Democratic mayors in several large U.S. cities say violent crime has declined on their watch and credit a mix of policing and community-based strategies for the trend.
In a virtual discussion hosted by the Democratic Mayors Association and the Vera Action Institute last week, mayors from Cleveland, Chicago, Baltimore, and Newark described investments in youth employment, mental health services, and violence interruption programs that they say are making neighborhoods safer.
Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb said his administration has pursued an “all of government” approach since taking office nearly three years ago.
“Since I took office nearly three years ago, we’ve seen a nearly 46 percent reduction in homicides, while investing in law enforcement, we’re also investing in non-violence interventions,” Bibb said. “And the mayors on the call today from Newark, Chicago, and Baltimore… are seeing the same results in their respective city.”
Bibb credited the city’s Raising Investment in Safety for Everyone Initiative, expansion of technology such as a camera-sharing program and ShotSpotter gunshot detection, and changes to police recruitment and pay.In February, the Major Cities Chiefs Association, an independent law enforcement group representing the police departments of the largest cities in the United States and Canada, issued a report that also showed an across-the-board decline in violent crime in the United States from 2023 to 2024.
It also showed that most violent crimes, including homicide, had decreased in Cleveland from 2023 to 2024. However, there were nearly 100 more reported cases of rape in the Ohio city, according to the report.
For the other cities represented in the meeting, Chicago saw an across-the-board drop in most crimes, though it saw an uptick in aggravated assaults from 2023 to 2024. Baltimore saw similar across-the-board drops, but a slight rise in reported cases of rape. Newark saw declines in homicide and rape but saw slight increases in robberies and aggravated assaults.
A more recent report, released just this month, shows that midyear statistics of all of these crimes in all four cities were lower at this point in 2025 than they were at the same point in 2024, except for Newark, which had an increase of four rape cases.
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson said his administration focused on “the 35 most violent beats in the entire city of Chicago”—neighborhoods with high unemployment, poverty, and shuttered schools and mental health clinics.
“We’ve worked with our police department to strategically deploy our officers to areas where they were needed the most, so we had people in the right places at the right times, essentially,” Johnson said, adding they had also completed a strategic overhaul of their detectives bureau and had built strategic partnerships with community violence intervention groups.
Johnson said the city has also invested more than $100 million in violence prevention, expanded mental health services, and employed more than 30,000 young people this summer.
Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott pointed to the city’s first-ever Comprehensive Violence Prevention Plan, which combines focused deterrence with offers of housing, education, job training, and mental health services for those most likely to be involved in gun violence.
“We go to those individuals… and we say… ‘I know who you are. I know what you do. We want you to stay alive and be able to provide for your family, but you cannot do that [by] doing the things that you are doing,’” Scott said. Those who refuse, he added, are prosecuted in coordination with local, state, and federal law enforcement.
Scott said the strategy, coupled with $50 million in community violence intervention funding and major investments in recreation centers, schools, and youth employment, has helped bring Baltimore’s homicide rate to its lowest level in decades.
Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, who has led the city since 2014, said crime there has dropped significantly since the city began treating violence as a public health issue and building an “ecosystem” of prevention programs.
“What police began to do is use intelligence-based policing…in which they begin to target the most violent and very specific folks and not just throw a wide net out and try to arrest everybody that they see,“ he said, adding police also began partnering with community violence intervention organizations that go into those communities and try to resolve conflict and treat trauma where it originates, ”because we know families that grow up in communities that have witnessed violence, that become victims of violence, are more likely to perpetrate violence.”
Speakers criticized the Trump administration’s April decision to terminate $820 million in Department of Justice grants for community violence intervention, victim services, diversion programs, and reentry services. Some of the cut funds were slated to go directly to Vera, the group hosting the event alongside Democratic mayors, according to Vera.Vera Action Institute’s webpage on these grant decisions also links to an analysis by the Council on Criminal Justice, which notes some of these were restored, and the cuts ended up being closer to around $500 million. The administration said the cuts were made because they no longer aligned with the administration’s priorities.
Bibb said the cuts will harm programs proven to reduce crime, alleging that they are “a blatant attack” targeting “blue cities.”
The mayors also said a persistent gap exists between falling crime rates and public perception. Johnson said decades of mistrust between police and residents remain a challenge, while Scott argued that investments in quality of life—from recreation centers to neighborhood infrastructure—are as important as crime statistics in shaping how safe residents feel.
“We must do a better job of telling our story,” Bibb said.
If you found this article interesting, please consider supporting traditional journalism
Our first edition was published 25 years ago from a basement in Atlanta. Today, The Epoch Times brings fact-based, award-winning journalism to millions of Americans.
Our journalists have been threatened, arrested, and assaulted, but our commitment to independent journalism has never wavered. This year marks our 25th year of independent reporting, free from corporate and political influence.
That’s why you’re invited to a limited-time introductory offer — just $1 per week — so you can join millions already celebrating independent news.
