The Jeff-alytics Podcast

A Blueprint for Reducing Gun Violence with Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott

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Baltimore is typically seen as the poster child for high crime with the city consistently having one of the nation’s highest murder rates. Things have been changing in Baltimore in the last few years though as the city has had a nearly 60 percent reduction in murder 3since 2022. It is a remarkable story of solving gun violence using every tool in the toolkit. 

To understand this amazing turnaround , I talked to Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott. Mayor Scott shares his journey, innovative strategies, and insights on reducing gun violence and transforming public safety in Baltimore. This is an episode about how data-driven approaches, community engagement, and leadership are shaping one city’s future.

Brandon M. Scott is the 52nd Mayor of Baltimore, and the youngest person to hold the position in more than 100 years. Mayor Scott is committed to ending gun violence, restoring the public’s trust in government and creating a brighter, better and more equitable Baltimore for all.

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SPEAKER_01

I'm Jeff Asher, and this is the Jeffalytics Podcast. For years, Baltimore has been the city people point to when they want to talk about surging violence, corrupt policing, and the impossibility of fixing entrenched problems. In many cases, the version of Baltimore that they have in their minds comes from either the national news or Hollywood in television series like The Wire and We Own This City. But something unusual has happened over the last few years. Baltimore has seen a sharp drop in homicides and shootings. And it didn't happen because the city increased arrests. In fact, arrests have dramatically fallen over the same period. So, what changed? In this episode, I talk with Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott about how the city has approached violence differently and what the data actually shows. We discussed strategies like focused deterrence and treating violence as a public health problem, and why a small group of people drives a disproportionate share of violence. We also talk about the challenge of communicating crime trends in a world where perception often lags far behind reality. And what comes next for cities trying to sustain these reductions? Let's get started. My guest today is Mayor Brandon Scott of Baltimore. Mayor Scott, thank you so much for joining the program.

SPEAKER_00

Thank you for having me. Thank you for having me, Jim.

SPEAKER_01

Let's start off with the same question I generally ask all my guests. What is your background? And more importantly, why is it that you wanted to be the mayor of Baltimore and take on what is just an enormous undertaking like that?

SPEAKER_00

Well, my background is this I am a young black Baltimore. That's really my background. For me, I was born in 1984. I'm a first-generation Baltimorean. My mom's family moved here from rural Virginia, right outside of Richmond and Amelia County. My dad's family, really his older brothers, my uncles, my aunts, they moved here from rural North Carolina, uh Halifax County, Littleton, to be exact, with my grandparents. Worked and ran a pig farm until they died. So I'm a first-generation Baltimorean. Love the opportunity that this place uh provided for both sides of my family. My my granddad uh being able to, and this is a great story, when he was down to$100, him and my grandmother to their name, uh being able to get a job at General Motors that like changed the trajectory of my family forever. Uh that's how they bought the house that my mom grew up in and my grandmother lived until she passed, and my my aunt still lives in. Uh, it's actually how my dad net my mom because he came up to visit my uncle who had lived in an apartment down the street. But for me, I had a little bit of a different upbringing in Baltimore in the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s, growing up in the time of zero tolerance policing, the war on drugs, all of that kind of stuff. And I wanted to become mayor because before I was 10 years old was the first time I saw someone get shot and uh was pestering my my parents, my grandparents, older cousins, uncles, aunts, anybody who would listen around why no one really cared. And then uh my mom one day looked at me and said, If you want to change, you have to do it yourself. No one's coming to save us, and the rest is history.

SPEAKER_01

That's fantastic. That's a great story and incredible achievement. So, how has Baltimore crime changed and gun violence in particular changed since you took office? Or really over the last decade?

