Total violent crimes — homicide, rape, aggravated assault and robbery — in Washington, D.C. and Baltimore City decreased by 60% and 21%, respectively, since 2015, according to a Capital News Service analysis.
Both cities, separated by only 40 miles, have seen a drastic change in the number of offenses, with politicians, state’s attorneys and police chiefs crediting their administrations and policies as the main drivers of the reductions. But criminologists and crime analysts say these decreases are likely the result of a mix of demographic and technology shifts, not just policy changes.
Ernesto Lopez, a criminologist at the Council on Criminal Justice, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank that studies crime, compared the overlapping forces driving crime trends to a river.
“Downstream” trends, like age and gentrification, can mix with shorter-term “rapid” trends, including changes to policing or “shocks to the social fabric” like the COVID-19 pandemic, he said.
Baltimore
Baltimore, known for consistently having one of the highest homicide rates in the country, has seen a steep drop in homicides in recent years.
Baltimore saw a 61% decrease in homicides from 2015 to 2025, according to FBI data. Last year, the city had the lowest number of homicides in nearly 50 years, with only 133.
While 2015, 2017 and 2019 ranked among the highest homicides totals ever recorded in the city– with those years reaching almost 350 homicides each– sharp declines in the last few years have brought Baltimore’s murder rates to a historic low.
Rape decreased by 7% from 2015 to 2025, according to FBI data.
However, this offense is the most underreported violent crime, with only 24% of incidents reported to police, according to the 2025 National Crime Victimization Survey.
Robberies decreased by 46% since 2015, after peaking in 2017 with almost 6,000 incidents. In contrast, aggravated assaults increased slightly by 5%. In the past three years, this offense dropped by 18%.
Washington, D.C.
Washington had a 21% drop in homicides since 2015 as well as a 69% reduction in sex abuse incidents, according to data from Washington D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department.
The deadliest year for homicides in the last decade was 2023, with 274 deaths, the highest since the late 1990s. However, homicides fell 32% from 2023 to 2024, and then dropped an additional 32% in 2025 — a total decline of 54% from the spike, according to the CNS analysis.
Washington reports all sexual crimes under the sex abuse category, which doesn’t distinguish between severity. The highest year for sexual abuse offenses was in 2016, according to the data.
Robberies have gone down 60% and assaults with a weapon by 61% from 2015 to 2025.
Washington reports only assaults involving a dangerous weapon. Baltimore reports aggravated assault, a broader category that includes assaults causing serious bodily injury regardless of whether a weapon was used.
Robberies in Washington peaked in 2023, marking the highest count seen in the decade, with a 67% increase from the previous year. This was followed by a 39% decline in 2024.
Assaults with a weapon increased by only 2% in 2023 compared to the previous year. In 2024, there was a 27% decrease in these offenses.
However, the data’s accuracy is under scrutiny.
The U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform interim report claimed that serious crimes were reclassified as lesser offenses to produce lower crime rates during the former Police Chief Pamela Smith’s tenure from 2023 to 2025.
Smith resigned in December while the committee’s investigation was still ongoing.
Despite this, the decade-long trends reported by Washington’s police are not out of step with those from other large cities, Lopez said. “Overall, I don’t see enough evidence to change that story.”
Why is violent crime down?
Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser credited a 20% drop in violent crime over two years to her office’s crime legislation.
Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott announced his administration’s reduction strategy group for a 60% decrease in homicides since 2021.
But the decade-long decline in violent crime isn’t unique to either city, said Zubin Jelveh, an assistant professor at the University of Maryland who analyzes crime data. The drops are happening in dozens of U.S. cities at once, which may indicate they are not tied to specific policy changes or legislation.
“The national trend sort of swamps the local for the most part,” Jelveh said.
Policing strategies and community outreach programs could have a limited impact compared to the broader national forces driving crime down, Jelveh said. Investments into programs that address education gaps and income inequality could provide longer-term relief for crime.
The median age in the country increased roughly 4% in a decade, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
“People tend to age out of crime,” Lopez said. But cautioned that an aging population alone would not explain the sharp, one-year drop in both Baltimore and Washington from 2024 to 2025.
Gentrification may also play a role, said Jillian Snider, resident senior fellow in criminal justice and civil liberties at the R Street Institute, a nonprofit think tank based in Washington.
When a neighborhood experiences gentrification, crime patterns could fluctuate, Snider said. As wealthier residents move in, there may be temporary increases in crime, such as snatch-and-grab thefts, she said. However, gentrification leads to a long-term decrease in violent crime.
Snider also pointed to shifts in policing strategies as a factor in declining crime rates.
Agencies nationwide relied on zero tolerance policing in the late 1990s and even early 2010s, when officers would over-enforce low-level violations such as loitering or marijuana possession, Snider said.
Police departments now prioritize precision policing by using data to focus limited resources and staff on neighborhoods with serious crime, rather than on petty crime, she said.
The Baltimore Police Department and the Metropolitan Police Department differ in their strategies to reduce their crime rates.
BPD’s changes are a reflection of strategies implemented in the aftermath of Freddie Gray’s death in police custody, which sparked days of violent protests, hundreds of arrests and the deployment of Maryland’s National Guard in 2015.
The result was an emphasis on local, homegrown violence-intervention programs to bridge gaps, Snider said.
Safe Streets Baltimore focuses on reducing gun violence by using trained community members to mediate conflicts and connect high-risk individuals to resources in 10 neighborhoods since 2007.
The Group Violence Reduction Strategy is a collaboration between BPD, the State’s Attorney’s Office and the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement that focuses on individuals at the highest risk of gun violence since 2022.
When you have a targeted, community-based program in a place where there is tension with law enforcement, “people that are embedded in the community are going to really be the force multipliers behind this interruption before shootings happen,” Snider said. “I think that’s huge.”
The MPD also has its own initiatives. The Real-Time Crime Center expanded the department’s security camera network to enable officers to monitor crime in real time in 2024.
Operation THRIVE’s goal is to reduce homicides and gun violence by proactively dispatching police officers and resources around Washington that same year.
Washington D.C.’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement launched its Violence Intervention Initiative in 2018, which uses similar community-based approaches to de-escalate conflicts.
Technology has made policing more effective in solving crimes, especially through license plate readers and surveillance systems, though its impact is limited by data overload and resource constraints, Snider said.
The staffing shortages in both departments led to these technologies being used to supplement their work, Lopez said.
“It’s not just the number of police, but it’s what they do,” he said.
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