begins with understanding a community’s violence, resources, institutions, gaps and opportunities.
The Community Safety Exchange can help municipalities do precisely that.
We work from a multidisciplinary, service-centered understanding of public safety to help communities examine their existing safety ecosystem, identify gaps, connect government with community partners, incorporate evidence-based practices, and develop strategies suited to their own populations and neighborhoods. The goal is not to sell cities another program. It is to help communities build systems. Community safety is working.
Learn More
Baltimore Police Department: 2026 Mid-Year Crime Report
New York City: Historic 2026 Shooting and Murder Reductions