SPEAKER_00

When you think about this, I am 41 now. 18 of the 41 years that I've been alive, Baltimore has had over 300 homicides. I mean, you think about uh the time frame following uh the unrest of Freddie Gray really in 2015. Uh, from 2015 all the way through 2022, we saw 300 plus homicides. But what you saw started to happen in 2022 was this steep decline in homicides and violence, not just homicides, homicides and shootings and all kinds of violence in Baltimore. And we really hit what we now know as a historic low. Uh we uh thought about it a different way, right? Most of my lifetime, uh uh as a young man growing up here in Baltimore, we could see uh that those in power, not just here in Baltimore, but around this country, subscribe to the thought that only police were responsible for the reduction of violence in any community. And we know that that didn't work, right? What we did have happen here is hundreds of thousands of people be arrested just because they were poor and black and living in neighborhoods and the crime did not move. Despite all those years of all those mass arrests, the crime did not move. And I'll give you a perfect example of that just so that you have it. So in 2004, uh the city of Baltimore, which is roughly uh close to 600,000 people, the Baltimore Police Department made 91,697 arrests. That year, we had 278 homicides. All right. If you look at 2024, we were all the way down to 201 homicides, but we only made 17,872 arrests. That shows everyone, it should be very clear to everyone is that we never been about how many people you arrest, but who and for what. And what we have done since I took office is changed the way that we think about public safety. Uh, we are implementing a law that I passed as the city council president where Baltimore has to have a comprehensive uh public health-based approach to dealing with gun violence. We call that of CDIP, our comprehensive violence prevention plan. And we are operating in that mode, understanding that while police play a very important role in dealing with crime and violence in our city, they are not the only agency or group that has to deal with that. And we're looking at it from a comprehensive approach. You know, we've been able to do that uh by reducing homicides by 40% over the last four years, and we want to make sure that we continue uh of that reduction as we make it through the end of this year. But the how is very important. And it's because we did it a very different way. Uh, we looked at it as that public health issue. And what we were able to do is say, see, and identify that we know that it was never everybody that lived in a in a neighborhood like mine. I grew up in Park Heights in northwest Baltimore, uh, a neighborhood that has a uh triple crown horse racing preakness, but every other day of the year I wasn't even treated as human as a young man. But there's a small group of people, roughly 2% of the population that is responsible for and the most likely to uh be the victim or perpetrator of gun violence. We identified those people and through our focus deterrence model, our group violence reduction strategy, we focus on them from both the carrot and stick uh point. Uh we actually give uh folks a chance to change their lives. They actually get a letter directly from me that essentially says, I know who you are, I know what you do. This is your one and only chance to change your life. And if you do not, we will remove you through law enforcement. But for those who do take us up on our opportunity to change their life, uh, we give them the resources that they need, whether they be housing, job support, education, training, relocation, whatever. And we've seen that be very effective because over 90% of the people that have said to us that they want to change their life have not been recidivism or have not been re-victimized, right? So they've not recidivated or been a victim of gun violence in our city. And the other folks, they go to jail. All right. We do the investigation through BPD and they turn it over to our state's attorney and our attorney general who are doing great work at prosecuting those cases. And we also uh have vested heavily into community violence intervention, paying the very people who used to be involved in that life to go out and intercede in gun violence through our safe trees program, through our hospital-based violence responders, through organizations like We R Us and Challenge to Change. We're focusing in on guns in every way, suing gun companies, gun stores, doing gun trafficking cases. The collective investment that we've made into our community and young people, all of it is how we've reduced violence.

