Baltimore is experiencing a significant drop in violent crime, a trend that began shortly after voters removed progressive prosecutor Marilyn Mosby from office in 2022. Mosby, who took office in 2015, was known for her progressive stance on criminal justice, which included declining to prosecute certain low-level offenses and pursuing charges against police officers involved in the death of Freddie Gray.
Though those officers were eventually acquitted, analysts argue her policies had a demoralizing effect on law enforcement. According to data compiled by the Heritage Foundation, and reported on by the Washington Free Beacon, the number of homicides rose sharply under Mosby’s leadership—from an average of 229 annually before she assumed office to 333 per year during her eight-year tenure. Meanwhile, arrests dropped significantly.
Frustration among Baltimore residents came to a head in July 2022, when Mosby lost the Democratic primary to Ivan Bates. Bates ran on a platform promising to undo many of Mosby’s initiatives, advocating for tougher penalties for repeat violent offenders and those caught illegally possessing firearms.
The impact of that shift was soon apparent. Baltimore recorded 334 homicides in 2022, Mosby’s final year in office. In 2023, that number declined to 262, and by 2024, it had dropped again to 202. The downward trend continued into 2025, with only 68 homicides reported in the first half of the year—a 62 percent decrease compared to the same period in 2022. Other categories of crime have also declined in 2025, with auto thefts down 34 percent, robberies falling 22 percent, and arson cases dropping 10 percent compared to the previous year.
“Ivan Bates’s model of targeting the most violent or violence-prone offenders (gun carrying criminals) is the primary driver of Baltimore’s miraculous success,” said Sean Kennedy, a fellow at the Maryland Public Policy Institute, in an interview with the Washington Free Beacon. “Homicides only started dropping when Bates came in and signaled that carrying guns meant prison.”
During her years in office, Mosby drew criticism for her frequent travel and alleged detachment from the city’s crime crisis. In 2018 and 2019 alone, she took 23 out-of-town trips, some funded by groups like Fair and Just Prosecution—a nonprofit supported by George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, which works to train and assist progressive prosecutors. In early 2022, Mosby was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of mortgage fraud and perjury related to her Florida vacation homes. She was convicted in 2024, though an appeals court recently overturned her mortgage fraud conviction.
Since 2022, nearly two dozen prosecutors backed by Soros, including George Gascón in Los Angeles and Kimberly Foxx in Chicago, have been voted out of office. Many major cities have returned to more traditional law enforcement strategies—a shift that a May 2025 study by the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund says is “statistically significantly correlated” with decreases in violent crime.
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