This week, President Trump called Baltimore “so far gone” amid the deployment of the National Guard in DC. In reality, Baltimore has seen record low rates of violent crime the past few years. Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott joins WITHpod to talk about the perception versus reality for crime stats in in Baltimore, the city’s Comprehensive Violence Prevention Plan and more.
Note: This is a rough transcript. Please excuse any typos.
Mayor Brandon Scott: There are so many folks that are doing this work, and we’re all doing this kind of approach, making it unique to our individual cities. But yes, we’re starting to see that tide change, especially nationally, where we have to crack it, crack through here locally, and you understand this, right? Because sometimes that stuff gets deeply rooted into people, and especially surrounding areas, and how we have to push, push and press, especially sometimes with the local media, about how we have to start to talk about that change in a more positive way and not get into this business where now that homicides and violent crime are down, we’re going to sensationalize every single incident and drive it so much that people don’t actually believe what’s happening.
Chris Hayes: Hello, and welcome to “Why Is This Happening” with me, your host, Chris Hayes. You know, one of the things that we saw happen amidst all of the kind of societal dislocation that happened in 2020 with COVID lockdowns, was a real appreciable spike in crime, particularly violent crime, homicides spiked that year. It depends on the city you’re looking at, but it was a pretty nationwide phenomenon. And the numbers, again, national crime statistics can be pretty incomplete and also they take a while, but there was like a 5% crime spike nationwide, according to the FBI, in 2020. We saw that continue to go up in ‘21 and ‘22, and then it started to level off.
And there was a huge amount of coverage of it. I mean, in some cities, you were seeing 20% to 30% increases in things like violent crime and assaults and homicides. And it was a huge defining issue in many places because people were feeling less safe. And the data bore it out.
What we’ve seen in the last three years is some of the most precipitous crime declines we’ve seen since the sort of historic drops in the 1990s, both nationwide and in specific localities, particularly localities that have seen, you know, that had been very hard hit, both by violent crime endemically and also in the rise of violent crime in the wake of the pandemic and its dislocation.
This year, we’re on track, preliminary statistics are showing we may be nearing historic lows for the homicide rate in the country as a whole. There are several cities that are around or below their record low for homicide. We’ve seen in some places, double-digit drops year after year in the most serious crimes. And one of the places where this has been the most striking is a city that I’ve covered quite a bit over the last decade, the city of Baltimore. Baltimore has had a relatively high violent crime rate for a fairly long time. It also has moved with natural trends. It was very, very high in the early ‘90s. It declined a bit. It really shot up in the wake of Freddie Gray and the protests after Freddie Gray in 2014, 2015, and also went through that same trend in post-COVID. But what has been happening in Baltimore right now is remarkable.
It’s an incredible story, and it’s an incredibly hopeful story. It’s also the kind of story that doesn’t get told because there is this asymmetry in the news where when crime goes up, it’s a story. When it goes down, no one covers it. And I want to reverse that today because I think the story of what’s happening in Baltimore, both specifically on Baltimore’s own terms, which are specific to that place and the mayor, you’re going to hear from in just a second. But also, this is happening in other places. It’s happening in Chicago. It’s happening in Philadelphia. It’s happening in New York. Like, it’s happening in Los Angeles. So, this is happening nationwide. And I want to get into why it’s happening and understand what’s happening.
And so it’s my great pleasure today to bring on to the program the mayor of Baltimore, Mayor Brandon Scott. He is serving his second term. He was re-elected for the first time a mayor in Baltimore was reelected in, I think, about 20 years. His approval ratings have been very high, and I think a large part of that has to do with the fact that Baltimore, through the first six months of this year, I think experienced the lowest number through those six months in very recent memory, in a long time. So, Mayor Scott, it’s great to have you on the program.
Mayor Brandon Scott: Thank you. Thank you for having me, Chris. I’m glad to be here.
Chris Hayes: Just to level set here, like will you talk us through your city’s experience, some of those national trends I talked about? Particularly, what did 2020 and the aftermath kind of do to the levels of interpersonal violence in the city of Baltimore?
Mayor Brandon Scott: I think, Chris, this is a very unique point. We were one of the cities that didn’t have a big spike during the pandemic. It stayed very, very flat here in Baltimore. And I think that there’s a lot of factors into that. But as you said, listen, gun violence in Baltimore is literally the reason why I’m in public office. I saw someone get shot before I was eight years old and that drove me to want to be involved because no one really cared.
And just so that you know, I grew up in a neighborhood in Baltimore called Park Heights that is famous because it hosts the Preakness Horse Race on the third Saturday of May every single year. So imagine, Chris, living in a neighborhood that is the center for the sports world one day of the year and not be treated as human every other day. That was my experience growing up. And when you think about the history of Baltimore and gun violence, this issue has really been the issue that has made or broken the careers of mayor after mayor after mayor and really been the centerpiece for all discussion around this city for more than 50 years, longer than I’ve been alive.
