Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott is speaking out to defend “a 50-year low” in homicides.Julia Nikhinson/AP
President Trump is planning to ramp up his federal reach into local enforcement after first flooding the streets of DC with National Guard troops, and this week he promised to send troops to more cities—including Baltimore.
Despite a federal judge ruling that Trump broke the law when deploying the National Guard in Los Angeles earlier this summer, Trump insisted during a press conference on Tuesday that his administration had “a right to do it because I have an obligation to do it to protect this country… and that includes Baltimore.”
Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott has been speaking out in defense of his city, including in a sit-down interview this week with me. Scott pushed back against Trump’s claims, saying that this year, his city has witnessed “the fewest amount of homicides through this date on record. That’s a 50-year low, and that’s still not good enough for me.” The Washington Post recently reported that homicide rates in Baltimore have plummeted nearly 23 percent compared with the first half of 2024, while non-fatal shootings fell by nearly 20 percent.
Scott also decried federal cuts to the very programs he says have been instrumental in reducing crime in Baltimore.
“Community violence intervention, victim services, all of those kinds of services that have been cut,” he said. “What we want from the president is very simple—reinstating all the cuts that they’ve made to federal grants to programs that have been working to reduce violence.”
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