In a remarkable turn of events, Baltimore, a city once notorious for its high crime rates, has witnessed a significant drop in homicides and other violent crimes.
This change came about after the city's electorate ousted their progressive, Soros-backed prosecutor in 2022. Experts are of the opinion that this is not a mere coincidence.
The city's homicide rate skyrocketed after Marilyn Mosby assumed the role of state's attorney in 2015. Mosby, who was elected on a progressive platform, refused to prosecute minor offenses while aggressively charging police officers, including those implicated in the death of Freddie Gray, a black man who died from injuries sustained while in custody.
Despite the officers' eventual acquittal, Mosby's policies had a profound impact on the Baltimore Police Department. Arrests significantly decreased under Mosby's tenure as homicides increased from an average of 229 per year before she took office to 333 per year during her eight-year term, as reported by the Heritage Foundation.
By July 2022, Baltimore's citizens had had enough. Mosby was defeated in the primary election by her Democratic opponent, Ivan Bates, who vowed to reverse her progressive non-prosecution policies and implement stricter penalties for repeat violent offenses and illegal firearm possession.
The results were strikingly evident.
In 2022, Mosby's final year in office, Baltimore recorded 334 homicides. The following year, under Bates's leadership, this figure fell to 262. In 2024, it further decreased to 202 homicides. During the first half of 2025, Baltimore reported only 68 homicides, a 62 percent decrease from the same period in 2022. Auto thefts, robberies, and arson have also seen significant reductions in 2025 compared to the previous year.
"The numbers don't lie," Sean Kennedy, a fellow at the Maryland Public Policy Institute, told the Washington Free Beacon. "Ivan Bates's strategy of targeting the most violent or violence-prone offenders is the primary driver of Baltimore's miraculous success."
"Homicides only started dropping when Bates came in and signaled that carrying guns meant prison," Kennedy added.
During Mosby's tenure from 2015 to early 2023, as violent crime surged in Baltimore, she was often absent. She enjoyed luxurious stays at five-star hotels in Germany and Portugal as part of the 23 out-of-town trips she undertook in 2018 and 2019. Several of these trips were sponsored by nonprofit organizations, including Fair and Just Prosecution, a dark money group funded by billionaire financier George Soros's Open Society Foundations.
In January 2022, Mosby was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of mortgage fraud and perjury related to her two vacation homes in Florida. She was convicted on these charges in 2024, but an appeals court overturned her mortgage fraud conviction earlier this month.
Rafael Mangual, the head of the Manhattan Institute's Policing and Public Safety Initiative, believes that Baltimore's transformation under Bates's leadership embodies a fundamental truth in law enforcement that Mosby and other Soros-backed liberal prosecutors elected during the late 2010s and early 2020s overlooked.
"There really isn't any place thats ever been able to gain control over a crime problem without the police, the prosecutors, and the jails and prisons playing a role," Mangual told the Free Beacon. "That's it."
Since 2022, nearly two dozen Soros-backed prosecutors, including Mosby, Los Angeles County district attorney George Gascn, and Chicago district attorney Kimberly Fox, have been voted out of office. Major cities across the country have implemented re-policing policies since 2022, which has led to a "statistically significant correlation" with reduced violent crime, according to a May 2025 study by the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund.
However, some liberal Maryland officials, including Baltimore mayor Brandon Scott, attribute the city's turnaround to other factors, such as his Group Violence Reduction Strategy (GVRS) initiative and investments in non-police community organizations.
Kennedy and Mangual, however, argue that these progressive non-police interventions have, at best, a marginal impact on reducing crime.
"The mayor can bang on a drum all day about GVRS but the only thing that made his strategy a success was clanging jail house doorsprosecutors matter," Kennedy stated. "GVRS is sprinkles on a cakepretty but empty calories."
Mangual agreed, stating, "People like Brandon Scott have trouble with getting around the reality that significantly reducing crime is always, has always, and will always require good policing and the ability to incapacitate offenders by putting them behind bars."
Thus, the city of Baltimore stands as a testament to the effectiveness of traditional law enforcement methods in curbing crime, challenging the progressive approach that had previously dominated the city's criminal justice system.
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