But for us, many of the things that many cities experienced after, not just COVID, I think we also have to consider the aftermath of what folks were calling for after the murder of George Floyd. As you alluded to, we had already essentially been through that five years prior with the death of Freddie Gray and all the things that have happened after that. So for us, it stayed flat. But flat for Baltimore was still historically high. We have to be reminded, as you were saying, from 2015 up until two years ago, Baltimore had a run of having 300 plus homicides, but it wasn’t the first time that that had happened. That was the reality for most of my childhood.
And when you understand this issue the way that I do as a young man who grew up young, poor, and Black in Baltimore and lost friends and had to duck bullets and was a young man who was a teenager during the height of zero tolerance or policing while Black policing, as I like to say in Baltimore, and had that lived experience of being sat down in handcuffs in my neighborhood just because of how I looked while people that I knew were carrying illegal guns and contributing to the violence never seemed to end up in handcuffs. And then, coming and being here in City Hall since I was 23 years old, learning the ins and outs and understanding what had to happen, we knew that we had to tackle this issue head on, which is why it was the thing not only that I ran on, but the thing that we talked about the most.
And that, aside from COVID, obviously taking over during the height of the pandemic that we had to deal with both our dual crises at the time: this public health issue of COVID and this public health issue of gun violence.
Chris Hayes: Yes, your point there is so important. And that’s a great, useful corrective, which I knew, but sort of misstated there, just because Baltimore was an outlier during COVID, where it did remain flat. It didn’t go up. But to your point, you had experienced this kind of spike four or five years earlier. We did, me and my great colleague Tremaine Lee did some reporting on this in Baltimore. We did some specials on Baltimore because we were there for Freddie Gray who was killed in police custody when he was in a police van. The police officers who’d apprehended him were tried and were not convicted. And in the aftermath of that, there was this real palpable spike.
And maybe we start there, because one of the things I think that’s hard when we talk about this issue is like separating constants from variables, right? So there are background conditions that produce high levels of interpersonal violence in Baltimore that have to do with segregation and racial hierarchy and underinvestment and the ready access of guns and the black market for drugs, like all of those things.
Mayor Brandon Scott: Everything.
Chris Hayes: And then on top of those background conditions, there are fluctuations. And one of the things that we saw after Freddie Gray’s death was a real spike. How did you, and I think at that point you were a city council member–
Mayor Brandon Scott: I was.
Chris Hayes: — like, how were you understanding what was driving that spike then as you were formulating in your head how to approach the problem?
Mayor Brandon Scott: Well, I think that that history would tell you during that time, I wasn’t just a city council person. I was the vice chair of the Public Safety Committee soon to be the chair of the Public Safety Committee. But the reality for us here in Baltimore was that, you can look it up for yourself, as a councilman then, even before the unrest that followed the untimely death of Freddie Gray, we were talking about. This spike that we were seeing. And what happened in the aftermath of Freddie Gray and the unrest is you just saw that spike just grow exponentially.
And I think even then, right, I also was leading, co-leading the 300 Men March, which was at that time Baltimore’s largest anti-violence community movement in the city. So I knew what was happening. It is a myriad of factors, right? And I think that we have to always be reminded of that. That if you’re talking about West Baltimore, where Freddie Gray is from, or Northwest Baltimore, where I’m from, or East Baltimore, where so many things have happened in the past, you are talking about a city in this office that I’m sitting into you talking with you right now in. This is where the birthplace of redlining. In this office, is where the first racial redlining bill was signed. When you think about that and you transplant that, what that means, and not just in policy, but the disinvestment into those neighbors, when you think about West Baltimore, for example, we’ve been having a lot of conversations over the past few years about these highways that were built to destroy neighborhoods, mostly Black and middle-class neighborhoods. We have the poster child for that in West Baltimore. It’s called the Highway to Nowhere because they displace all of these working class, middle class, Black homeowners, and businesses, and all of these things and the highway doesn’t even connect. Interstate 70 and I-95 do not connect on the east side of Baltimore. When you throw all of those factors in, and you throw on top of that a town where my family moved here, my dad’s family from rural North Carolina, my mom’s family from rural Virginia, because of the industry and the port. My granddad worked at General Motors. It’s literally the reason why I’m here still because they were going to move back home until they got that job. My uncles worked at Bethlehem Steel before starting their own businesses. And when those jobs went away, when you have all of that, you really have a melting pot of things that can cause these factors to level up.
And then drugs show up in high numbers in the neighborhoods. And then guns, or as you say, our city can be awashed in guns that easily make it to. And by the way, I’ll just point out that over 60% of the guns that the police department recovers come from other states, right, and when you think about neighborhoods like the one I grew up in, there are people that I grew up with who’ve never been to East Baltimore. They for sure didn’t go to Georgia and purchase this gun on the street, right? We have to deal with all of the factors that are leading that.
So, for me, I’ve always been, and since I was a council person, talking about us needing a comprehensive approach to this public health Issue. Just so happened that around that time I was being shadowed for a documentary called Charm City where I said, we need a comprehensive approach to dealing with gun violence as a public health issue because it all matters. It’s not just about that one incident with that person and that gun. It’s all of the factors that play into that. And I was saying even then that we were putting too much of the burden of dealing with public safety on the backs of our police officers because we were asking them to be mental health clinicians, coaches, relationship coaches, parents, all of these things that, quite frankly, here in the city of Baltimore, where we have the best health and mental health institutions in the world, we shouldn’t have been at any point. And that’s what we have to continue to grow. But the landscape at the time was just not allowing for that through leadership and obviously through what was happening with the unrest.
