A study from Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions has found that Baltimore's Safe Streets program, which trains community members to interrupt conflicts before they turn deadly, is associated with a 42% reduction in homicides among youth aged 15 to 24 and a 21% reduction in nonfatal shootings across the neighborhoods where it operates.
The research, published in Injury Prevention, examined eleven Safe Streets sites across Baltimore between 2007 and 2023, analyzing the first 39 months of activity at each location. What makes this finding significant is that it may be the first rigorous study to examine how community violence intervention programs specifically impact youth—a demographic that bears an outsized burden of gun deaths in cities like Baltimore. Safe Streets Violence Interrupters, often drawn from the communities they serve, use outreach, public education, and conflict mediation to de-escalate situations and keep neighborhoods safer.
The program itself, founded in 2007 and run by the Mayor's Office of Neighborhood and Community Engagement, represents a fundamentally different approach to violence prevention than traditional law enforcement. Rather than waiting for violence to occur, trained messengers work with high-risk individuals to prevent conflicts from escalating into tragedy. The first site, McElderry Park, opened in 2007 and continues operating today. Six newer sites launched in 2019 and 2020, expanding the program's reach into additional neighborhoods.
The results, however, tell a more nuanced story than the overall figures suggest. Effectiveness varied significantly by neighborhood. Five of the eleven sites showed estimated reductions in youth homicides ranging from 37% to 100%, but two sites actually showed increases of 46% and 89%. When researchers looked at nonfatal shootings, seven of the eleven sites experienced substantial drops, with reductions estimated between 27% and 75%. Researchers attribute this variation to differences in neighborhood violence dynamics, the quality of community partnerships, local police effectiveness, and how well the program was implemented in each area.
"These results show that Safe Streets can have positive impacts on a leading cause of death among youth in Baltimore," says Carla Tilchin, assistant scientist at the Center for Gun Violence Solutions. To reach these conclusions, researchers used sophisticated synthetic control methods, essentially creating a statistical model of what youth violence trends would have looked like in each neighborhood without the Safe Streets intervention. This allowed them to isolate the program's actual impact from other factors affecting violence rates.
The neighborhoods studied covered areas averaging 0.57 miles each, drawing homicide and nonfatal shooting data directly from the Baltimore Police Department and Open Baltimore, the city's publicly available data portal. The authors acknowledge that some results were not statistically significant—a common outcome when analyzing small geographic areas—but the overall pattern suggests the program's potential to save lives.
"Safe Streets Violence Interrupters dedicate their lives to protecting public health and making their neighborhoods a safer place to live—it's important to know their work can save lives," Tilchin adds. As Baltimore continues investing in community-based violence interventions, this research offers hope that these grassroots approaches, when properly implemented and supported, can measurably reduce the gun violence that has long plagued the city's young people.