In 2015 I wrote Baltimore Arrests are Down and Crime is Way Up and, as I predicted, Baltimore tipped into an high crime equilibrium. After the Freddie Gray riots, arrests declined and crime shot up but crime stayed high even after arrests rebounded. In my view, the surge fed on itself: higher crime strained police resources, and that strain—in and of itself—reduced the probability of punishment, sustaining the high-crime equilibrium, as in my crime wave paper.

Yet, beginning around 2022 crime in Baltimore—most especially murders—began to fall.

In April, Baltimore had four homicides, the lowest total for any single month since at least 1970. So far this year, there were 38, compared with 51 in the same period last year. At the current rate, Baltimore would end 2026 with fewer than 100 homicides. There were 323 just four years ago.

How did we get from a city in which the question was how high can crime rise, to one where the question is how low can it go? The answer might be linked to the nationwide decline in murder, spurred by a restoration of policing as the excesses of the George Floyd years recede. But that raises the question of what cities across the country are doing right.

So what caused the decline? We can’t be entirely sure as national trends confound but Charles Fain Lehman has a good piece in the FP arguing plausibly that the answer boils down to carrots, sticks and the non-random nature of murder. Begin with the latter. A significant subset of murders are highly predictable. A gang member gets gunned down today. Next week, you can expect retaliation. Moreover, you know who is going to do the murder even more than you know who is going to be murdered. Namely, a close associate—a fellow gang or family member—will be the one to do the killing. Sometimes pre-Cog is not so hard.

So with this in mind, Baltimore, under a new mayor and tough on crime prosecutor, began to intervene in the murder cycle before it happened, i.e. a focused deterrence program based on Boston’s Operation Ceasefire.

The approach involves a detailed investigation of every shooting that happens in the city. Every week, the Baltimore Police Department and its partners review the week’s incidents….For every shooting, GVRS prescribes reaching out to known associates of the victim.

…At one recent coordination meeting, about 20 people gathered around the table of the conference room at Baltimore’s Doxa Ministries Church Without Walls. Under the direction of Reginald Williams from the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement, they talked through two new “referrals” associated with the victim of a recent shooting. One had a long criminal history and was on house arrest. Another, barely an adult, was himself a victim a few years earlier.

Both men will have their doors knocked on by several of the meeting’s attendees. They will be offered services—job training, tattoo removal, relocation, whatever they need to get out of the “life.” But they will also get a clear message, delivered verbally and in the form of a letter from Mayor Scott: Baltimore is watching them—and will come after them.

Carrots, sticks, and a little Pre-Cog. Together they appear to be working.