Chris Hayes: So I want to focus on the aftermath of the unrest as you sort of illuminate all these structural factors that go into this. And I think, like, keeping your eyes on how complicated a story this is is so important because people will really reach for single cause reasons.
Mayor Brandon Scott: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And having spent a fair amount of time in the literature, when you look at like the huge rise in crime that happened starting the ‘60s and peaks in around ‘93 and then decline, I’m talking nationally.
Mayor Brandon Scott: Right.
Chris Hayes: You can’t tell a single causal story. Like, there’s a lot of stuff happening. But one, I want to propose one theory that people offer that I think is interesting and has kind of neither ideological side likes a lot, but because it’s sort of convenient in both directions. And it basically goes like this. After Freddie Gray, or in some cases, after Ferguson, or say after George Floyd, police officers are like, you know what? Fine.
Mayor Brandon Scott: We’re not going to do anything.
Chris Hayes: We’re not going to do anything. You don’t want us to go out there. You don’t want us to do things. And you guys all get upset when we do our jobs. So fine. And then they don’t, and crime goes up. And the reason I think that’s an interesting theory and a little ideologically convenient on both sides is, I think for the left, what it says is, actually, policing does matter and does reduce crime when it’s being done proactively. And I think for the right, for people who sort of defend cops, it’s like, it’s not a great look for police officers to sort of sulk because people protest them. And so, no one sort of comes off well in that story. And I’m not saying it’s true, but I would love for you to respond to that as a theory in terms of understanding this complicated dynamic.
Mayor Brandon Scott: Listen, I would always tell folks very simply, I always quote the great Sean Carter, women lie, men lie, numbers don’t, right? It has never been solely about how many arrests police make, they have to have these quotas, all these things that we’ve heard before. It’s been about who they’re arresting and how they’re going and doing their job. Because also, as I just said to you, Chris, the reality is that before April of 2015, violence and homicides were already up and there wasn’t any police slowdown or shutdown in January, February, March, and early April of 2015, right? So just based off the reality, right? We know that that isn’t the only factor, but also when you look at, and listen, we know that those things happen, but that is not the singular reason that we saw that big spike. There are so many things that play in a part of that, right?
There’s leadership within all the agencies, all of those things that are happening, right? We know the environmental things and community things that change, especially after the unrest. But I want to give you a little bit of historical data, right? Because we’ll talk about that. And you’ve been talking about the history, because Baltimore, for example, as you know very well, we have people will always say now, well, look, every city is down. Well, as you know, throughout the history of these ebbs and flows when everyone else has went down, Baltimore, in some cases, has gone the other way. We’re not a place that always follows the trends.
Chris Hayes: Yes, yes.
Mayor Brandon Scott: Sometimes in a good way, and sometimes in these cases, in not such a good way. But let me just give you some reality. In 2003, 2004, I’ll give you an even better example. The police department made 91,697 arrests in a city of 600,000 people roughly.
Chris Hayes: That’s a lot.
Mayor Brandon Scott: There were 278 homicides in Baltimore that year. In 2024, the police department made 17,872 arrests. There were only 201 homicides.
Chris Hayes: Wow. That is a really wild stat.
Mayor Brandon Scott: Because it’s never been about how many. It’s about who and for what? The focus, right? When you think about in that 17,000 that I told you about, there’s 2,500 gun arrests in there alone. When you think about the arrest they made for robbery, and it’s who, and that’s why we have the strategies that we have like my group violence reduction strategy was focused on deterrence, which is a carrot on a stick approach for maybe some of your listeners or viewers who don’t understand that, where it isn’t that you just go and blanketly say that every poor person, right, in Baltimore, every poor and Black person that lives in East or West Baltimore, or Cherry Hill or Park Heights, all of them are the most at risk just because what color they are, what neighborhood they live in, and what economic situation they live in, they’re the most likely to be the victim or perpetrator of gun violence.
That’s the kind of mentality that they had in the past, right? And understanding, and this is something I want to drive home, that this wasn’t, that kind of thinking, it wasn’t a Republican or Democratic thing, it was a universal American thought, coming from the ‘93 crime bill, white and Black mayors all across the country had that policy. We now know better, right? That policy was a failed policy. It ruined lives. It did so many things, some of them that caused some of the underlings of what we saw in 2015. But now we know better. Through our GVRS strategy, what we actually did is, went out and we looked at the data. We identified because just knowing our communities, you know, everybody’s not involved in activities or things that might put them at risk, it’s a very small group of people. And what we do is we go. We started in our Western Police District, which is the district that the Freddie Gray incident happened in, and we go and tell those individuals, we know who you are, we know what you do. They actually get a letter directly from me. We want you to stay alive. We want you to be healthy. We want you to provide for your family, but you cannot do that doing what you’re doing now. We will help you change. You need housing, relocation, job training, education, substance abuse, mental health, whatever you need, we’ll help you with it. But if you do not, we are going to remove you from the neighborhood. And we’ve had so many people take us up on those opportunities. A young man last year, and this is a great anecdotal example. I was at my oldest son’s basketball league at the Under Armour House on Friday nights, which is where I spend almost all of my Friday nights in this early spring, right?