SPEAKER_01

Can I ask you about focused deterrence? One more follow-up question on that. I'm in New Orleans, where 12 years ago, 13 years ago, the city did pretty much the exact same strategy and similarly saw a very sharp, sudden drop, like clearly connected to the implementation of the focused deterrence. And then the city's implementation sort of waned after that and they weren't as focused and it wasn't as effective. And they had academics come in and researched it and showed, hey, you you just you stopped doing the strategy. How do you keep doing this strategy, A, for the rest of your term, and also to um systematize it so that whoever comes in after you is also able to keep up these successful strategies?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I think that we we had a front row seat to that, right? When I when I got this job, uh the former police commissioner of New Orleans, uh what one of the former police leaders in New Orleans, uh Michael Harrison, was my police commissioner here in Baltimore. So he had seen what happened and what he said to me, uh, and what everyone said to me, I'll I'll advisor said to me from UPenn, the most important thing is the executive buy-in. I had seen that myself. And this is the third time Baltimore has tried focus deterrence. I saw it myself the second time Baltimore tried it here as a young staffer, but even before as a citizen. And what you have to have first is that executive buy-in. The reason why we've been able to have that success like this quickly is because everyone knows that it is my strategy, and every single person that works in city government, law enforcement or not, is going to have to work under that strategy, or they're just not simply going to work here. But what we're doing to uh institutionalize it is we thought about this in a very different way. Typically, as you know, uh a city has a program and they do a program, and that program is done by the city, is funded by the city, and all these things. For us, we have uh private businesses, philanthropic dollars that are helping with GBRS and they're seeing that approach. They're seeing the benefit of their investment, right? We have our federal delegation that is invested in it because they're bringing money from the federal government. They are seeing the benefit of their investment. Our state government is a partner in it. They are seeing the benefit of their investment. When it does not solely rely on one individual or one government agency, and it'll be very hard for whoever comes behind a brand of Scott to take it away. But even more importantly, we're embedding it in the community, the fabric, the culture of the community. People are not going to just sit by and let this go away. And as I said before, we know uh that we have to, whoever the mayor is, is gonna have to present to the city council and the public a comprehensive violence prevention plan at least every two years. So it'll be very hard for someone to not have something in there that has been in there every single time and uh that has been very effective. That's how you have to do it. You have to institutionalize it in every way, in every faction that you can.

SPEAKER_01

You talked about the sharp drop in arrests, and you haven't it obviously not correlating with the increase in murder or anything like that. How has policing in Baltimore changed? Obviously, there's been a consent decree, there's been federal investigations. Uh how has it changed over the last decade? And how are they impacted by the sort of bigger picture law? You know, you've got fewer officers now than you've probably ever had before in quite a long time. How do all of these these factors play in?

SPEAKER_00

Ten years ago was one year after the uprising, right? And at that time, think about the Baltimore Police Department at that time, we were looked at like as the laughing stock of policing depart police departments in this country. The irony is that if you were to ask me then 10 years ago as a as a young councilman, that we would uh now be BPD would be a place where mayors and police chiefs from around the country would be coming to look at their policies, their strategies, their practices, all of these things, I probably would have laughed at you. But that's the truth. We are light years away from where we were, and we're still light years away from where we need to be. We have proven uh that you can reduce violence while reforming the police department at the same time. Uh under my leadership, we have come into compliance with multiple sections of our consent decree after being stagnant for a very long time in that. But it's really about uh refocusing and reimagining what public safety is. Uh, one of the first conversations that I had with my police commissioner, then police commissioner Michael Harrison, is that he and I both agree that uh the police department in Baltimore, really around the country, that we are putting too much culturally, uh we have decided that they are the response for any and everything. 80% of the calls coming into our 911 emergency for our police department were non-emergency. Things like, especially because this is the height of the pandemic, things like, oh, my kid won't log into Zoom to go to school, 911. Uh, my husband is cheating on me on Facebook, 911. There's a marching band walking down the street practicing. I don't like the noise, 911. Those things have absolutely nothing to do with police work. And we have to, through our smart policing program, refocus our police department in many different ways. And that's the same thing that we did through GVRS, right? It can't just be this place-based, and any and everybody that lives in this place is the most likely. No, identify, use data, be very intelligent about that, right? Uh, data that is now informing how they go about doing their work, where they're focusing, focusing on those groups of folks, and that, and then relieving them of some of the other smaller things now allows them to focus on guns, to focus, make those gun trafficking cases, to build relationships and community. And that's how we're really starting to evolve the way that policing works in Baltimore. And we we have a long way to go, but as someone who lived through zero tolerance and policing while black, as we call it, as a young black man to where we are today, we are light years away from where we used to be. And we just still have to keep working at it. And my goal is to get out of the consent decree before my turn is out.

