Murder makes work.

As soon as somebody is killed, an enormous machinery kicks into gear, driven by cops and medics, nurses and lawyers, ministers and morticians. The mechanics aren’t that different city to city, but in Baltimore the machinery has been as active and infamous as anywhere.

Now it is operating in a Baltimore that no one alive has experienced and few could have imagined. So far in 2026, Baltimore has recorded fewer homicides than ever at this point of the year, an incredible milestone in a place once morbidly referred to as “Bodymore.”

For most of the past 50 years, the city’s annual murder total exceeded 200. It ran above 300 for most of the last decade — a multiyear eruption of violence after the 2015 death of Freddie Gray from injuries in police custody. This year, the police commissioner aims for the count to stay under 100. It isn’t unattainable. From January to August, there were 60 murders. There were 45 in July 2015 alone.

Across the country, homicides have fallen to record lows after a surge during the pandemic years. But the steepness of the decline in Baltimore stands out even against that backdrop.

What happened? Violent crime rates rise and fall for countless reasons: some enigmatic mix of policy, practice, economics and other unknowable factors. Credit or blame are impossible to assign precisely, though not for lack of trying.

Just down Interstate 95 in Washington, no less a figure than President Trump is claiming credit for a drop in crime in the capital that was well underway before he returned to office. Last summer, he sent thousands of troops and federal officers into a city he declared was overrun with “bloodshed, bedlam and squalor.”

The effects of what the White House calls the “unrelenting” efforts of Mr. Trump’s D.C. task force and the thousands of arrests it has made will be long debated. But the drop in crime in Baltimore has been almost entirely on the city’s own terms. The overall number of arrests in the city is far below what it was a dozen years ago. It would have been unimaginable in the raw aftermath of Mr. Gray’s death, when a scathing civil rights investigation into Baltimore’s police department, released a decade ago this month, found the force was overly aggressive and ineffective.

The mayor has championed an array of programs to defuse tensions in volatile neighborhoods, enlisting those who know the fundamentals of street violence firsthand. Baltimore’s top prosecutor has focused on making illegally carrying guns, let alone using them, a very risky proposition in a city rife with firearms.

There is still plenty of violence in the city. Shootings remain routine. Murder is not a rarity. The machine still has work.

But the difference is real: At this point four years ago, nearly 160 more people had been killed in Baltimore.

For those who were on duty when the bloodshed was at its worst, this new reality has been almost hard to fathom. And in a scarred city, they only hope it can last.

The Detective

“There’d be no way I’d be doing this right now,” said Detective Jonathan L. “J.J.” Jones, who has worked in the Baltimore police’s homicide unit for nearly two decades.

Detective Jones, 49, was rolling through Westport, a neighborhood in south Baltimore, looking for someone among the rowhouses. The case was all but closed; a suspect had confessed. But he thought the evidence could be “tightened.”

“I can play the long game now,” he said.

In the 2010s and early 2020s, when bodies lined the hallway at the medical examiner’s office, Detective Jones would be handed three new murder cases in a week, nearly as many as policing experts say detectives should be given in a year. He would come into work on a Wednesday and not return home until Sunday, rotating through changes of clothes he kept at the office.

That there are simply fewer murders to investigate is a big reason Baltimore’s homicide clearance rate — the share of cases that result in an arrest — has risen to 60 percent this year, significantly above the national average, from 31 percent in 2015.

Historically, many of the city’s murders have come out of disputes between small gangs or drug crews, bloody attempts to settle scores or send messages. This was the kind of violence portrayed on “The Wire,” the show that gave epic dimension to the struggle over the streets of Baltimore.

These days, Detective Jones said, fewer of the victims seem to be targets, more of them casualties of reckless gunfire. Some of the veteran drug dealers, men proficient at the use of violence, have been locked up, he said. The suspects now are more careless, less streetwise. It’s easier to get them to talk.

It is not a good idea to say all of this out loud, Detective Jones said, wary of jinxing things. He is genuinely nervous that the progress may be more fragile than people realize.

“It’s really weird now,” he said. “You have these young detectives saying there’s nothing going on.”

He tells them to shut up.

“It won’t always be like this.”

For now, his blood pressure is down and he spends more time with his family, including his 19-year-old son. Detective Jones recalled cases he’d worked on with victims that age. Houses and street corners all along his drive through the city recalled past killings.

“These are the things I can think about now,” he said. “Before I was just running. The more time you have to sit and think about stuff, the more it gets to you.”

At the sound of four chimes — the signal from “the box” — the nurses in the R. Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center at the University of Maryland Medical Center prepared for a new visitor. A young man with a gunshot wound was wheeled in on a gurney. “Embarrassing,” he muttered. He had accidentally shot himself in the armpit.

The trauma ward is the primary destination for people on the worst days of their lives. Patients are brought by ambulance, flown in by helicopter and in some cases dropped off on the front sidewalk. Freddie Gray spent his last days there in a coma.

Any minute, some major calamity can turn the ward into a whirlwind of activity. This has always been true. But something has changed about the gun violence cases.

“It’s still happening, it’s just not as severe,” said CJ Meyer, 53, a senior clinical nurse who left a job at a law office for the more unforgiving demands of emergency medicine.

