--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Welcome to Today Explained. I'm Sean Rameswaram here with Miles Bryan, who's been down to Baltimore to find out how they got their violent crimes to go down.
--:-- Miles Bryan: Thanks for having me on the show, Sean.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So, the strategy that Baltimore is pursuing is focused deterrence, focusing on the small group of guys at high risk for shooting or being shot. And there's a shift in the policing part of that. They start making more arrests and prosecuting more gun crimes. But the other part of the strategy is outreach. The people I talked to for this story kept pointing me towards an organization called ROCA.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: [pauses] What's ROCA stand for?
--:-- Miles Bryan: I think it's just ROCA. No way. Oh, it's low case.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Interesting. ROCA is one of the main partners working with the police in Baltimore's Focus Deterrence Program. The police find these people and refer them to ROCA, and then ROCA goes out and tries to get them to join up. And if they do, they're signing up for a combination therapist job training program. There's even a gym.
--:-- Miles Bryan: Yeah, they learn cognitive behavioral therapy to try and get a handle on their impulses. They get paid work doing things like cleaning up city parks. They can get their GED.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: [pauses] That sounds good to me, a nerdy reporter, but what kind of teenager wants to do all this stuff?
--:-- Miles Bryan: Then I ran into a crew of guys who'd been out working who were back for lunch. Why you ain't breaking me bread with the oranges? You ain't asking the oranges.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: [laughs] I don't ask for the oranges? I already morning, I'll see you with the oranges.
--:-- Miles Bryan: Miles. You just said it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Look, I can't say I wasn't awkward, but they were nice enough to let me ask those questions anyway. And I asked them what they thought was working in the city to get gun violence down.
--:-- Miles Bryan: Huh? And these guys were like, look around you. With Ruka, probably the best thing that ever happened for Baltimore. Like, it changed a lot of people's lives.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: [pauses] You guys aren't just saying that because we're out real quick.
--:-- Miles Bryan: No, I'm just saying that because it changed my life. I've been in this program since, what, 2023, right? I came home in 2023. January 10, 2023, I came home for real. I got booked for a gun for real. I was locked up when I came home.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: [pauses] Like, I'm saying, from then to now, my whole mindset changed the life.
--:-- Miles Bryan: Roka reaches hundreds of young men in Baltimore every year. According to their own stats, for young guys who stay enrolled in the program for at least two years, 80% have no new arrests and 92% don't go back to prison.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: [pauses] Okay, so the kids are really impressed with Roka, and it sounds like Roka's working for Baltimore. But how do you get someone who's like, I don't know, just immersed in a gang or in some turf war or something or making money dealing drugs to come to Roka?
--:-- Miles Bryan: Yeah, I think that's the real sticky question here. Like, my sense is when they're in, they're in. But getting them to get involved can be tough. It's a lot of door knocking, a lot of following up.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: [pauses] I actually went out with a Roka outreach worker who goes by Pastor John. I'm a youth worker, technically, from 9 to 5, but the guys know that I'm a pastor 24-7. I never turn that off.
--:-- Miles Bryan: Pastor John got into being a youth worker after doing a stint in prison for dealing drugs. These days, he's all about his guys.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: [pauses] We went to check in with one of them. Yes, he's actually going to come down. Okay. What's this fellow's name?
--:-- Miles Bryan: His name is James.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: James. Hold on, Pastor John, I'm coming down. I'm on a jail call. I'm coming down now.
--:-- Miles Bryan: James hopped in our car. What's going on, James?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Another day, another day. Off. I'm off today.
--:-- Miles Bryan: The whole time we talked, he kept his phone on speaker. I'm on a jail call with my brother here, just giving some motivational, you know, advice. You feel me?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that's all just cooling. I'm just chilling. Everything going good with the job?
--:-- Miles Bryan: Yeah, everything going good. It's a cool job for real easy money.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: [pauses] James is 19, and he's doing great now. But a couple of years ago, he was struggling. He got arrested for a gun charge, identified as a high-risk person, likely to shoot or be shot.
