A feud is resurfacing between Baltimore’s mayor and top prosecutor over who’s done the most to drive down crime, as the city’s homicide rate continues to plunge for a third year in a row.

State’s Attorney Ivan Bates touted his office’s increased convictions of repeat violent offenders during a city budget hearing last week. Meanwhile, Mayor Brandon Scott continues to emphasize the impact of the Group Violence Reduction Strategy he instituted, which aims to prevent crime through life coaching and other support services.

The city saw its lowest monthly homicide rate in recorded history in April. This year’s homicide count is on track to drop 23% compared with last year, following two prior years of significant decline.

“Through our tireless and successful prosecution of violent offenses, we have seen homicides drop in Baltimore by 63%” since 2022, said Bates, who took office in January 2023.

In an emailed statement to The Baltimore Sun, Scott acknowledged the state’s attorney’s impact — while also pushing back.

“We appreciate the SAO for prosecuting violent criminals based on the hard work done by the women and men of BPD, as directed by me through my police commissioner as a part of my comprehensive violence prevention plan,” Scott said. “But I want to be clear that each case he prosecutes is built on the backs of the hard work my officers and detectives do each day, and I am grateful to each of them for that work.”

Daniel Webster, a violence prevention expert at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said, “Both men have legitimate claims that what they are doing is making Baltimore communities safer.” However, based on the available information, it’s not possible to determine who has had the greater impact, he said.

“I know enough about gun violence to note that it’s a really challenging thing to reduce effectively, and typically, you need many systems operating well to curb violence to have the kind of historic reductions that we’ve seen over the past roughly two and a half years now,” he said.

The mayor and state’s attorney have previously clashed over their approaches to combating crime in Baltimore, dating back to Scott’s reelection bid last year, when Bates endorsed his opponent, Sheila Dixon, in the Democratic primary.

Increased convictions, enhanced penalties:

Bates described during Wednesday’s budget hearing how his office has increased the incarceration of repeat violent offenders using firearms. In 2021 and 2022, there were 780 such cases that resulted in incarceration, while in 2023 and 2024, that number increased to 2,129, he said.

There’s also been a decrease in individuals being ordered to probation instead of serving prison time. In 2021 and 2022, 656 violent offenders were ordered to probation, and 781 served prison time. In contrast, in 2023 and 2024, 245 were ordered to probation, and 1,723 served prison time.

“More than double the number of violent repeat offenders were held accountable and removed from our communities,” he said. Bates added that under his leadership, prosecutors have been instructed to request enhanced penalties, including five years without the possibility of parole.

When Bates took office, there were around 5,000 to 6,000 “violent offenders running around the city with guns,” Bates said during Wednesday’s budget hearing. Today, he estimates his office has put “almost 2,500 of those individuals in prison.”

“It’s not something we’re proud of in a sense to just, to put people in jail,” he said. “But it’s in a sense that these are the individuals running around, shooting and killing individuals. We’ve targeted the right people to put them in prison.”

Bates added that the reduction in crime is also attributable to “everybody working together.”

Reducing violence

Since the start of GVRS in January 2022 through June 2 of this year, GVRS has provided services to 230 individuals and led to 455 arrests, Scott told The Sun in a statement. He added that GVRS cases are prosecuted by both the state’s attorney’s office and the Maryland attorney general’s office.

Scott said violence reduction efforts “began in September 2022, before he (Bates) took office, and have continued since then. Every gun arrest and related action is a result of my strategy.”

Scott added, “The impact that GVRS has had on reducing violence in Baltimore has been studied, reviewed, and analyzed by some of the most respected experts in the world, who say that its impact cannot be refuted. However, the states attorney is right that a very small group of individuals drives the violence in Baltimore. That is what the problem analysis we conducted for GVRS stated, and those groups are exactly who the strategy is focused on.”

He continued, “My team and I look forward to continued partnership with the States Attorney, Attorney General, our CVI (community violence intervention) Community, Federal Agencies, and most importantly, our community to continue the historic reduction in violence that we are creating together.”

Historic reductions

In a statement on Friday, City Council President Zeke Cohen credited the city’s historic reductions in homicides and violent crime to “the leadership of Mayor Scott, States’ Attorney Bates, and the Baltimore Police Department.”

During Wednesday’s hearing on the state’s attorney’s budget, Cohen said that when Bates took office in 2023, the office was “in turmoil, staffing levels were dangerously low and we were struggling on the crime fight” and that the office now “has been largely rebuilt.”

“The city of Baltimore is winning when it comes to the violent crime fight and your office has played a major role in getting us there,” Cohen told Bates during the hearing. “And we still have a very, very long way to go to becoming the safe city that we all deserve.”

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