Baltimore mayor summons public safety leaders to City Hall over rash of violence

Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott summoned his public safety leadership teams to City Hall Tuesday to address a rash of recent shootings that could slow Baltimore’s historic yearslong reductions in gun violence.

“We cannot have another two weeks like the two weeks that we have been having,” Scott said in an interview, flanked by Police Commissioner Richard Worley and Stefanie Mavronis, director of the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement. “We know what we have to do.”

October has already been the deadliest month of the year, with 17 people killed. Six people were shot in two separate incidents on opposite ends of the city Monday evening, in the Franklintown and Belair-Edison neighborhoods. Three of them died. On Sunday, eight people were shot, two of them fatally, in separate incidents. And on Thursday evening, five people were shot, two fatally, in one incident.

Homicides remain down, with 101 people killed this year compared with 105 at this time last year.

Violence continues to be well below where it hovered for nearly a decade, with the city experiencing over 300 homicides annually before 2023. Homicides fell 24% in 2023, 21% in 2024, and 31% last year. Nonfatal shootings fell more than 50% from 2023 to 2025.

Worley said those results show that police need to continue doing what they are doing, but with renewed urgency.

“We’re not going to change anything that’s been working for a couple of years. We know who the groups are. We know who they’re feuding with,” Worley said. “Unfortunately right now we have a couple different types of feuds going on between groups, and it keeps going back and forth, and we’ve got to stop it.”

Worley said police would seek to step up traffic stops and engage with groups populating hot spots. He said the department had been “place-based” and would get more involved with individuals.

He said the concern being displayed showed that Baltimore was in a new era.

“That shows how far we’ve come and how much progress we’ve made that we’re no longer accepting what was accepted five years ago, and we want to get better than what we did last year,” he said.

A Banner analysis of incidents through Monday shows there have been fewer shooting incidents this year than last.

Overall, there have been 261 shooting incidents this year, down from 280 during the same period last year.

However, there have also been more nonfatal shootings and shootings that resulted in multiple victims being struck. And the city has seen seven mass shootings — which involve four or more victims — this year, compared to four in 2025.

In a separate interview, Baltimore State’s Attorney Ivan Bates said he’s long been concerned that the city’s decline in gun violence could reverse as gun offenders return home.

“We sent a number of these guys to prison for 36 or 48 months,” Bates said. “They’re starting to come home to old beefs and drug territories that they want back.

“One shoots one crew, then another responds with violence. You see it go back and forth, back and forth.”

At City Hall, Mavronis said her “small but mighty” engagement team was being stretched to respond to so many incidents in different parts of the city, but the team would seek to “leverage partnerships with community-based partners.”

“We can’t be everywhere at the same time, but when we work with our partnering organizations, we absolutely can cover that ground,” she said. “So we’re showing up in multiple communities every single day to check in on neighbors, make sure that people are OK.”

Officials from her office canvassed the area around the 2800 block of Edmondson Avenue, where five people were shot Sunday.

In the Poplar Grove neighborhood, they encountered Don’nel Brooks, a 57-year-old who said he’s been a victim of violence.

Brooks, who lives across from a boarded-up rowhouse, expressed frustration that officials offered services only in response to devastating shooting incidents.

He said he is dismayed by the number of multi-victim shootings of late, describing the trigger pullers as increasingly brazen.

“They are very careless. They don’t even care if children are there,” Brooks said. “It wasn’t like that when I was growing up. Everybody respect[ed] their neighbors.”

Banner journalists Greg Morton, Alex Mann and Sahana Jayaraman contributed to this report.

This story has been updated.