--:-- Miles Bryan: When I first started off, it was rough for me. I wasn't talking to my mentors, none of that. They was reaching out to me. I wasn't reaching back. It was rough.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: [pauses] His initial introduction into Roka was rough.
--:-- Miles Bryan: James and the pastor were obviously tight. And on the way back, I asked him how that came to be.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Unfortunately for him, the catalyst, the thing that triggered him to really get him on the right track was his brother was killed.
--:-- Miles Bryan: He was the guy that was on my caseload. And I ended up being the pastor at his funeral, and I preached at his funeral. That's when I met that young man.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: [pauses] And he just came and gave me a hug, and he was weeping. And he was like, I need Roker. I really need Roker.
--:-- Miles Bryan: From that point on, he'll pick up the phone. Pastor John, I need to talk to you. This happened at work today, Pastor John. I got robbed. They stole my paycheck. You know, I'm feeling some kind of way.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: [pauses] You know, all my guys are like, come on, let's go get him and doing stuff like that. But he's never acted on that.
--:-- Miles Bryan: That is so much work and luck and coincidence just for one guy to help pull him on the right path. It's kind of amazing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: [pauses] Yeah, it is. It's absolutely amazing. But I don't take any credit for it. Like I said, Roka was here long before I ever did.
--:-- Miles Bryan: I just thanked him for giving me the opportunity to share that with these young men.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: [pauses] Miles, help me with something, because this sounds great, but the program itself doesn't sound new. We've talked about violence interrupters on this show before. They've been doing this stuff for a long time in cities across the country. What makes something like ROCA so special in this moment or are there other factors here?
--:-- Miles Bryan: You know, I think Baltimore focused deterrence strategy and stuff like ROCA has actually moved the needle. But I don't think it explains the whole picture.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: [pauses] Baltimore has seen this huge decrease in gun crime, but so have many other American cities, right? Like the whole country.
--:-- Miles Bryan: And after talking to a bunch of experts and more helpfully that group of kids at lunch, I think there's at least three other national factors worth mentioning.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: [pauses] Okay, first, most obviously, the end of the pandemic. They closed all the fields and all the gyms, so we had nothing to do but be outside. In most cities, gun crime spiked in 2020, right? During that time, schools were shut down, malls were closed, basketball hoops were taped off. All that stuff's back open now.
--:-- Miles Bryan: I feel like what's stopping everything is, it's more stuff to do now. Like, it's more activities, more, you feel me, the pool's open now.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: [pauses] Okay, so everything opens back up, and that helps. What else?
--:-- Miles Bryan: The second factor I think can be summed up in one word, exhaustion. A lot of older guys locked up for real, for real. Like they really pay a certain influence on young niggas for real, for real.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: [pauses] Gun violence feeds on itself, right? One shooting leads to two retaliatory shootings, which leads to four more and on and on.
--:-- Miles Bryan: I talked to Daniel Webster, a criminologist at Johns Hopkins, who says that cycle tends to exhaust itself. A lot of the people involved in the shootings are either killed or maimed or arrested.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: [pauses] And others just look around and decide like, hey, it's not worth it. A lot of people never been in them type of situations to where they was fighting for their life in the court system. So they think it's all cool and good. But now a lot of people are coming to a realization like, man, this not it. I don't got the money for a lawyer. Like, you feel?
--:-- Miles Bryan: Just like that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: [pauses] Okay, so it sounds like crime sort of hits rock bottom. What's the third factor?
--:-- Miles Bryan: The third factor, the final factor here is money. Money. Let's talk about Baltimore's rec centers. All the recs getting reopened, everything getting refurnished, rebuilding and all, everything getting looking better and stuff like that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: [pauses] Like just simple things like that, they can go a long way. Because if somebody, if you got somebody in a messed up environment, all they see is abandoned houses, all the recs closed, no activities. What else is there to do outside? You feel me?