Several years ago, she said, people would come in with multiple gunshot wounds. Now, “they’re getting shot in the arm or shot in the leg,” she said. “They’re not dying.” And gunfire accounts for even fewer of those brought to the trauma ward by violence.

Of the 929 violent injury patients admitted in fiscal year 2023, roughly half had been shot. The rest had been stabbed or otherwise assaulted. This past year, there were 159 fewer patients, and the share with gunshot wounds had fallen to a third.

This may be due partly to the prosecutor’s crackdown on illegal gun possession. Ms. Meyer is not in a position to theorize. “We never know the stories,” she said.

The medical staff’s job is only to keep people alive. These days, that often means seeing people with bullet and knife injuries through surgery and rehab, making the stays for these patients longer than they used to be. But they are less likely to end with a somber notification in the family room.

The Prosecutor

Michael Dunty started his job at the Baltimore prosecutor’s office right after Freddie Gray’s death. When he joined the homicide unit a year later, “I was handed, I don’t know, maybe 10 or 12 charged homicide cases that were pending in court.”

As dozens of prosecutors quit under the then-state’s attorney Marilyn Mosby and trials were delayed by the pandemic, the caseload compounded. In 2022, a typical prosecutor in the unit had more than two dozen homicide cases on the court schedule, Mr. Dunty said. One handled 17 homicide jury trials in a single year. And the murders did not stop: Beyond the cases in court, each prosecutor was working on 20 to 25 open investigations.

“We all recognized it wasn’t sustainable,” said Mr. Dunty, 51, now chief of the homicide division.

Ivan J. Bates became state’s attorney in 2023, promising to hire more people and aggressively prosecute gun crimes. Since then, more than 1,500 people charged with illegal gun possession, mostly because of prior violent felonies, have been sent to prison.

In Mr. Dunty’s division, prosecutors are now handling around a dozen charged cases and, in the most stunning change, only four or five open murder investigations.

“We’re still seeing the same kind of types of homicides that we were over the years,” Mr. Dunty said, referring to drug deals and beefs. “We’re just seeing less of them.”

The Messenger

In certain neighborhoods, generations knew the name Dennis Wise, even though he’d be absent from the city for nearly 40 years. Convicted of murder in 1979 — prosecutors described him as a hit man — Mr. Wise was a living urban legend. A character based on him in “The Wire” is simply named Dennis Wise.

When he was released in 2017, Mr. Wise returned to a different Baltimore. The guns were deadlier and everyone seemed to have one. Gangs from the West Coast had arrived. After the Freddie Gray protests, he said, “police were standing back and letting people kill each other.”

But he was intrigued by a mentorship program called Safe Streets, which he’d learned about from a man he’d known in prison.

There are many elements to Mayor Brandon Scott’s violence prevention plan, but most attention has focused on the Group Violence Reduction Strategy. This is based on the concept that a small group of people drive most of the violence. In weekly meetings at a Baltimore church, police officers, city employees and members of community organizations discuss people they have reason to believe are likely to be perpetrators or victims of violent crime. Members of the group visit these people, warning that the they are on the city’s radar but also offering services, including housing assistance and job training.

Variations of the approach have been tried in other cities and twice before in Baltimore, with mixed results. But criminologists studying the current iteration found that in the police district where it was initially put into place, violence dropped measurably.

There are other pieces to the mayor’s plan, including intervention teamslike Safe Streets, which has operated in Baltimore since 2007. Some of these programs rely on “credible messengers,” a jargony way of saying people with a background on the streets.

Mr. Wise joined Safe Streets soon after his release. He worked out of a school building, talking to young people on the corners and mediating disputes. People listened to him, said Mr. Wise, now 75 and soft-spoken, “because they know I’ve been through a lot of things.”

Mr. Wise’s background gives him authority, but histories like his also bring the program risk. In June, a 51-year-old Safe Streets worker who had spent 10 years in prison was arrested on a federal gun charge.

To the critics of the program, Mr. Wise counters: Who else would have the trust of a young man with a gun and a grudge? “When I was I was coming up, in order to be safe, you had to be known to be dangerous,” he said. He insisted the numbers showed that was changing.

“When you stop being people getting shot, you know you’re making progress,” he said.

The Undertaker

Albert P. Wylie opened his first funeral home in 1993, when homicides hit a record high. This was the era when his son, Brandon, was learning the trade.

He learned that the funerals of murder victims were often paid for by the local drug dealer. He learned that families appreciated little celebratory items, like wristbands, when the person being mourned had not made it out of his teens.

“Not a lot to celebrate,” the younger Mr. Wylie said. “Obituaries were short.”

Young people have a lot more to do these days, he said. There are classes and community groups in places where there used to be nothing but the corner. Social media can be a problem, with videos of shootings and carjackings going viral. But, he said, the phone has also diluted the sway of the local street crews.

“It’s not so much about your corner anymore,” he said. “It’s decentralized.”

There seem to be more people dying by suicide these days, Mr. Wylie said. And there are still killings, even if they are fewer. The funeral home held recently services for three victims, he said. But he was optimistic. “I have hope for the city,” he said.

And as mourners gathered in the lobby after a midday service, Mr. Wylie pointed out that murder wasn’t the only fact of life and death in Baltimore.

“No I can’t say that we’re as busy with homicides,” he said. “But I’m busy. I’m always busy.”