Chris Hayes: Same, same. I spend a lot of time. I spend a lot of time at youth basketball.
Mayor Brandon Scott: A lot of time. And a young man says, Mr. Mayor, I got to show you something. And I’m like, all right. I’m like, what is it? He runs and goes, gets his phone. He takes out his phone and he shows me a picture of the letter that we sent him for GVRS. And I say, well, are you ready for help? He says, oh, no, I’m good. I’m already enrolled in ROCA. Thank you. That is life-changing. We had another young man that told us he had been involved in that kind of activity since he was 12, and no one told him he could do anything different until we showed up.
And it works, but then there are some who don’t. And that’s when our partnership, because GVRS is a partnership with me as the mayor, obviously, my mayor’s office of neighborhood safety and engagement, the police commissioner, and police department who works underneath my command, our state’s attorney, our attorney general here in Maryland, all of us. And when we don’t, we work with our federal partners as well. We remove people together. The police department goes out, does the investigations, turns it over to our partners on the legal side who make sure that there’s their swift accountability that we have to have for them. But through this, 95.7% of the people who have accepted support have not been re-victimized, and 97.7% have not recidivated. That is how you do a focused approach to dealing with an issue as complicated as gun violence.
Chris Hayes: So I’m hearing a few things here, just to I want to kind of grab these top lines. So, one, I think, that’s really important is it’s not the quantity of policing, it’s the quality, right? It’s not part of the defining ethos of broken windows ended up being this kind of brute force quantity metrics, right?
Mayor Brandon Scott: Any and everything.
Chris Hayes: Right. That you had to, that you had to get out there and just show up everywhere and constantly be in people’s faces. That would be the thing that, and I believe, again, I think people really believed in this approach, like, they thought this was the way to do it.
Mayor Brandon Scott: They thought it was going to work, Chris, but listen, the numbers say it didn’t, right? And for a city like ours, in particular, you had to think about all the lawsuits with the NAACP. That’s just, you know, how we ended up in a federal consent decree that I actually was one of the people calling for as a council person, right? Because we were doing things that we shouldn’t have done. And I think I say this a lot, I said this to some reporters last week, right? Because folks think that, especially when it comes to communities like the Black community, folks think that everybody universally, like, oh, everyone that lives in a neighborhood like this, they don’t want any policing. No, and I always talk through the lens of what we call the 90% (sp?) or like my grandmother’s generation.
My grandmother’s generation never said that they didn’t want any policing in their neighborhood. They simply said they didn’t want me, my cousins, my brothers, those of us who are just trying to go through and survive the things that were happening in our neighborhood to be the best version of themselves, right, to not end up in handcuffs simply because we were outside. I’ll just tell you a story about that, right? I’m coming home from St. Mary’s College of Maryland This is 2004, 2005. You’ll remember everyone wore throwback jerseys back then, right? So I’m coming home in jersey, sports jerseys, period. And I pick up one of my friends, Kelly, who actually right now is a police sergeant, ironically. And we go to my parents’ house to unload my stuff so that we can go out to the club later that night. And my parents’ house, where they live now, in West Arlington, Northwest Baltimore. It’s across the street from a cemetery, police always sit there to write their reports, right? So when I come down, I go to my parents’ house, I park, they come down the one way, which is something they often did. I didn’t pay any attention. I come back outside after dropping a bag, and the officer is talking to my friend. And he says, we need to talk to you. I’m like, who, me? He’s like, yeah, I think, about what? You meet the description of someone who did a robbery earlier today. I was like, I can assure you it wasn’t me. And he’s like, why? I was like, because I’ve been out of Baltimore for the last two and a half months. And he says, no, I need to talk to you.
And I, as I often did as a young man, ignored him. I went to my car, got something else, went in the house, and so did my friend. When I came back out, he grabbed me, he sat me down in handcuffs on the curb and said that I met the description. I said, well, sir, what’s the description? He said, a young Black man with long braids that has on a Kevin Garnett jersey. I said, well, clearly, officer, this jersey says Allen on the back in Bucks, and it’s purple, and it’s not white, and doesn’t say Timberwolves. He said, oh, you’re a smart ass.
I’m like, no, I’m not being a smart ass. I’m just telling you that it was not me, right? And he’s in his mind, it’s made up that it’s me. Well, he didn’t pay attention to my 6’1” friend who went in the house and got my dad who came back out and one of, a close friend of my family was a well-respected Black police officer in the city of Baltimore. And my dad just tells him, I want to tell you whose nephew you have in those handcuffs.
And once my dad says the name, officer doesn’t blink. He takes with the handcuffs off, gets in his car, pulls off. No paper, no nothing, right? So you have to understand that, meanwhile around the corner, from where I was —
Chris Hayes: Right. The guy actually did, someone’s running around with the stuff.
