In last Friday’s column, I noted the possibility that Baltimore could close out 2024 with fewer than 200 homicides for the first time in 11 years. Correction: It would actually be the first time in 13 years. As of Thursday, there had been 178 homicides in the city, 57 fewer than at the same time last year. There have been 200 fewer nonfatal shootings.

Among organizations contributing to this trend is Roca. Now in its seventh year in Baltimore, Roca deploys a staff to identify and pursue young men who constitute the hardest cases — the ones most likely to put someone in Shock Trauma or end up there themselves.

They’re also at risk of being arrested, and probably not for the first time. The Roca approach is “relentless outreach” to change their thinking before it’s too late.

“A race against the clock” is how Kurt Palermo, who runs Roca’s Baltimore operation, puts it.

Sometimes Roca wins the race; most of the young men who stick with the program for at least two years find jobs and stay out of prison.

But sometimes the clock runs out.

This paragraph appears in Roca’s most recent report, for the fiscal year that ended in June:

“Over the last year we were able to serve 427 young people in Baltimore City and Essex and Dundalk in Baltimore County. Unfortunately, we saw a slightly lower retention rate for eligible young people due to active warrants, incarceration lasting longer than six months … and tragically losing eight young people to homicide.”

Eight in one year.

“Yes, I’ve been to funerals,” says Antoin “Twan” Torain, one of Roca’s outreach workers who took me on a round of his house calls in West Baltimore.

“We’re trying to do the best we can to find young people who don’t want to be found, engage them [and] teach them critical lifesaving skills,” says Palermo. “But this past summer alone, in a 60-day period, we lost three young people to homicide. Another young person was shot, just a terrible shooting. His life is altered. He’s now a double amputee, both of his legs. But he’s alive and still focusing on what he can do to be positive and change his life.”

Roca’s work is with boys and young men between 16 and 24. The one who lost his legs is 23.

“It’s difficult, it’s challenging, it’s painful when any of that type of stuff happens,” Palermo says. “But the staff is committed. We’re here to try to help these young people.”

The fact that eight of the year’s cohort were killed tells you that Roca is reaching the high-risk group it means to help.

The other day I asked Torain how he spends his day as a life skills specialist for Roca.

“CBT, CBT, CBT,” he said, referring to the iron core of Roca’s efforts, cognitive behavioral therapy. Roca’s brand, offered in group settings at its Baltimore office, is called Rewire CBT.

It’s all about getting young adults to stop and think, to take a few seconds to separate their impulses from their actions in a way that reduces violence.

“The main thing I do is get them to challenge their own thoughts,” says Torain. “You have to become your own therapist.”

“It’s really about emotional regulation,” says Molly Baldwin, Roca’s founder and CEO. “It takes 18 to 24 months to change your brain at that age. And so can we hold on to you, drive you crazy, follow you around, bother you, get you into transitional employment, talk with you, teach you these emotional regulation skills, so that, at some point, the neural pathways are responding in a way that lets them take an eight- to 12-second pause.

“Once you can take an eight- to 12-second pause between what you think and feel and what you do, then you have agency.”

Then you can become a better man, not a statistic.

The violence that surged in 2015 and continued at a high rate for nine years was horrifying, tragic and depressing. Brandon Scott was elected mayor in 2020 and almost immediately criticized, in some quarters, for not acting more swiftly to curtail the killing. The approach he wanted — intervention at its root level, focused on gun violence — was dismissed by some as impractical or too slow. But those who leveled the criticism, often from distant positions, do not seem very vocal now.

They never had skin in the game anyway.

It’s the work on the ground — by Roca and Safe Streets, by Baltimore Police and the department’s federal collaborators, and by the State’s Attorney’s Office — that have combined to make a difference in the number of homicides and non-fatal shootings. As the year-to-date numbers indicate, both are down significantly, and we have to hope that trend continues.

It only continues with consistency in the current approach and efforts like Roca’s “relentless outreach.”

I asked Twan Torain, who works with at-risk young men every day, what gives him the most satisfaction, a sense of progress.

“A lot of these kids, when we meet them for the first time, they’re complete strangers,” he says. “They come into the building one day, and it’s ‘Hi, howya doin’.’ I do my job, I create a relationship. And to hear these complete strangers one day say, ‘Hey, Twan, you the only thing I have,’ or ‘Twan, I love you,’ that’s big in our community. … Sometimes there’s a lot of pressure in that, but it’s empowering too.”

Have a tip? Contact Dan Rodricks at drodricks@baltsun.com, 443-600-6719, or on X @DanRodricks.