April in Baltimore ended with a historically low number of homicides. Five people were murdered that month, the fewest in any recorded month in the city’s history, ending a decade where the city regularly surpassed 300 homicides a year. “This is progress, but we aren’t stopping to celebrate,” Mayor Brandon Scott said. “Five homicides in April is still five too many — and we will continue to use all tools at our disposal to prevent violence and save lives.”
But at the end of that month, the city had fewer tools at its disposal than it previously had thanks to major cuts by the Trump administration. On April 22, the Department of Justice cancelled more than 360 ongoing grants totalling more than $800 million issued by the Office of Justice Programs for community violence intervention work around the country, including programs credited with contributing to Baltimore’s dramatic reduction in homicides.
The Justice Department eliminated the grant funding in cookie-cutter emails sent to the organizations, terminating the funds immediately.
“The Department has changed its priorities with respect to discretionary grant funding to focus on, among other things, more directly supporting certain law enforcement operations, combatting violent crime, protecting American children, and supporting American victims of trafficking and sexual assault, and better coordinating law enforcement efforts at all levels of government,” one termination letter, obtained by Baltimore Beat, read. “This award demonstrates that it no longer effectuates Department priorities.”
The Justice Department did not respond to request for comment, but the cuts came days before the Executive Order “Strengthening and Unleashing America’s Law Enforcement,” which promises to “establish best practices at the State and local level for cities to unleash high-impact local police forces; protect and defend law enforcement officers wrongly accused and abused by State or local officials; and surge resources to officers in need.”
Paired with the cuts, the “unleashing” seems in part to mean “defunding” everything but the police. Additionally, the executive order promises to review all consent decrees, such as the one the Baltimore Police Department has been operating under since 2016, “and modify, rescind, or move to conclude such measures that unduly impede the performance of law enforcement functions.”
“For all their lip service about public safety, the Trump administration doesn’t give a damn about it,” Scott said in a statement. “They said they support law enforcement but they’re defunding programs to support public safety officers and pardoned [January 6] rioters.”
The organizations whose grants were terminated have 30 days to appeal.
“At the precise moment that we are realizing these public safety reductions, when we’re seeing all of these partners in the city of Baltimore… truly doing work to coordinate together, at that very moment, we’re seeing a withdrawing of that investment and that threatens to undermine the gain that we’ve worked so hard collectively to achieve,” said Stefanie Mavronis, the director of the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement (MONSE).
“At the precise moment that we are realizing these public safety reductions…we’re seeing a withdrawing of that investment and that threatens to undermine the gain that we’ve worked so hard collectively to achieve.”
Stefanie Mavronis, the director of the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement
Roca, a violence interruption program that was founded in Massachusetts and has worked in Baltimore since 2018, is one of those organizations. In 2022, Roca’s Baltimore program was awarded $1,998,807 as part of the Office of Justice Programs’ Community Based Violence Intervention and Prevention Initiative.
“At 5:00 pm on [April] 22, we got a letter that three of our grants are gone,” said Kurtis Palermo, vice president of Roca Maryland. “It was just gone.”
Roca’s model is based on what they call “relentless outreach,” which begins when they “find young people at the center of violence and show up at their door—and we keep showing up every day until they open up,” as the organization’s website puts it. In one case in Baltimore, it took 112 visits to bring one young man into the program. Like the city’s Safe Streets program and other violence interruption programs, this approach involves working with “credible messengers,” whose own histories around violence allow them to speak honestly and authoritatively to those most at risk for violence. Unlike Safe Streets, or the national Cure Violence model, Roca’s interventions are more intensive and long-term, involving skills training and a look at the larger systemic causes of violence.
But like other violence intervention programs, Roca is responsive to individual acts of violence, operating on the idea that the victim of a shooting is likely to become a shooter. With the Community Based Violence Intervention and Prevention Initiative, Roca expanded the use of their data-driven After Shooting Protocol, where “all non-fatal shootings will be reviewed daily and each identified young person will receive a door knock within 24-48 hours to connect them to services.”