Mayor Brandon Scott: And I think that that’s the thing that folks try to put on neighborhoods. It’s been about wanting a constitutional policing. And also, and this is the point that I was really trying to make here, understanding that it’s not just about policing. And this is why I’ve said then, and when I became mayor, I actually passed a law as a council person that said that Baltimore had to have a comprehensive violence prevention plan that wasn’t led by the police department. Actually, here in Baltimore, our CVPP actually is overseen by MONSE and our health commissioner because we have to consider all the other things, and when, in 2021 I stood outside of a row house in East Baltimore with my good friend Mr. C from Rose Street who has led one of the vast community organizations to work to help people get them on the better path for many years in Baltimore and said that we were not only going to have this comprehensive violence prevention plan that I laid out, but that we were going to reduce homicides by 15% year over year, people literally laughed at me, Chris. Some media here in Baltimore who aren’t interested in the truth or interested in what really can help Baltimore asked me every single day that we were not at 15% reduction, when are you going to reach it, Mr. Mayor? Because when you think about what that means, we are not just focusing our police department on guns and getting them to take off 2,500 guns off the streets, as we’ve been talking about, holding gun traffickers accountable, making sure that we’re suing gun companies like Polymer 80 ending their ghost gun business, not just in Baltimore and Maryland. We already talked about our group violence reduction strategy.
At the same time, I made historic investments into our community violence intervention ecosystem. Paying people who used to be the folks out there committing violence, being involved in that kind of activity, to help that not to happen. We have to do all of it.
Chris Hayes: Let’s talk about that targeting, right? So the idea is, and this is true in Baltimore, it’s true in most cities, right? If you look at the worst violent crime, right? We’re talking about shootings and assaults and homicides. What you’re finding is two things. A relatively small group of census tracts account for a huge amount of it, right? Just like spatially. And a really tiny sliver of the population accounts for a massively outsized percentage of both perpetrators and victims in interpersonal violence, right?
And so the theory here is, if that’s the case, and it is, and this is true in a lot of places, but in Baltimore, if you could identify who those people are and then you can go to them in some way and intervene before violence happens, right? So that’s the theory here. What is it, you talked about the letter, it’s like, so, sort of spin this out for me. So, like, if you have someone who’s like, okay, I’m 19 and I live in a neighborhood that has a lot of gun violence, right? And I’m now involved with a gang and you know, people on the block know that, right? And whether I’m, you know, selling drugs or not, but I’m on the streets, right? Like, and everyone in the neighborhood knows who is and who isn’t, right? And so the question is like, okay, so what then? How do you interrupt? How do you move them onto a different track?
Mayor Brandon Scott: Yeah, I think we’ll talk about this in a couple of ways. So, in GVRS, right, this is the beauty of a program like this, it’s not just the city, the folks that are delivering that message are our trusted community partners. We have community moral voice partners, people who have the community standing to go out and knock on those doors, to go on those corners, to go wherever these people are. Because I also want to say, Chris, that this is not, this is in the ‘90s, right? As you know, you talked about it being interpersonal violence. This isn’t just about guns and drugs and money and territory. This is about simple stuff. My ex-girlfriend is now dating this guy. He sent her a message on Instagram when we were together. I saw it, I’m going to go kill him, right? Or someone dissed me in a rap video. Sometimes it is still about drug organizations and money, right? But not all the time. And even when the person who is the victim or the perpetrator is involved in that life doesn’t mean it’s about that life or what they do for a living. And what we do with our partners, YAP and Roca, and some of our other moral voice partners, they are community members, pastors, whoever, right? We actually have those people go out and talk to those people direct. That’s how the things get delivered. And when they’re ready for help, the help is there, the full weight of city government, because this is a mayoral program. Everyone knows when people come in through GVRS, the services and things have to be ready for them to go. We have to, they’re called notifications, custom notifications, and they’re one of the things that I’m most proud of because, in my time, I’ve been in City Hall a long time now, we’ve seen this effort start and stop, right? But never have we seen the level of coordination here. Never have you seen before folks in a room together, right? Police and community members, including people who used to be on the other side of the police in a different way, talking about who’s the best person to go and notify this person that–
Chris Hayes: You’re talking about like
Mayor Brandon Scott: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: At the individual level, as like meaning, like a convening for like this guy here?
Mayor Brandon Scott: This guy, well, no, convening for we go through who we need to reach. Who are the folks we need to reach? And we’re in that room, right? Which I’ve been in actually. In one case, I was the person that needed to deliver the message to the person because I was the only person that had the in to that, right? I think that’s the kind of thing that you need to have. And it’s very focused, right? And it’s academically–
Chris Hayes: It’s almost like an intervention.
Mayor Brandon Scott: Yes, it is. It is an intervention.
Chris Hayes: Like in the way that we think about it with substance, people with substance issues.
Mayor Brandon Scott: It is an intervention. You’re going to them and saying, because that’s the reality. The data, if you continue to do what you’re doing, there’s a high chance that you’re going to end up shot or shooting somebody, and we don’t want that for you, right? But hey, this is your chance, and if you don’t take that, you can assure that we’re going to be on your ass about what you’re doing from the law enforcement point of view.