SPEAKER_01

That's a great goal. I wish you luck certainly with that. What role has either implementing programs targeting youth or supporting youth played in these reductions? I mean, uh, you've certainly seen a huge drop in your shooting numbers nationally and also in Baltimore. We've seen enormous drops in carjackings, which tend to be disproportionately carried out by youth offenders. So uh have you targeted youth specifically, or is that just something that sort of fits into the overall strategy as just another piece?

SPEAKER_00

Well, in addition to this rethinking of public safety, we are also uh changing something that has been the case in Baltimore, at least as long as I've been alive. Uh, when I was growing up here, I was looked at as a problem to solve, not something to invest in. We have flipped that on his head. We looked at, we look at our young people in my administration as a deeply important resource that we should invest in. And you can see that in the reflection of our budgets. For example, uh the Wreck and Park's operational budget alone has grown 40% uh since I've been in office. They have had over$200 million in capital projects. And I can just run down for you. Since I've been in office, we've opened six rec centers that were some that were closed, some that we built new, some that we renovated. Uh, we did the same with pools, seven pools, I believe. I can't count the amount of playgrounds that we have. And right now, as you and I talking, I have five more rec centers that are under construction, two that will open uh this month, brand new in the city of Baltimore. And the last two budgets that that I had that passed here by the city council have been the largest amounts of money funded into Baltimore City Public Schools through from the city of Baltimore in its history. Uh, we've opened uh above 12, I think 13 uh new school buildings, built new or renovated in my time and office. We opened the first new library branch in 20 years, and then we broke ground on another one. Uh we are continuing, we had over 8,000 young people in our summer jobs, youth jobs program uh last summer. We are gonna continue to invest in our young people in a very deep way. We also build their summer programming around what they want. We took about 300 of our young people and helped them develop the outside in 25 summer youth program where we had teen nights and pool parties and these events and that events, and having those young people have that structured uh places for them to go helps out tremendously. And that's in addition to uh the folks who are on the front lines, our community violence intervention workers and organizations who are working with those young people who need through my mayor's office of African Maryland Mail Engagement and others who need uh to have a different viewpoint, who need to be brought in, who need to be taught about themselves, who need to be trained up to be in a better them. We're gonna do that as well.

SPEAKER_01

So I want to talk about how we communicate and how you communicate all of this and how we communicate going forward. And I'm sure that you get a variant of this question all the time being the mayor of Baltimore, but what do you say to someone about public safety and crime in Baltimore, to someone that's only seen the wire, or maybe they saw that uh we own this city on HBO, which obviously terrific television, but not inherently always the most truthful to reality and certainly not the reality that we're seeing today.

SPEAKER_00

What I always tell people is that when you visit or think about New York, you don't think about NYPD Blue or one of the 20,000 different versions of Law and Order, right? You understand that those kind of things happen in a big city, but you also uh think about completeness of a place. And that's what I tell people about Baltimore. Yes, those things that happen, happen. I lived them, right? I lived them. I understand that. But I also know uh that even then there were so many people who were working tremendously hard to make Baltimore a better place, and that now uh really the story is about how a city uh that was once the poster child for things like that is now this city with mayor after mayor, with police chief after police chief, or community organization, CVI organization after CDI organization is now coming to Baltimore to say, talk to us about how you did it. We have gone from being uh the one that everyone's poking at to the example that everyone wants to be when it comes to how you can reduce violence in your city, not wave the white flag and celebrate because we have nothing to celebrate as of yet. We still have far too many people uh dying from gun violence, but to show tremendous progress and doing it the right way is what matters.

SPEAKER_01

And how do you respond to people who you you point out all of the successes that you've had and say, well, it's only following the national trend. We are, you know, it's truthful. We are seeing enormous declines in across most cities. How do you how do you respond to something like that?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, the the truth is that we're beating the national trend. Uh the last two years, our reductions have been higher than the national trend. Uh so we're not following the national trend. We're actually, we are the trend. And I think that's very important for people to understand and know. And in in Baltimore's history, there have been years and years and years where the national trend has been big reductions, and Baltimore is seeing the opposite. So uh we have to make sure that folks are reminded that the national numbers are don't compare to what Baltimore has seen.

