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Baltimore Violence Reduction Initiative

Posted at 11:15 PM, Nov 20, 2018
and last updated 2018-11-20 23:16:45-05

We hear it all the time— enough is enough.

Many people asking what our politicians are doing to stop 5-year-old girls from getting shot in the street.

RELATED: Community walks to rally against violence

On Tuesday, Baltimore City Council Members on the public safety commission were grilling members of the city police department and the mayor’s office about their violence reduction imitative.  

The initiative started in February of this year and focuses on zones throughout the city that are violent crime hot spots.

Community walkthroughs lead by Mayor Catherine Pugh and leaders in the Baltimore Police Department give the people who live there the chance to show and tell what needs to be fixed.

Councilman Brandon Scott, the Chair of the Public Safety Committee said that while strides have been made in those zones, repeat violent offenders are just taking their business outside of them into buffer zones.

“If these groups of violent people are moving then we need to make sure that we are targeting those people,” Scott said. “You’re never going to hear about this council making all of these arrests. We’re talking about the quality of the arrests who you’re arresting and not the amount of arrests you have.”

In those zones there has been a 23% reduction in homicides and a 33% reduction in shootings since last year.