--:-- Miles Bryan: Yes, the rec centers, the pools, all that stuff reopened after being closed for COVID. But it's not just that. Baltimore City has been spending a ton of money redoing rec centers, redoing pools, redoing other kinds of public infrastructure.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: [pauses] And the people they're trying to reach are noticing.
--:-- Miles Bryan: But this part has historically been tricky for local governments to tackle because doing this kind of thing is expensive.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: [pauses] Brandon Scott's arrival in the mayor's office in 2020 turned out to be perfect timing. In 2021, Biden signs the American Rescue Plan Act, a COVID stimulus bill that provides hundreds of millions of dollars to Baltimore and most other cities.
--:-- Miles Bryan: Baltimore got $40 million for upgrading parks and rec centers. Mayor Scott put $50 million into his gun violence reduction plan right away.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: [pauses] The only reason Baltimore has so many pastor johns out and about right now is that groups like Roca got a big cash infusion from the feds.
--:-- Miles Bryan: Come on. Come on, folks.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: [pauses] And it wasn't just Baltimore who got some love from the feds, I assume.
--:-- Miles Bryan: No. Across the country, local and state government spending on policing and public safety went up by 49% between 2021 and 2024.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: [pauses] That one's sort of obvious, but local and state spending on neighborhood social centers went up by 82%. Spending on lighting, which has been proven to help reduce gun violence, went up by 45%.
--:-- Miles Bryan: And that's all in addition to the billions of dollars that the Biden administration paid out to ROCA and other anti-violence groups during those years.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: [pauses] I talked to the criminal analyst Jeff Asher about this. He put it on my radar. He said most of the systemic factors we think of as driving gun violence in America, they did not change in the last couple of years, right? Like the country's still swimming with guns. There's still a lot of people in poverty.
--:-- Miles Bryan: But local governments all over got a ton of money to try stuff. He called it, quote, slop being thrown against the wall. But it's also, I think, well-informed slop, if that's a thing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: [pauses] And it is the thing that I think helps to explain why we're seeing it everywhere and why it has been so significant, because it was it was a really enormous increase in spending above and beyond what we've ever done before.
--:-- Miles Bryan: Miles, I know you're trying to bring us good news, but now I have to ask if this is going to take a turn for the worse, because Joe Biden was all about spending that money, as we've talked about, you know, ad nauseum on this show. But Donald Trump is all about cutting funding for anything in sight, except maybe tax cuts for rich people.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: [pauses] Yeah, this is the bummer part of a feel-good story. The Trump administration already cut nearly a billion dollars of grants for anti-violence groups back in April.
--:-- Miles Bryan: Like in a Doge-style cut, they took money back that they'd already promised. Roca lost a million bucks. They had to eliminate some jobs. It's going to serve 15% fewer kids this year than last.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: [pauses] And that's super frustrating to Mayor Scott, who's otherwise kind of having a moment in the sun.
--:-- Miles Bryan: It's really sad because you have a president, an administration, and party that claims that they want to deal with violent crime, right? that they care about violent crime in these inner cities, or as they would say, democratic-led cities.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: [pauses] But then they cut ROCA. They cut the Center for Hope, people that are out here helping to prevent violence simply because they don't believe in the methods that they use.
--:-- Miles Bryan: If you talk to criminologists, if you talk to anti-violence people, they're frustrated because they can look out onto the horizon And they know that if history is our guide, something is going to happen that will trigger another uptick in gun violence at some point.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: [pauses] And we've got this system right now, this tenuous balance that seems to be working. And there's a decent chance we're just going to throw it all away.
--:-- Miles Bryan: So much for good news.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Miles Bryan is our senior producer and reporter and our Philadelphia Bureau Chief. Shout-outs to the Northeast Regional. Jolie Myers edited the show today. Laura Bullard fact-checked it. Patrick Boyd and Andrea Kristinsdottir mixed it. It's Today Explained. Thank you.