SPEAKER_01

And looking ahead, do you, you know, at some point you're going to see crime is going to rise. You're going to have a year where your shootings are don't keep falling. We're inevitably going to see this enormous historic decline sort of slow down and possibly even reverse nationally. Do you plan or think about like what you're going to do about those types of things and how you're going to communicate, okay, yes, there was a 6% increase in shootings this year, but you know, the overall trend is positive. How how do you think about those sorts of things?

SPEAKER_00

I think about it that we have to keep doing our work. That if we continue to do the work that we're doing, uh, that we can continue to do the reduction. But we also ultimately have to continue to have the conversation that it's something that we need to really have at the national level, too. That the way violence and shootings and homicides happen now, it's not the same as it was in the 80s and 90s and 2000s, right? People still have this blanket view that it's all gangs and drugs, right? 11% of the country's homicides are gang related. So if you remove all of them, the majority of them still happen. Most of it is interpersonal stuff. Uh people are are getting into the smallest and pettiest beefs and people end up dying. And we have to talk about how we deal with that issue. And that issue solely isn't a policing issue, but we have to also just focus on the work. If you are out there saving lives in the way that we have here and cities around the country have done, we can continue the trend by the understanding that things happen and that we can continue to work on on the other side. To make sure that we're preventing it.

SPEAKER_01

Is there a strategy specifically looking at sort of attacking interpersonal violence as a driver of gun violence that you haven't been able to implement yet or and that you really want to, or it's just it's really hard, it's really expensive?

SPEAKER_00

I think it I think it's it's but it is still connected to groups, right? So I just want to be very clear about that, right? Uh we even when you think about our focus groups for G V RS, people will see, and we understand in a format like this, we can go deeper, right? But on the nightly news, uh, when they're talking about a homicide or a shooting, the first thing that those reporters are going to do, because they have to be quick, is they're gonna say, oh, yep, this person has a a long record, it has guns and it might have drugs in it. Yep, it's drug related, right? But the truth is, is that even though that person was involved in that life, that might not be Jeff why that person got shot. What could happen is that that person, let's just say his name is Jeff. Uh Jeff realized that Brandon uh and he were dating the same girl. He saw that uh Brandon sent that woman a message on Instagram. Jeff decides that he's gonna confront Brandon, ends up shooting and killing her. It has absolutely nothing to do uh with Jeff dealing drugs or dealing guns, right? It is an interpersonal conflict. And I think that that is why the group focused deterrence model is the model. Because when you're dealing with those groups and you're focused on those groups, you're interceding in that in many ways. That's why CVI is the model, because they will know the community violence intervention folks will know who's beefing over women, who's beefing over rat beef, who's beefing over small amounts of money or disrespect in a different way. That's why you have to have this all and above approach because there are things that police can prevent and intercede in, but there are things that other people can prevent and intercede in. And no one, no one is Tom Cruise in the minority report where they've been able to see it beforehand, and we have to understand that.

SPEAKER_01

You remind me of um used to work for the CIA and and we would talk about how you know so-and-so was connected to the Russian intelligence service. It's like, well, every person in Russia that has any sort of power is connected to the, you know, they they know somebody. So just because something happens doesn't mean it was an intelligence service-led coup or something like that. How do you get that message across? How do you make a the the media cover this smarter and people cover this smarter to sort of be able to do that differentiation between a person that maybe is part of a group because they just they grew up in a neighborhood and they call themselves something and it versus this was unrelated to that dynamic. It was this was an incident of gun violence that happened because of interpersonal conflict.

SPEAKER_00

Listen, that part we're still trying to figure out here, especially, especially with some of the media we have here in the home of Sinclair broadcasting, right? Uh people, media, they they want the quick and simple. And I think that's something that we have to, on mainstream media, get folks to understand that deciding to shoot and kill someone or stab someone is not a quick and simple thing. It's not something that's gonna be cut up nicely and produced nicely for you to be able to tell a simple story on the nightly news. We have to have people understand the complexity and the depth that that these incidents uh really represent. And we're we're still working on that. We've had some instances where we've been able to do that, but by and large, uh people are still force-fed this model that, like, oh, yep, the person got shot. The person was arrested before for selling drugs is related to him selling drugs, right? You like that person could have stopped doing that 10 years ago. I think that we have to keep evolving and understanding and say what things actually are, not what's easy for us to say.