Chris Hayes: More of our conversation after this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: In terms of your relationship with the police department, this has been a fraught point of tension for many mayors, particularly mayors, you know, who you might broadly describe as reform-minded. Can you talk to me a little bit what your relationship with BPD has been and how those conversations go and maybe what you’ve learned over the course of being a mayor and being in partnership with the police department, which, you know, they’re part of your, they’re part of the city you’re running.
Mayor Brandon Scott: They work for me.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, right.
Mayor Brandon Scott: They work for me directly. I think that I’m in a very unique position, Chris. I think what many people outside of Baltimore won’t know is that before I was elected, I worked for a mayor, right? And one of the things that I worked on as a staffer was public safety. So, so many of the folks, especially, for example, my police commissioner and I now, we were mid-level staffers together, right? I’ve known him and worked with him since 2010 or so. So I know these folks, but they also know me. And they know that, listen, I respect what they do. I want to focus what they do. And often I’ve, and this is the reality, I’ve learned so much about public safety and what we’re talking about here, even from people that folks wouldn’t expect, including police officers.
So, my deputy mayor for public safety, who I coaxed out of retirement for the second time is Tony Barksdale. I’ve learned so much from him as a person who was the deputy commissioner and acting commissioner of BPD because I understand, right? And knowing that we should have always had this focused approach, and hearing from him and some of the folks who have been around for a long time who hated that they were basically ordered to go out and just arrest all these people. He and I were just talking about the other day a story about him being in an executive conference room as a colonel arguing with one of the mayoral staffers at the time who said, you’re not arresting enough people, Colonel, and he him saying, like, it’s not about how many people I’m arresting, it’s about who, but they also know that I’m fair, and I don’t care who it is, if it’s my brother, if they’re wrong, they’re wrong. If they’re right, they’re right. When they do things and get into what we would call the public eye or catch fire for doing things that ultimately were the right thing to do, I’m going to be the person that’s going to be standing up, and I will take the heat for that.
But when they’re wrong, I’m going to say that as well. And I think that mutual respect and them understanding that also what my job’s role here is to alleviate all of the things that people, they have been saying to me, why am I doing this? Why are we doing this? And not someone else, for so many years, that is something that they respect. There’s tension sometimes.
Chris Hayes: Sorry, just so I understand, who’s been saying that. Why are we doing this? Meaning police officers saying?
Mayor Brandon Scott: Yeah, I’ll give you a perfect story. A good friend of mine, he’s retired now, right? When you think about Baltimore now has one of the largest 9-1-1 diversion programs, and now we even have 9-8-8 here in Baltimore running in the country, one of the most successful. My fray into that came from a good friend of mine, Lloyd Wells, was the commanding officer, the major of the Eastern District, which actually has Johns Hopkins Hospital system in. And one day he and I are talking after our flag football game. We played on the same team. And he said, hey, I got to talk to you about something. He said, this has been bothering me. He said, why am I sending my officers, lights and sirens out, every single time someone calls because there’s a mental health issue? And I said, what do you mean? Well, he says, Johns Hopkins is in my district, why am I doing it when I have the best hospital and mental health workers in the world in my district?
And he was right. And that was really what pushed the fire in me to start to work on those things way back then. And now we’re able to grow that. I think that what you have to do a lot of times as a leader is peel back the skin of the onion, of what people think is what everyone that does a specific job does, and actually talk to folks about what actually has happened. And then many of them, I gained their respects on the many late nights as a staffer, as a councilman out on the street, but also as a person who was leading, the 300 Men March, co-leading 300 Men March and us being in the most violent neighborhoods with no guns, with no bulletproof vests, out there talking to people. And they knew that if we were in an area, they didn’t have to be there, because we were going to be able to keep everything moving in the right direction.
So, we have a great relationship, and for me, it’s really a part of being a part of Baltimore. I have a great relationship with our CVI workers, with many of our community partners, because I understand the value of it all, a both and, not either or, and being able to try to bring us together to do what we have done. Because, Chris, as you and I are talking on July the 31st, 2025, Baltimore has its lowest amount of homicides through this point of the year on record. That is a huge thing for us that we’re not celebrating, right? We’re acknowledging that progress and saying that we know we can still do better.
Chris Hayes: Well, I grew up in the Bronx in the 1980s, which, you know, there was a fair amount of crime, disorder, and violence. I would commute down to Manhattan in the early 1990s, and like the year, you know, the record-setting homicide year from New York City, right? So, like, we’re talking 2,300 or something as opposed to like 500, 600, 400.
One of the things that I relate to with people from Baltimore in the many times that I’ve been there and reported on as someone from the Bronx is that the place you’re from gets this reputation where it just becomes synonymous, like with, like, crime, grittiness, urban decay, all these things. And particularly for the Bronx, you know, the famous the Bronx is burning and the, you know, the World Series Yankees. Like, when I was growing up, like, people, you’d say you’re from the Bronx, people would be like, oh. They think it’s dangerous. And I know that It’s been a perennial struggle for people in Baltimore. You know–
Mayor Brandon Scott: Yeah, they asked me, is it like “The Wire”?
Chris Hayes: Right, exactly. There’s this love-hate relationship with “The Wire”.
