BALTIMORE — David Fitzgerald knows how difficult it can be to prevent gun violence. In 15 years of working in some of Baltimore's most dangerous neighborhoods through a program called Safe Streets, he said he has prevented hundreds of fights that could have resulted in shootings.
The effort, part of Baltimore's more than $100 million plan to prevent gun violence, relies on staff like Fitzgerald to build trust with people at risk of such violence and offer them resources such as housing or food. Researchers believe these programs reduce gun deaths.
But one morning in 2019, Fitzgerald said, his oldest son, Deshaun McCoy, then 26, was shot and killed near the area he was patrolling at the time. Fitzgerald said McCoy was a “truly beautiful soul” who repaired dirt bikes at a local garage. McCoy went urban 65th homicide victim of 2019one of 348 that year, one of the deadliest in the city. He is survived by three daughters.
“This is our zone,” Fitzgerald said, pointing toward McElderry Park. “My son got ready here.”
For years, intervening in violence has been the work of loosely organized and underfunded groups. Then gun violence surged during the Covid pandemic, and the Biden administration and Congress poured money into better integrating such programs in cities. It seems to have helped: Gun violence has dropped sharply in Baltimore and beyond.
Homicides in the city fell 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 complex problem that is difficult to solve,” said Daniel Webster, a researcher at the Johns Hopkins Center for Solving Gun Violence in Baltimore. “We finally get it right.”
Now President Donald Trump's administration has cut funding for that work.
Webster said it could take years to get to the bottom of what led to the drop in gun violence in the city. Among the factors, he said, are the end of the pandemic, investments in fighting violence, improvements that have given police more legitimacy in neighborhoods, targeted prosecutions and aggressive efforts to eliminate untraceable ghost guns.
“To systemically reduce gun violence, all of these systems need to work well,” he said.
Trump administration cuts funding gun violence prevention and research, cutting grants to organizations that support public safety by approximately $500 million.
At the same time, Trump weakened gun laws. and weakened The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which oversees gun dealers. He also sent federal troops into the Democratic-led cities of Chicago; Los Angeles; Memphis, Tennessee; Portland, Oregon; and Washington, DC
Webster said cities continue to benefit from pandemic-era efforts to combat gun deaths. But given Trump's policy changes, if violence escalates, city leaders will have a hard time keeping it from getting out of control.
Let's try something different
Safe Streets is among promising violence prevention programs that could lose funding. Officers in the city's most violent areas act as community health workers.
During the pandemic, the Biden administration has provided billions of dollars to local governments through the American Rescue Plan Act. Biden called on them to put the money toward anti-violence programs that have been proven to reduce the number of murders by as much as 60%. His administration allowed states spend Medicaid dollars on such programs. The goal: Stop gun deaths.
Only a few cities have taken advantage of this opportunity.
Analyzing federal data, professors Philip Rocco of Marquette University and Amanda Kass of DePaul University found that local governments used ARPA money for 132,451 projects. However, they said only 231 (less than 0.2%) had been involved in a community violence intervention.
In Baltimore, newly elected Mayor Brandon Scott was prepared for an influx of federal votes.
Baltimore's homicide rate has been high since 2015, when a 25-year-old black man named Freddie Gray died in police custody. Protests erupted and the rift between residents and police widened. Baltimore ended the year with 342 homicides, the first time the city has recorded more than 300 homicides since 1999.
“We've done a really good job” in the years since Gray's death, said James Gannon, trauma program manager at Sinai Hospital in Baltimore.
Gun deaths tracked what public health researcher Lawrence T. Brown called black butterfly: Racially segregated neighborhoods that are scattered throughout Baltimore's eastern and western neighborhoods around the affluent central strip. People who have faced years of forced displacement and disinvestment became prone to violencewhich fueled the cycle.
Every year from 2015 to 2022, at least 300 murders were recorded in the city.
“We had to try something different,” said Stephanie Mavronis, director of the Mayor's Office of Safety and Neighborhood Engagement. Scott created the agency weeks after he was sworn in in 2020, later. financing this with $50 million from ARPA money and $20 million annually from the city budget.
Containing the outbreak
The office's budget — $22 million in fiscal year 2026 — represents a small portion of the city's budget. Police department budget of $613 million.
Still, the money has allowed Baltimore leaders to scale up a new approach: tackling gun violence the same way public health officials might deal with an infectious disease outbreak, Mavronis said.
City staff have identified a small group of people most at risk of being shot or becoming the next shooter, based on crime data and recommendations from social service workers, hospitals and violence prevention specialists, she said. Mavronis said gangs, friends willing to inflict violence on each other and retaliation have led to gun deaths in the city.
“This endless cycle of violence, loss and trauma,” Mavronis said, “happens because of this.”
The city convened hospital leaders to provide counseling, crisis support and city services to gunshot victims, their friends and family.
They offered people help finding treatment, work, or emergency relocation—and threatened arrest and prosecution if they retaliated.
“We decided that we would no longer trust that one thing, one agency, one part of government, one program would cure Baltimore of this disease of gun violence that has had a stranglehold on this city my entire life,” Scott said.
Coming Cliff
This year, Baltimore is expected to have the fewest number of gun deaths since Richard Nixon was president.
“Part of it is the national zeitgeist,” said Adam Rosenberg, executive director of the Center for Hope at LifeBridge Health, which runs Safe Streets sites and the Sinai Hospital violence response team. He credits mainly the infusion of funding that has allowed for more resources and hands-on engagement with high-risk communities.
“We usually talk about how poverty affects homicide rates, but it works the other way around,” Webster said. “People don’t invest in homes and businesses or, frankly, people where people get shot on a regular basis.”
Fitzgerald, who grew up in East Baltimore, said he started working for Safe Streets in 2010 for a salary.
He said he's been on both sides of gun violence, being hit by someone more than a dozen times in shootings – the first time he was 12 years old. At age 13, Fitzgerald said, he shot his cousin in the leg. He has been in and out of the criminal justice system over the years, including on attempted murder charges, which has helped him understand the people he now works with every day, he said.
No college “can validate my experience of violence,” he said. “This is what allows me to identify and detect potentially violent situations.”
Today, Fitzgerald, 49, believes that teaching children coping mechanisms to cope with trauma can help change the culture and stop shootings.
“Our children see more death than soldiers,” he said.
But federal funding is drying up. Anthony Smith, Executive Director Cities Unitedwhich supports local leaders in the fight against gun violence, estimates that about 65 groups have lost funding this year. And the legislation Trump signed cuts nearly $1 trillion in expected federal spending on Medicaid over the next decade.
The Hope Center lost $1.2 million due to federal cuts.
“It’s like a speeding car and you see a cliff coming,” Rosenberg said. “I don’t know if the resources are still there, but the need is certainly there.”
Rosenberg said that because of their experience, officers like Fitzgerald are “incredible ambassadors” for people involved in gun violence and noted that they are carefully vetted.
Fitzgerald put it this way: “I'm trying to save my children, my community. The people we're trying to save are our friends, our family, and ourselves.”
KFF Health News senior correspondent Fred Clasen-Kelly contributed to this report.
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