SPEAKER_01

Looking kind of big picture, what are the challenges that you face in Baltimore that you think are very unique to Baltimore versus the challenges that you think every one of your colleagues as a big city mayor is dealing with?

SPEAKER_00

Well, listen, we face a lot of unique challenges, right? I think that being the city that is the birthplace, the first place uh that racial rate lining was passed, literally uh a few feet from where I'm talking to you from right now, the first racial rate lining bill was was signed. So still living that legacy of being uh uh uh a city that it's only one other city that really can compare, right? Us in St. Louis, uh not having county government and being the only representative of government uh creates a different set of issues for us, especially when it comes to infrastructure and some of the other things that may challenge this for us. Being one of the only cities that doesn't get to keep some of the local sales tax, like every other major city in the country, that they can put back into infrastructure, they can reduce property taxes, all of those things that we're fighting for uh in our state legislature with our state government here in Maryland. Uh that's really uh some of the things that that jumped to mind to me. And then dealing with the historical uh disinvestment into Baltimore and Baltimore's communities of color particularly.

SPEAKER_01

Are there things that you deal with that you're just like, I know every single one of my colleagues is dealing with from a public safety perspective?

SPEAKER_00

Oh, we yeah, we we we all deal with the shootings, the homicides, the guns. Uh the hardest part about being a mayor of any city is being the person that has to deliver that bad niche, right? It's different for us. Mayors are people that people know. Uh I don't know any of my brother, sister mayors that I'm very close with who have not personally been impacted by gun violence in their city, right? When you think about that, having to deliver that message to people you know, that their son, that their daughter, that their parents never coming back home, having to uh deliver the the eulogies at at funerals and speak at funerals, right? People have no earthly idea, uh, no matter how many times you do it, how hard and how draining that is. We all have to deal with uh the impacts that listen, uh the federal budget gets cut, the state budget gets cut, and it rolls downhill to us, and there is no place for us to cut, right? Like we have to deal with the impacts all the time of happening at our state level and our national level. And we're the we're the where the rubber meets the road. We're the ones that the the people are gonna see in their grocery store. We're the ones they're gonna hold accountable for things that are eaten literally out of our control. We mayors deal with so much. We deal with the potholes, we deal with the snowstorms, we deal with the weather, the thunderstorms, the hurricanes. We deal with every single thing that any resident in our jurisdiction experiences in a way that our state and fed and national partners simply just don't have to.

SPEAKER_01

You mentioned the funding piece. How is your approach to public safety changing or affected by the changing funding and support specifically coming from the federal government and making its way down over the last few years?

SPEAKER_00

Well, yeah. I mean, we were smart to uh uh not bank on only having funding come that way. So that's we were very blessed that we were splitting it up, as I said to you earlier today, and we still have that private support, we have our state support, we have obviously the city support, and we still have the best federal delegation that America have. But it has impacted some of our local organizations who are doing our CBI and other work, who lost grants, right? That is a real thing uh that we have to deal with. And the community has really uh uh came here in Baltimore, wrapped our arms around it, and we, I had to replace some of the positions that were working on some of these efforts in Baltimore, uh, from being on federal dollars to moving them to local dollars, which was all a part of the plan in the first place.

SPEAKER_01

And are the are there any really tough public safety decisions that you've had to deal with and navigate with sort of the community that you like you look at and you're like, I really wish I didn't have to make this decision. Any approaches, especially with changes in funding or anything like that?