Mayor Brandon Scott: Do you live where “The Wire” was filmed? If I had a dollar every time somebody said that, oh Lord, I’d be a billionaire.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, like, you know, and the thing about that that’s double-sided is like there is real truth to it because, like, there really has been high levels of interpersonal violence in the city of Baltimore. And also, Baltimore is an amazing city with amazing people and amazing neighborhoods and all sorts of incredible stuff happening.
I guess my question to you is like, do you feel like, okay, the first order problem, the most important thing is saving the lives of people that would otherwise die and producing public safety for the people that you represent, but there are second, third order effects, which is those reputational perceptions people having altering. And maybe that leads to, you know, it’s easier to attract certain kinds of investment. It’s easier to do certain kinds of things. Like, do you feel like that part has started to happen, as, you know, over, say, the last year or two, as the actual numbers that don’t lie are sort of clear to everyone?
Mayor Brandon Scott: Yeah, I think it has. And you know that sometimes perception chases reality.
Chris Hayes: Yes, exactly.
Mayor Brandon Scott: The reality is that since September 2022, which is when the conference violence prevention plan and GVRS was fully stood up, right? We’ve been on the decline ever since, right? Even with the horrific mass shooting that we had in Brooklyn Homes a few years ago.
But we know that we have to still chase that change with perception. We are now starting to see that, right? When I’m out of town and other places, I hear that when you look at the fact that $7 billion with a B is being invested just in downtown Baltimore, when you consider all the other investments that are happening around town, and now we have this great partnership because the other issue that has been haunting Baltimore for years is the vacant housing issue. We have this partnership with myself, the GBC bill, our fabulous governor, Governor Moore, to eliminate vacant housing in Baltimore, $3 billion plan over the next 15 years. And we have right now the lowest number of vacants that we’ve had in 20 years, the lowest number of homicides that we had in 50 years, that word is starting to get out, and it’s starting to get out that we have connected leadership.
And it’s also getting out in other ways. I talk to my brother and sister mayors basically every day. And every other week, one of them is saying to me, if not multiple, can you please get the people in my city off my back? Because they’re telling me to just do exactly what you’re doing in Baltimore. And like, tell them it’s not the same here. Because we are seeing this work happen, it’s not just here, right?
My brother in Birmingham, in Chicago, obviously, the godfather of this way of leading a city in Mayor Baraka in Newark. There are so many of us that are doing this work this way, and it’s really telling a different story about cities, and also, quite frankly, about leadership and Black leadership and Black mayor leadership. When you see this happening, whether it’s myself, Mayor Woodfin, Mayor Johnson, Mayor Baraka, Mayor Bibb in Cleveland, Mayor Scott in Little Rock, Arkansas, Mayor Reed down in Montgomery. There are so many folks that are doing this work, and we’re all doing this kind of approach, making it unique to our individual cities. But yes, we’re starting to see that tide change, especially nationally, where we have to crack it, crack through here locally. And you understand this, right? Because sometimes that stuff gets deeply rooted into people, and especially surrounding areas and how we have to push, push, and press, especially sometimes with the local media about how we have to start to talk about that change in a more positive way and not get into this business where we’re going to sensation now that homicides and violent crime are down, we’re going to sensationalize every single incident and drive it so much that people don’t actually don’t believe what’s happening.
We have to have that balance of actually telling the truth. As I always say, that we’re not celebrating, we’re acknowledging the progress, but we also have to say, hey, remember where we were, right, because these things are issues that have existed. If it’s existed longer than me, we have to understand that it’s systemic things that we have to build upon and be able to do that work for a long, sustained period of time.
Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
(BREAK)
Chris Hayes: Talk about the sort of where you think the discourse in your city is on policing right now because this has been such a big part of it. And I think, you know, you talked about the fact that, you know, James Forman has an amazing book called “Locking Up Our Own” that won the Pulitzer Prize. It came out in 2017 when I was writing a book. A lot of which was actually about Baltimore colonization (sp?) about race and policing, and, you know, just the complicated relationship that Black communities have often had with policing. Neither of the sort of polar ends of wanting total, you know, brute force surveillance nor wanting defunding the police –
Mayor Brandon Scott: Nothing.
Chris Hayes: — or abolishing the police as an institution. Right? And I do think that, like, conversations moved in pretty radical directions in 2020. I think there was a lot of understandable reason for that. Where do you think the conversation about, I hate this term, police community relations, but like, the relationship that Baltimore residents and citizens have with the police department.
Mayor Brandon Scott: Yeah, I think that, listen, and again, we were a little different in 2020. Many of the reforms and things that folks were calling for, we had already done because of what happened for us in 2015. And what I always say, because we actually just obviously came up on 10 years of the unrest and the death of Freddie Gray, I’ll say to you what I’ve been saying then, we are light years away from where we were in 2015, and we are light years away from where we want to go. We’ve improved significantly. Right? When you look at the amount of complaints and how complaints have come down, when you look at things, for example, it’s also reflected in the work, it is not by happenstance that the clearance rate for BPD is as high as I can remember it being ever, right? And that does not happen without people calling in, right? And that, you don’t get those kinds of relationships and tips to activate.
