Crime fell across Baltimore City in 2024, which the Mayor’s office said is thanks in part to programs like Safe Streets, the city’s primary violence reduction program, which is administered by Lifebridge Health Center for Hope. Now, despite a year of landmark achievements, the center is in peril.
Center for Hope and other community-based crime prevention programs are facing an existential threat in the form of budget cuts — amounting to $1.2 million —- from the Trump administration. Without those funds, last year’s progress on citywide crime reduction may be erased, according to Freedom Jones, director of violence intervention programs for Center for Hope.
“We have an ecosystem that has been working,” Jones said. “If you strip the ecosystem, what is the likelihood of gun violence increasing? It is much greater.”
What is Safe Streets?
Safe Streets has been the city’s flagship gun violence reduction program for nearly two decades, starting in East Baltimore’s McElderry Park in 2007. The program, originally founded in Chicago by epidemiologist Dr. Gary Slutkin, focuses its efforts on 10 zones around Baltimore, representing about 3% of the city’s total footprint, according to Emanuel Tarrant-Bey, the Safe Streets site director in Belvedere.
Four of the zones are administered by Catholic Charities of Baltimore while the other six fall under the Lifebridge Health Center for Hope, the largest street intervention program of any hospital in the country, according to Jones.
Safe Streets is a community-based, public health-focused approach at violence prevention. The program aims to engage neighborhoods and denormalize violence, which Jones says has become a common occurrence for many Baltimoreans.
Center for Hope works with two Lifebridge Health hospitals, Sinai Hospital of Baltimore and Grace Medical Center – Baltimore, with the goal of breaking cycles of violence within the city, as the 72 hours after an violent incident are the highest risk period for acts of retaliation and further violence in a community, Jones said
In Belvedere, Tarrant-Bey runs monthly community meetings to engage and organize the neighborhood against gun violence. Although Safe Streets has been effective in this area, Tarrant-Bey said that more resources are needed to bring Belvedere’s success to neighboring communities.
“We can see that there’s a great effect with our presence, but that also is an indication that we need more community involvement,” Tarrant-Bey said. “We need more community partners. You need more community to bind to the idea.”
A landmark year
In 2024, Belvedere, along with three of other Center for Hope zones — Park Heights, Woodburne-McCabe and Franklin Square —- marked a full year without homicides, reflecting the city’s overall progress in violent crime reduction. That trend has continued into 2025, with the Baltimore Police Department reporting just five homicides citywide in April — the lowest number of monthly homicides in Baltimore’s recorded history.
BPD tracks all crime in the city, both violent and non-violent, by location type, such as street, residential, park or convenience store.
Street and residential locations see the vast majority of violent crime in Baltimore, about 82% of it in 2024. Violent street crime saw a steeper drop than violent residential crime last year, dropping 14%. Still, Tarrant-Bey said that it’s the streets that need the most attention, due to social conditions they attract, like poverty or unemployment.
“When you have these areas filled with a bunch of individuals without a particular purpose or a particular interest in life at that particular moment, then that’s where that disease of violence begins to spread,” Tarrant-Bey said.
Non-violent crime, which made up nearly 90% of all crime in Baltimore last year, was also down in 2024. Non-violent street crime fell almost 30% from 2023, the sharpest year-over-year drop of any location category. Overall, non-violent crime rates decreased in 20 out of the 36 location types tracked by BPD.
Only one location type, convenience stores, saw large spikes in both violent and non-violent crime last year. Tarrant-Bey said he believes convenience stores can act as a harboring point for violence, especially among youth. He hopes to engage with both store owners and local youth through community organizing and monthly meetings, although Safe Streets’ future in Baltimore has become unclear.
An uncertain future
The Department of Justice, under the direction of the Trump administration, eliminated hundreds of millions of dollars in grants meant for over 350 organizations that focus on opioid addiction recovery and gun violence prevention over the past three weeks, including that $1.2 million bookmarked for Center for Hope.
Center for Hope isn’t alone; other Baltimore advocacy organizations, including the Living Classrooms Foundation, Black Mental Health Alliance, Greater Baybrook Alliance and Roca, also lost grants during the Trump administration’s sweeping funding cuts, according to a Safe Streets spokesperson. At least $8 million in federal grants have been cut citywide.
For Jones, the losses are already mounting. With about 10% of its budget abruptly cancelled, Center for Hope has been forced to cut its public health efficacy study at Johns Hopkins, as well as some trauma support programs throughout the city. While staffing remains unaffected for now, additional service at Safe Street, which was to be funded by the federal funds, has already been interrupted.
“We don’t want violence to go up,” Jones said. “We need the resources and the support to keep going in the right direction.”