Violent crime is down across America.

Brooklyn Homes residents have seen more Baltimore City police patrols in the neighborhood since a mass shooting in July 2023.

Before he was the mayor, Brandon Scott was a regular at a barbershop here just steps from an intersection long notorious for illegal drugs.

For decades, the small business – on Frederick Avenue in the city’s southwest Irvington area – gave neighbors a shelter from gangs and dealers, somewhere they could gather safely and talk about music, family and friends.

That “barbershop was the only place they felt like they could come and talk to real people and not feel some sense of someone being ready to shoot or rob them,” Scott stated.

In recent months, though, the refuge zone has expanded.

The mayor’s office – through its revived Group Violence Reduction Strategy effort – in March led a takedown of the alleged drug trafficking organization that long had plagued the neighborhood and driven violence citywide, with 12 people indicted on drug and gun charges, Scott said at the time.

The Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement had helped “answer … the community’s call” by investigating the alleged crime ring, Scott said. The mayor then issued a warning to anyone unwilling to accept that same office’s inverse, perhaps more important mission: to help deter violence in the first place.

“Take us up on our opportunities to change your life,” he said, “or end up … indicted, headed to prisons.”

By some key measures, the mission is succeeding.

Aimed at curbing shootings through an “intentional collaboration between law enforcement, social services, and community members,” the violence reduction strategy last year helped drive Baltimore’s record 21% annual decline in homicides, Scott said, with an even steeper 34% drop this year through July 8, police department data show.

“We’re dealing with government having really low levels of trust within the community,” said Stefanie Mavronis, director of the neighborhood safety office, as she pointed to lessons learned from Freddie Gray’s 2015 death in police custody and the protests it spurred.

“We are not often a credible partner, and coming out of the uprising there was a lot of community energy around the idea that community has to be a part of the solution and needs to be a co-owner of our strategies moving forward.”

Scott in 2022 recast a previous city program as the Group Violence Reduction Strategy, with a “focused deterrence” pilot in the city’s Western District, beset for nearly a decade by high murder and shooting rates.

Members of Roca, a referral partner in the Group Violence Reduction Strategy, gather for a morning meeting at the organization’s Baltimore site.

Members of Roca, a referral partner in the Group Violence Reduction Strategy, gather for a morning meeting at the organization’s Baltimore site. Em

Law enforcement, social services providers and community members work together to identify people at the highest risk of being victims or perpetrators of gun violence, then give them stipends for substance abuse or job placement counseling. The strategy costs about $7.3 million annually, paid for through the city’s general budget and other federal, state and philanthropic sources, the mayor’s office told CNN.

The goal is to disrupt underlying issues that lead to violence, like in the zone around the barbershop, which Malik Blandon bought from Scott’s cousin in 2018.

Since the city-backed takedown of the alleged drug ring, the area has become “more peaceful and quieter,” Blandon explained. Still, though, the new owner offered a word of caution echoed by others in US cities who’ve seen crime.