Baltimore mayor summons public safety leaders to City Hall over rash of violence

Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott summoned his public safety leadership teams to City Hall Tuesday to address a rash of recent shootings that are threatening to slow Baltimore’s historic yearslong reductions in gun violence.

“We cannot have another two weeks like the two weeks that we have been having,” Scott said in an interview, flanked by Police Commissioner Richard Worley and Stefanie Mavronis, who is director of the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement. “We know what we have to do.”

October has already been the deadliest month of the year, with 17 people killed. Six people were shot in two separate incidents on opposite ends of the city Monday evening, in the Franklintown and Belair Edison neighborhoods. Two of them died. On Sunday, eight people were shot, two of them fatally, in separate incidents. And on Thursday evening, five people were shot, two of the fatally, in one incident.

Through Monday, 253 people have been shot and wounded, compared to 247 people that were shot and wounded at this time last year.

Homicides remain down, with 101 people killed this year compared to 105 killed at this time last year.

To be sure, violence continues to be well below where it had hovered for nearly a decade, with the city experiencing over 300 homicides annually until 2023. Homicides fell 24 percent in 2023, 21 percent in 2024, and another 31 percent last year.

Worley said those results show that police need to continue doing what they are doing, but with renewed urgency.

“We’re not going to change anything that’s been working for a couple of years. We know who the groups are. We know who they’re feuding with,” Worley said. “Unfortunately right now we have a couple different types of feuds going on between groups, and it keeps going back and forth, and we’ve got to stop it.”

Worley said police would seek to step up traffic stops and engaging with groups populating hot spots. He said the department had been “place-based” and would get more involved with individuals.

He said the concern being displayed showed that Baltimore was in a new era.

“That shows how far we’ve come and how much progress we’ve made that we’re no longer accepting what was accepted five years, and we want to get better than what we did last year,” he said.

In a separate interview, Baltimore State’s Attorney Ivan Bates said he’s long been concerned that the city’s declines in gun violence could tip back as gun offenders return home.

“We sent a number of these guys to prison for 36 or 48 months,” Bates said. “They’re starting to come home to old beefs and drug territories that they want back.

“One shoots one crew, then another responds with violence,” he said. “You see it go back and forth, back and forth.”

At City Hall, Mavronis said she had a “strong but mighty” engagement team that is being stretched to respond to so many incidents in different parts of the city but would seek to “leverage partnerships with community-based partners.”

“We can’t be everywhere at the same time, but when we work with our partnering organizations, we absolutely can cover that ground. So, we’re showing up in multiple communities every single day to check in on neighbors, make sure that people are OK,” she said.

This article may be updated