BALTIMORE — David Fitzgerald knows how tough it is to prevent gun violence. In 15 years working in some of Baltimore’s deadliest neighborhoods for a program called Safe Streets, he said, he’s defused hundreds of fights that could have led to a shooting.
The effort, part of Baltimore’s more than $100 million gun violence prevention plan, relies on staffers like Fitzgerald to build trust with people at risk of such violence and offer them resources like housing or food. Researchers believe these programs reduce gun deaths.
Yet one morning in 2019, Fitzgerald said, his oldest son, Deshawn McCoy, then 26, was shot just outside of the neighborhood he patrolled at the time. Fitzgerald said McCoy was a “really beautiful soul,” who fixed dirt bikes at a local garage. McCoy became the city’s 65th homicide victim in 2019, one of 348 that year, among the city’s deadliest. He left behind three daughters.
“This is our zone,” said Fitzgerald, pointing toward McElderry Park. “My son got cooked over here.”
For years, violence intervention was the work of loosely organized, underfunded groups. Then gun violence spiked during the covid pandemic and the Biden administration and Congress poured in money to better integrate such programs within cities. It appeared to help: In Baltimore and beyond, gun violence has plummeted.
The number of homicides in the city dropped 41%, from more than 300 a year in 2021 to 201 in 2024, according to the U.S. attorney’s office in Maryland.
“Gun violence is a sticky, hard problem to solve,” said Daniel Webster, a researcher at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions in Baltimore. “We’re getting it right finally.”
Now President Donald Trump’s administration has gutted funding for that work.
Webster said it could take years to untangle what led to the city’s gun violence drop. Among the factors, he said: the pandemic’s end, investments in violence intervention, improvements that have given police more legitimacy in neighborhoods, targeted prosecutions, and an aggressive effort to remove untraceable ghost guns.
“You need all of these systems working well to have systemic reductions in gun violence,” he said.
The Trump administration has slashed funding for gun violence prevention and research, cutting about $500 million in grants to organizations that support public safety.
At the same time, Trump has loosened gun laws and weakened the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which oversees gun dealers. He has also sent federal troops into the Democratic-led cities of Chicago; Los Angeles; Memphis, Tennessee; Portland, Oregon; and Washington, D.C.
Webster said cities are still benefiting from pandemic-era efforts to address gun deaths. But given the Trump policy changes, if violence escalates, city leaders could have a hard time keeping it from spiraling out of control.
Trying Something Different
Safe Streets is among the promising violence prevention programs that could lose funding. Staffers in the city’s most violent neighborhoods operate like community health workers.
During the pandemic, the Biden administration provided billions of dollars to local governments through the American Rescue Plan Act. Biden urged them to deploy money to community violence intervention programs, which have been shown to reduce homicides by as much as 60%. His administration allowed states to spend Medicaid dollars on such programs. The goal: Stop gun deaths.
Few cities seized the opportunity.
Analyzing federal data, professors Philip Rocco of Marquette University and Amanda Kass of DePaul University found local governments used the ARPA money for 132,451 projects. Yet only 231, less than 0.2%, involved community violence intervention, they said.
In Baltimore, then-newly elected mayor Brandon Scott was ready for the federal influx.
Baltimore’s homicide rate had been high since 2015, when a 25-year-old Black man named Freddie Gray died in police custody. Protests erupted and fractures between residents and police deepened. Baltimore ended the year with 342 homicides, the first time since 1999 that more than 300 were recorded in the city.
“We got really good at our jobs” in the years after Gray’s death, said James Gannon, trauma program manager at Sinai Hospital of Baltimore.
Gun deaths tracked what public health researcher Lawrence T. Brown called the Black Butterfly: racially segregated areas that fanned out across Baltimore’s eastern and western neighborhoods around a wealthy central strip. People who faced years of forced displacement and disinvestment became prone to violence, which fueled the cycle.
Every year from 2015 to 2022, the city recorded at least 300 homicides.
“We had to try something different,” said Stefanie Mavronis, director of the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement. Scott created the agency weeks after he was sworn into office in 2020, later funding it with $50 million in ARPA money and $20 million annually from the city’s budget.
Containing an Outbreak
The office’s budget — $22 million in fiscal year 2026 — is a fraction of the city’s $613 million police department budget.
Still, the money allowed Baltimore’s leaders to scale up a new approach: addressing gun violence the way public health officials might handle an infectious disease outbreak, Mavronis said.
City staffers identified the small subset of people most at risk of being shot or becoming the next shooter through crime data and referrals from social service workers, hospitals, and violence intervention staff, she said. Mavronis said that gangs, friends willing to engage in violence for each other, and retaliation had been driving gun deaths in the city.
“This never-ending cycle of violence and loss and trauma,” Mavronis said, “comes from that.”
The city convened hospital presidents to connect gunshot victims and their friends and family to counseling, crisis support, and city services.
It offered people help finding therapy, a job, or emergency relocation — and threatened arrest and prosecution if they retaliated.
“We decided that we were no longer going to subscribe to the belief that one thing, one agency, one part of government, one program was going to help cure Baltimore of this disease of gun violence that has had a stranglehold on this city for the entirety of my life,” Scott said.
The Coming Cliff
Baltimore is on pace this year to post its fewest gun deaths since Richard Nixon was president.
“Some of it is the national zeitgeist of the moment,” said Adam Rosenberg, executive director of Center for Hope at LifeBridge Health, which operates Safe Streets sites and the Violence Response Team at Sinai Hospital. He credits mainly the infusion of funding that allowed more resources and hands-on engagement with high-risk communities.
“We typically talk about how poverty affects homicides, but it works in reverse too,” Webster said. “People don’t invest in homes and businesses or, frankly, in people, where people get shot regularly.”
Fitzgerald, who grew up in East Baltimore, said he started working for Safe Streets in 2010 for the paycheck.
He’s been on both sides of gun violence, he said, as someone hit more than a dozen times in shootings — first when he was 12. At 13, Fitzgerald said, he shot a cousin in the leg. Over years, he was in and out of the criminal justice system, including for charges of attempted murder, which helped him understand the people he now works with every day, he said.
No college “can certify you in my experiences in violence,” he said. “That’s what allows me to identify and detect potentially violent situations.”
Today, Fitzgerald, 49, believes that teaching kids trauma coping mechanisms can drive culture change and stop shootings.
“Our kids see more death than soldiers,” he said.
But federal funding is drying up. Anthony Smith, executive director of Cities United, which supports local leaders on gun violence reduction, estimates that about 65 groups have lost funding this year. And Trump’s signature legislation slashes nearly $1 trillion in anticipated federal Medicaid spending over the next decade.
Center for Hope lost $1.2 million from federal cuts.
“It’s like a car racing along, and you see the cliff coming,” Rosenberg said. “I don’t know if the resources are there anymore, but the need certainly is.”
Rosenberg said that, because of their experiences, staffers such as Fitzgerald are “incredible messengers” for people involved in gun violence, and he noted that they are thoroughly vetted.
Fitzgerald put it this way: “I’m trying to save my kids, the community. The people we’re trying to save is our friends and our family, and ourselves.”
KFF Health News senior correspondent Fred Clasen-Kelly contributed to this report.
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