European Seminars on the Economics of Crime (ESEC)

Baltimore's homicide rate fell by roughly 60% between 2022 and 2025, an exceptional decline among large U.S. cities. At the start of this period, Baltimore launched a strategy that concentrated police and social service resources on a small set of people thought to be driving group-involved gun violence. The approach-"focused deterrence”-has been implemented in some form by cities across the U.S. The strategy was introduced first in the Western police district, one of the highest-violence communities in the U.S. Relative to comparable Baltimore neighborhoods, we estimate that within 18 months shootings and homicides in the Western district fell by roughly one third and carjackings by about 40%, with no spillovers elsewhere in the city. These gains came without expanding overall enforcement: total arrests were flat even as arrests for serious violent crimes rose sharply, indicating that the strategy redirected police authority toward serious violence rather than widening the net of the justice system. Person-level and qualitative evidence point to deterrence, incapacitation, services, and community messengers' legitimacy as contributing channels, with no single mechanism explaining the bulk of the decline. The social value of the averted violence is roughly 35 times the program's first-year spending. Citywide, Baltimore's homicide rate over this period was about 25% below a synthetic counterfactual built from other large cities. The timing of Baltimore's homicide decline and the absence of a larger-than-expected drop in other violent crimes are consistent with the expansion of focused deterrence across the city and a broader shift toward a targeted, partnership-based response to group violence. Baltimore's experience offers an important blueprint for how cities can achieve reductions in gun violence at scale.