With only about half of the roughly $2 million grant spent, Roca quite suddenly lost about a million bucks. And this comes on top of losing $1.3 million in congressional earmarks that had already been approved by Congress for Roca Baltimore’s Transitional Employment Program but was later scrapped as legislators kicked the budgetary can down the road, forcing the organization to make difficult decisions even before the grant cuts.
“We eliminated three open positions in December, then in March, we did a modest layoff in Baltimore,” said Dwight Robson, executive vice president of operations at Roca. “We’ve gone from 10 youth workers to seven.”
Even with increased case-loads for the remaining outreach workers, this has very real consequences on the streets of Baltimore. “Last year, in FY 24 we served 441 individuals, I believe,” Robson said. “We’re now planning to serve about 380 on an annual basis…So we have had to reduce it by 60.”
Roca is struggling to prioritize the most high-risk people to work with, Robson says.
“There is no such thing as low or moderate risk, with regards to Roca, Baltimore,” he said. “But, that’s 60 fewer individuals that we will engage with.”
“It definitely does have an impact if we’re seeing these community violence intervention organizations have to scale back the number of staff, taking people off the street [who] can prevent the next incident of violence from happening,” says Mavronis of MONSE.
Roca is not the only organization that the mayor’s office credits with contributing to the reduction of violence that has lost its funding. Living Classrooms Foundation lost $1 million in grant money for its Operation Respond, whose goal is “to provide comprehensive services through our mobile Crisis Response Resource Center,” which is modified RV staffed with a team comprised of resource navigators, a licensed clinical social worker, and career and workforce development case managers. The hope is to “empower those at the highest risk of community gun violence, helping them heal from unresolved trauma and transform their lives for the better,” in the Belair-Edison and McElderry Park neighborhoods, which are also Safe Streets “catchment areas,” where the city has focused resources to curb violence.
LifeBridge Health’s Center for Hope also lost around a million dollars remaining in a grant for a program supporting therapy for gun victims. LifeBridge runs several of the city’s Safe Streets locations, but Safe Street’s operational and staff funding was not affected, according to Mavronis.
“Safe Streets and the funding that supports it is pretty well secured,” Mavronis said. “Our state legislature, back in maybe 2018, put it into the budget, so every single year there is $3.6 million in the state budget along with more than a million, if I’m not mistaken, from city general funds that support Safe Streets.”
Though Safe Streets is funded through the city and state, it does not work closely with the police department because the nature of its work requires trust from those likely to be victims or perpetrators of violence. Safe Streets’ violence interrupters would, they feel, lose credibility — and access to vital information — if the streets thought they were collaborating with police.
Roca, on the other hand, works closely with police and began a program in 2024 that uses the same emotional regulation training that they deploy in the community to “rewire” the mental processes of police officers. “Our training has gotten a lot better over the last few years, and this happens to be one of the best ones that we have,” Baltimore Police Commissioner Richard Worley told WBAL in September 2024. BPD has not responded to request for comment on the loss of funding for these organizations.
The Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) also lost funding. PERF, which has had close relationships with several Baltimore Police commissioners and released an after-action report on BPD’s handling of the 2015 Uprising, focuses many programs on police reform
As much as the loss of the DOJ grants may affect individual organizations, the uncertainty of the future is worse.
“What I’m hearing from everyone is just bracing ourselves for the fact that this is just the first of what’s probably going to be more and many cuts,” Mavronis said. “So I think part of what we’re dealing with right now is the uncertainty…and knowing in the back of our minds that there’s certainly more to come.”
Mavronis says MONSE is working with its partners to try to limit the damage to their work, seeking funding from the city, state, or philanthropic partners but that such conversations are ongoing, due in part to the “chaotic nature in which some of these decision notifications are coming down.”
“We are adjusting to this situation while preparing for what could be several other shoes to drop,” Roca’s Robson said.
“We are adjusting to this situation while preparing for what could be several other shoes to drop.”
Dwight Robson, executive vice president of operations at Roca
Despite the uncertainty, which Palermo compares to the onset of COVID-19 in 2020, MONSE and its partners are working to maintain the violence interruption work that they credit with the dramatic decrease in homicides in the city.
“We’re not going to stop doing what we’re doing,” Palermo said. “We may not look the same through all of this, but we’re still going to serve young people.”
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