Brandon Scott knew from a young age that he wanted to be mayor of his hometown. Raised in a rough area of Northwestern Baltimore that hosts the Preakness Stakes—the second leg of the Triple Crown thoroughbred racing series—Scott would see the potential of his neighborhood on display every third Saturday in May. “When you live in a neighborhood where your neighborhood is the center of the sports world for one day, and then every other day you’re not treated as human, it forces you to make decisions at an earlier time,” he said.

Scott recalled the twofold shock of witnessing a shooting before his seventh birthday—both that it had happened right in front of him and that it hardly provoked any kind of reaction from the adults in his life. “No one really cared. We would go back to school like nothing happened,” said Scott, who was in elementary school at the time. “Pestering my parents, my aunts, uncles, grandparents, older cousins, everybody that watched me. Finally, my mom told me one day that if you want things to change you’ve got to do it yourself.”

So the DIY campaign began. In the span of a decade in local politics, Scott went from city councilman to council president to mayor, becoming Baltimore’s youngest mayor at age 36. Scott, vying to run a city long maligned as one of America’s “murder capitals”—and deemed a “deathbed” by President Donald Trump—made a firm vow during his campaign: He would be the mayor to reduce the homicide rate, which was then averaging well above 300 deaths per year, by 15 percent annually over five years.

The 41-year-old Democrat is about to enter his sixth year in office, and while Baltimore hasn’t reached his ambitious benchmark yet, it’s getting very close. With Scott at its helm, Baltimore has achieved what many see as remarkable progress: Homicides began a year-over-year downward slide in 2023, and the city will very likely close out 2025 at a new record low. In November, Baltimore recorded 15 homicides, contributing to a 30 percent year-to-date drop, according to the city’s reporting. That amounted to 127 murders so far for the year, as of last month. That’s still several times higher than the national homicide rate, but the lowest number the city has posted since 1970.

To reach this point, Baltimore has employed a model that showed promise in Oakland, California, and Philadelphia. Baltimore’s Group Violence Reduction Strategy (referred to by the jargony acronym GVRS) employs focused deterrence, using carrots and sticks. The carrot—access to resources, including mentorship and job training. The stick—accountability, namely the vow of arrest and prosecution under a new state’s attorney, Ivan Bates, who is also credited with the violence turnaround. The vast majority of the people involved with the program are not “hardened” criminals, according to Scott. “Most of the violence, in Baltimore and everywhere else, is interpersonal violence. People have conflict, which humans are going to have, but people don’t know how to resolve that conflict,” Scott told The New Republic in his office just before Thanksgiving. Along with systemic factors like redlining, deindustrialization, and a drug trade targeted at Black, brown, and poor neighborhoods, “you understand that you have a recipe, a melting pot that can cause these things to happen.”

Scott’s understanding of what drives—and cures—violent crime is at odds with the conventional wisdom out of Trump’s federal government. When Trump signed an order deploying National Guard troops to Washington, D.C., in August, he called a press conference where he held up mug shots of several alleged criminals, all people of color,

© New Republic