2024 began in Baltimore City with a promise of continued progress. For the first time in nearly a decade, the city had recorded fewer than 300 homicides in 2023.
"While this is meaningful progress, the disease of gun violence continues to plague our community and none of us that you see here today are ready to celebrate, we are ready to push this work even further," Mayor Brandon Scott told reporters at a January press conference.
It was only the second day of the year when the city saw its first murder victim - 16-year-old Noah Gibson.
One of his neighbors wasn't feeling optimistic about the recent milestone when he talked to WMAR-2 News after the deadly shooting:
"Two hundred sixty-six and three hundred and something, that's not too much difference. It's the same to me."
Still, about 60 fewer lives were lost this year compared to last. Baltimore Police say their homicide numbers just hit 200. Governor Moore reflected on the decrease at a press conference in late November.
"Baltimore City is seeing one of the most precipitous drops in violent crime of any city in the country right now. And it doesn't happen by accident. It happens because we're moving together and we're moving in partnership."
That partnership was something that seemed to be missing at the start of the year, when prosecutors in the Baltimore City State's Attorney's office accused the state Department of Juvenile Services of acting as a gatekeeper, by not forwarding cases properly.
By June, the agencies figured out what was causing at least some of the miscommunication — a typo.
"There was a huge backlog. Eventually we figured out, it was because it was the wrong email address," State's Attorney Ivan Bates said during a September interview.
But while prosecutors and DJS finally got on the same page, the same couldn't be said for the thousands of people who signed this petition, calling for the head of DJS, Vincent Schiraldi, to be fired.
Most of the concern came from the Southeastern part of the city, after a video showing a group of teenagers attacking a 66-year-old man in Butchers Hill went viral. We spoke to the victim after he learned one of the teens was released by DJS after getting arrested.
"I was beaten to a pulp. I'm just so angry when I found out they had caught two of them and the arresting officer had specifically said not to release the 15-year-old, and DJS just released him anyway, within hours," he said.
Prosecutors were able to later charge the 15-year-old with attempted murder, but people in the neighborhood were sick of hearing similar stories.
"These kids are clearly off the beam," Donna Ann Ward, who started the petition and lives near Patterson Park, told WMAR-2 News. "They're being released without charges, without seeing a judge, without sentencing, right back into the exact same environment that produced them. They are incredibly violent."
Secretary Schiraldi told WMAR-2 News he intends to keep his job as long as the governor will have him, and that anecdotes don't necessarily reflect the bigger picture.
"Folks feel like we're being more lenient. Since the Governor was inaugurated, we have 20% more kids in custody than we did before he was inaugurated. So it's actually kind of a myth that we're being more lenient," Schiraldi said.
Still, change came this year in the form of a new law, and new policies DJS made on its own. Now, children as young as 10 can be charged with most crimes, and DJS is stricter about ankle monitor violations. Critics of the juvenile justice bill said it goes too far and isn't based on evidence.
"For me, the bill is completely uncivilized - to cage children as young as 10 years old," Zakiya Sankara-Jabar from Racial Justice NOW! said at a March press conference calling for the bill to be vetoed.
But Governor Moore signed the bill into law and it went into effect on November 1st.
Another new law on the books stemmed from the 2023 murder of Pava LaPere. Her killer had been let out of prison early after receiving enough "good time credits," also called diminution credits, while serving a sentence for sexual assault.
Her family pushed for a law to make that impossible. The Pava Marie LaPere Act was passed, and violent sex offenders can no longer receive those credits.
"Governor Moore has stated emphatically on multiple occasions that the system failed Pava. It's time to change that system," Frank LaPere said earlier this year.
2024 also saw the take-downs of several organized crime rings. In February, Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown announced charges against a group of six people running a criminal organization that was responsible for murder, two attempted murders, several commercial burglaries and robberies, and at least 35 carjackings. In July, Baltimore Police announced indictments against eleven teenagers for a string of armed robberies and carjackings. In November, federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies completed an investigation into four separate criminal enterprises operating in the Southwest part of the city.
Additionally, carjackings and non-fatal shootings were also down this year from last year according to BPD data.
A deeper look into Baltimore's 2024 crime numbers