Chris Hayes: You can’t clear homicides if people don’t talk to the cops.
Mayor Brandon Scott: You can’t clear homicides if people don’t talk to you, right? And I think that with us having a plus 60% clearance rate last year and then seeing that again.
Chris Hayes: Really?
Mayor Brandon Scott: Yeah, I’ll get the official number for you for last year. But that, like, that is what we have to continue to do, right? I think that we have to continue to see those numbers and those kind of things rise. And it’s only because we have to continue. Now, we’re different. We have a consent decree. We’re doing it not just because it’s the right thing to do. We have to do it right. And I will be doing it either way. And when I came into office, I was very focused on getting us to close out some of those sections of the consent decree because I knew what it meant.
People will say that it’s improving. We’re not perfect, right? There’s obviously things that we need to work on, but we will continue to see that improve as long as we stay committed to the work, and I will make sure that we do that. As you and I are talking today, Chris, the average clearance rates for homicides in Baltimore is at 64%. You don’t get that without an improved police community relations. And I remember, and you’ll remember the years where that was at 40, 39, 40%, right? That’s a part of it. But we still–
Chris Hayes: It’s been in the 30s in a lot of cities I’ve covered. I mean, yes.
Mayor Brandon Scott: Yeah, we have a long, long way to go still, though.
Chris Hayes: So, the governor of your state, Wes Moore, Democrat, has been governor for a few years. He replaced a Republican governor Larry Hogan. Who was governor for eight years and was quite popular among Maryland voters, had a very high approval rating, but also had a very fraught relationship with Baltimore. He very famously, early on in his first term, canceled a huge amount of state money investment in the city of Baltimore for transportation infrastructure build out. I’m curious what difference it makes from your end as mayor to have this governor, Wes Moore, as opposed to the previous governor.
Mayor Brandon Scott: Yeah, it makes the world of a difference. And history would tell you, and he would tell you, Governor Hogan would tell you, that I had a better relationship with him than probably any other mayors that he dealt with. But the reality was that you led into it, right? One of the first things that Governor Hogan did was kill a red line. We had a billion dollars for a new subway line, east and west in Baltimore that, west to east in Baltimore, that would have transformed neighborhoods. We should be actually riding that right about now, we should be at completion, which would have been a huge game-changing thing for our city, right.
But also, a little known fact about the city of Baltimore, most of the public safety agencies work for the governor. For example, I don’t run our jail. The state does. Our juvenile services is run by the state. So is social services, right? Obviously, parole and probation. All of those things are run by the state. And even back then, even though the mayor appointed the police commissioner, you’re talking about, though in that 2015 timeframe, within four years of me advocating in Annapolis, where our state legislature is based, for us to actually have local control of our police department that we technically didn’t get until the end of last year when the voters gave the final vote.
So, when you think about how important that relationship is, and not only did the former governor cancel the red line, he ended the Criminal Justice Coordinating Council, which is where all the public safety agencies would come to meet and work on things together, right? We know that things were unfunded, defunded during his time. They took the parole agents out of our police precincts. All of these things happened. And then, even for me, I won, as you know, this is Baltimore, the only thing that really matters here is the primary election. I won the election in June of 2020. I could not meet with him until the beginning of the year in 2021, right? After asking time and time and time again, because we wanted to build this comprehensive strategy, we wanted to build GVRS, and we could not do that fully without the state being at the table.
Now, after months and months of waiting to get that meeting and having the meeting and us showing that we actually knew what the hell we were talking about, we got it, but it shouldn’t have taken that long.
Now it’s night and day. If I got something I need to get from Governor to Moore, I pick up the phone, I call him, he answers, or he calls me back, we meet, we discuss these issues. We now have a governor that understands how important this city is to the state of Maryland and is investing in the city. Obviously, even if you just look at what he’s doing, giving us $50 million towards that vacant housing initiative every single year, making his agencies be a partner on the ground and working with us and also asking us, right, our opinion on things. When they were having issues with the Department of Juvenile Services, the now former secretary came to me and said, well, can you talk to me about how you guys are doing this focus on these focus groups? And then we connected them with some of our partners in the work, and they’re now doing something similar for some of the young people. That is what can happen when you have folks that are true partners in the work and not folks who are using Baltimore for their political punchlines and right-wing talking points. Chris Hayes: Mayor Brandon Scott is the mayor of Baltimore city. He’s serving a second term, as you just heard. The city just set a record all-time low for homicides for the first six months, that city a great, great, great American city.
Mayor, thanks so much for taking time today.
Mayor Brandon Scott: Thank you. Thank you for having me, Chris. Thank you very much.
Chris Hayes: Don’t forget, you can get tickets now for our upcoming MSNBC live event in Manhattan. Join me and more than a dozen of your favorite MSNBC hosts for our second live community event on October 11th. You can get your tickets now by visiting msnbc.com/live25. You can email us at withpod@gmail.com. Get in touch with us using the hashtag WITHpod. You can also follow me on Threads at ChrisLHayes, and on Blue Sky. Be sure to hear new episodes every Tuesday. “Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory, and featuring music by Eddie Cooper. Our associate producer for video is Joann Kong. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening.