As federal and local governments spar over how to address violent crime in Baltimore City, crime reduction through deterrence has been at the forefront of the current city administration’s community-involved Group Violence Reduction Strategy (GVRS) program since its implementation in January 2022.
The program – an effort that strategizes “focused deterrence” – now exists in five of Baltimore’s nine districts, but evidence of its impact and whether it’s connected to the national decline in crime remains scarce.
GVRS was launched by the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement (MONSE) and in partnership with the Baltimore Police Department (BPD) and the State’s Attorney’s Office (SAO). Designed to reduce crime through deterrence, the program expanded to the Southwestern district in 2023 and the Central and Eastern districts in 2024.
South Baltimore is the latest district to have implemented GVRS in July.
In an interview with Baltimore Witness, Baltimore City State’s Attorney Ivan J. Bates said his administration “changed the tone” from a prosecutorial perspective in January 2023, reinforcing the city’s “carrot-and-stick” approach to get repeat offenders off the street.
Social services, such as housing relocation, job training and counseling, to assist repeat violent offenders represents the carrot.
“[Legal repercussions] are the stick. You can’t be super successful without the stick,” Bates said. “Once the stick is laid down — literally lay down the law of how we’re going to act — then you have the opportunity to see more and more of these programs taken into effect.”
“My job is to work with the police and work with the government authorities to hold them accountable,” the state’s attorney added.
In coordination with the city, University of Pennsylvania’s (UPenn) Criminal Justice and Policy Lab helped advise the city on GVRS implementation and continues to provide technical assistance, said MONSE spokesperson Jack French. In 2024, UPenn released findings that estimated the impact of GVRS in Baltimore’s Western District 18 months after launching in 2022. Crime decreased in West Baltimore between January 2022 and June 2023, with the report attributing the decline to GVRS.
The research and evaluation team had no involvement in any aspects of the program design or technical support and did not receive any city funding for their analysis, French told Baltimore Witness.
In the first 18 months of the program’s implementation, UPenn reported, community and city leaders conducted 175 individual interventions and informed offenders of “the legal and safety risks” of ongoing violent crime. With 144 focused arrests, 90 people deemed “highest-risk of shooting someone or being shot” had accepted services through the program.
GVRS was also shown to reduce shootings and homicides by 25 percent without shifting into other districts in addition to 60 fewer shooting and homicide victims.
Fellow researcher Max Kapustin, assistant professor of economics at Cornell University, said the report compares GVRS and its impact in Baltimore City’s Western District during those 18 months with an estimated crime rate that UPenn calculated using BPD data from 2015 to 2021.
Kapustin, who previously served as the senior research director at the University of Chicago Crime and Education labs, explained their calculations used BPD’s data from before the program’s launch to analyze violent crime rates. Given the historically high number of shootings in West Baltimore, he said, a “synthetic Western District” was created using the weighted average of other areas in the city that resembled the district. This was then used to calculate an estimated crime rate had GVRS not been implemented.
“This synthetic Western District closely matches the trends in shootings of the Western [District] over the 2015-2021 period, giving us more confidence in the resulting estimates of the impact of GVRS,” Kapustin said.
The report notes that its findings “provide solid empirical evidence that the January 2022 GVRS implementation did not result in noteworthy changes in [Western District] group behaviors, especially as it relates to group members’ criminal activities, including engagement in homicides and shootings, in adjacent districts.”
Local government officials, including Mayor Brandon Scott, have praised GVRS for its effective strategies; however, Kapustin said that BPD’s redistricting in July 2023 “throws a wrench into the methodology” to study the program’s ongoing and future impact.
Jeremy Biddle, the lab’s director of violence reduction policy and programs, said when the district boundaries changed, so did the basis for comparison.
“The new Western District is more violent, pound for pound, based on historical data than the old Western District,” Biddle said. “We expected the new Western District to be more violent based on historical data. It’s impossible to disentangle because they’re not the same district or the same communities.
According to recent data from Baltimore Witness, the Western and Eastern districts showed the least progress in reducing shootings and homicides between 2023 and 2024, only decreasing by six percent and four percent, respectively. In this same period, there was a 26-percent drop in shootings and homicides in South Baltimore, which had not yet had GVRS.
The Southeastern, Southwestern and Northeastern districts saw the most substantial changes, decreasing by 31 percent, 33 percent and 51 percent, respectively, followed by 13-percent and 20-percent declines in the Northern and Central districts between 2023 and 2024.
Between 2023 and 2024, Baltimore Witness data shows shootings and homicides dropped nearly 19 percent across the city’s nine districts. Baltimore Witness reported 227 shootings and homicides in the Western District alone in this time – a period when the Western District saw only five fewer homicides and two fewer shootings from 2023 to 2024.
Aaron Chalfin, associate professor and graduate chair of criminology with UPenn’s Department of Criminology who worked on the report, said it’s also difficult to determine how much of Baltimore’s decrease in crime is due to GVRS given the ongoing decline nationwide. Such an analysis would require factoring in the national decline as well as the city’s significant decline seen in recent years.
“I think it’s plausible that GVRS is a part of the story as [the program] has percolated to large spots in the city, but it could also be changes in prosecution or other managerial changes, policing or just a variation that’s not due to public policy,” Chalfin said.
“It’s impossible to really point to one thing,” added Biddle. “People have a tendency to want the simple explanation, but no such simple explanation exists here.”
As of September 2025, more than 277 very high-risk individuals used GVRS services through Youth Advocate Programs (YAP) and Roca’s violence intervention programs, French told Baltimore Witness. About 96 percent of participants have not been revictimized, while nearly 98 percent of participants have not committed more crimes.
An additional 431 GVRS individuals who refused to cease violent crime were arrested.
