A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
President Trump's federal takeover of law enforcement in the nation's capital is entering its second week. Trump has - without evidence - described D.C. and other Democratic Party-run cities as dangerous and crime-ridden.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We have other cities that are very bad. New York has a problem. And then you have, of course, Baltimore and Oakland. We don't even mention that anymore. They're so far gone.
MARTÍNEZ: In Baltimore, though, violent crime is historically low after hitting a gruesome high more than a decade ago. Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott spoke yesterday with our colleague Michel Martin.
MICHEL MARTIN, BYLINE: So I want to start by going back in time a little bit to 2015. Homicide spiked in Baltimore to levels that hadn't been seen since the '90s. That was the year that Freddie Gray died in police custody. There were demonstrations. You were on the council at the time. What do you think was driving the violence back then?
BRANDON SCOTT: We know what causes it - right? - when you have here in Baltimore the birthplace of red lining, purposeful disinvestment into neighborhoods over generations and generations and, at the same time, deindustrialization. And then you, of course, have the influx of drugs into the communities. You just have a melting pot of disaster.
MARTIN: So back in 2015...
SCOTT: Yeah.
MARTIN: There were something like 344 homicides...
SCOTT: Yeah.
MARTIN: ...In 2015, and then they started dropping, you know, after that. And then there was the COVID spike.
SCOTT: No, not for us.
MARTIN: No.
SCOTT: They did not drop. That's the difference here.
MARTIN: They did not.
SCOTT: Yeah. In Baltimore, you - we didn't have a, quote-unquote, "COVID spike." It stayed flat for us until we started to see violence literally started to fall off a cliff, starting with September of 2022.
MARTIN: What do you think were some of the factors that led to that significant drop?
SCOTT: Well, September of '22 is when we fully implemented our Comprehensive Violence Prevention Plan. So when you look deep into that plan, it's multifaceted. We have the Group Violence Reduction Strategy, which is a focused deterrence model where we actually go to those who are most likely to be the victim or perpetrator of gun violence. They get a letter directly from me. We knock on their door and say, we know who you are. We know what you do. Change your life. We'll help you do it. But if you don't, we're going to remove you via law enforcement. Those who have taken us up on changing their life, over 90% of them have not reinjured, revictimized or recidivated in crime.
MARTIN: So if people say, yes, I am ready, what happens then?
SCOTT: We actually have case managers that work with these people every day to make sure that they're getting the things that they need. I'll give you some examples. There was a young man who literally told our folks when they knocked on the door that this was the first time he had been involved in that life since he was 12 that anyone told him he could do any different. There are people who are now working for the city at the public works, at the convention center, folks who have changed their life around because they're getting all of that support from the organizations in the community portion of the Group Violence Reduction Strategy.
MARTIN: What big of a difference do you think the federal money paid in this?
SCOTT: When you look at how we were able to really grow our community violence intervention ecosystem at such rapid pace, it's because we used 50 million of ARPA to do so, right? We have local money into it, obviously state money, philanthropic money and the federal money. And that helped us to really rapidly deploy all of these resources.
MARTIN: I know you say, look, there's never one cause of this kind of a situation, and there's not one solution. But if you had to isolate, you know, one or two things, what do you think it would be?
SCOTT: I can't. It's all of it, right? It is the community violence intervention. It is that our police officers are making a gun arrest and taking 2,500 guns off the streets. It is that they are taking these violent organizations down and handing them over to our attorney general or our state's attorney, who are prosecuting folks. It is the record investments that we've made into recreation in parks, into schools. It's all of it.
MARTIN: So as you're watching the approach the president is taking in Washington, D.C. - putting the D.C. police under federal control, putting 800 National Guardsmen on the streets - what's going through your mind?
SCOTT: It's the wrong approach. We know that that doesn't work. You're taking federal ATF agents, DEA agents, all these folks off of their actual job to stop guns from being trafficked into cities, drugs from being trafficked into cities to just do patrol. That's not what they do. If the president wanted to help, he could be sending them to the borders to stop the drugs from getting into the country in the first place. He could be helping by eliminating things like Glock switches and AR-15 access to average Americans and ghost guns. That's what he could be doing.
MARTIN: That's Brandon Scott. He's the mayor of Baltimore, Maryland. Mayor Scott, thanks so much for your time.
SCOTT: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