SPEAKER_00

Aaron Powell Well, the truth is that when I walked out of the row house in 2021 and said that we were gonna have our first carpenter's advanced prevention plan and it was gonna be a five-year plan, right? It wasn't gonna be something that we're gonna just implement overnight and boom, murders and shootings and stuff were gonna go down, that we were gonna strategically do it over a five-year period. Uh, people laughed and were pissed because they they felt like they didn't, we didn't have uh uh time. We didn't have five years. We needed a plan for right now, and we had to do a lot of the explaining that the plan is for right now, but it's also about the future, and that if we wanted to continue to make the mistakes that are made in Baltimore, time and time again in my lifetime, is that we would think about public safety only as a right now. It was a very unpopular political decision at the time. I actually said at the time that we were going to reduce homicides by 15% from one year to the next, and people went crazy, including my own staff members. But now, uh five years later, everyone wants to be a part of the comprehensive violence prevention plan and say, look at what we're doing here revolting. You were understating it. Yeah, right? Like that's what leadership requires of you. I say this all the time. Leadership requires you to do what's right, not what's popular and not what's easy. What's right will get you hated, what's right what might get you unelected, what's right is not gonna get you a bunch of likes on Instagram or TikTok, but what's right is always going to be right, no matter how many people don't like it.

SPEAKER_01

Let's turn to the future. I have three future-related questions for you. The first is just broadly, what do you think are the biggest public safety challenges that you're gonna face for the rest of your term in office?

SPEAKER_00

Well, it's the same ones, right? I think that that we know, especially with the pressures now coming down uh from all of the policies happening at the national level, right? We're talking about uh I I'm in Baltimore, I'm in Maryland, that is seeing oversized impact of the reduction uh of the federal workforce. Where when you see the things that people are talking about, uh uh limiting the access to food and all of these things, we know that ultimately that has a direct correlation to what's going on uh with violence and crime in any place, but it's outsized here. Uh but when you think about now, uh we are now starting to see cocaine flow be one of the things that we're recovering and flowing into the city in ways that we haven't seen in a long time. We obviously always gonna have to be worried about the flow of guns into the city of Baltimore, right? But most importantly, we have to be worried about the conflict. The conflict between groups is what drives balance in the city, which is why we're gonna be focused the way that we are.

SPEAKER_01

And what do you hope your legacy is 20 years from now, 30 years from now, looking back specifically as it relates to public safety?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I think I I say this, I get this question a lot from from students. I always say very simply, uh, when 20 years from now, when some young person is is reading and studying about me, which is a weird thing to talk about, I want them to look back and say that that is where the switch happened for Baltimore. He is the foundation, foundational block on which the new best improved version of Baltimore stands on. That is more important than me than anything. Because when you now have a strategy, when we implement that strategy, when you see it's working, you stay connected and keep it going, then the city can build on top of that. And I say to the young people all the time, the person who uh puts that first part of that foundation down is just as important as the person who puts the fancy topper on top of the billboard. And I'm quite okay being uh that that foundational piece if one of these young people that I've spoken to in school uh grows up to be in this chair and is the person that gets to put the top over. That's awesome.

SPEAKER_01

That's that is a a uh great, great approach. And then last big question is how is AI going to change your job just in general and also your approach to public safety in the future? Is that a a question that you're asking right now?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, we know it'll change everything, right? It'll change everything for how people analyze things and how they, you know, quote unquote predict things. It'll change. Obviously, a lot of folks, I don't, but people use it for things like speech writing and policy writing and all of those things, is it's gonna change everything uh that we do. But it could have some some uh positive impacts on, especially on the analytics and looking at groups and analyzing those groups. I think that that could be a very powerful thing for us. But with anything, you also have to, it has to have the cultural competency and understanding, uh which we know and sometimes in a city like Baltimore, he does not.

SPEAKER_01

So, Mayor Scott, what's next for you?

SPEAKER_00

What's next for me? I think I'm going to read to kids at a school. That's what's next for me.

SPEAKER_01

All right, that sounds fun. Mayor Scott, this has been enlightening, and I really appreciate you taking the time. Um, thank you for coming on the program. Thank you for having me. Thanks for listening to the Jeffalytics Podcast. Be sure to subscribe and to learn more, head on over to ahdatalytics.com for more information and previous episodes. If you like what you heard, please leave a glowing review, which will help others to discover the show. Until next time, I'm Jeff Asher.