Catholic Charities’ Safe Streets marks 10 years of violence interruption work across four Baltimore neighborhoods

A decade inside Baltimore’s community violence intervention model

Catholic Charities’ Safe Streets teams are marking 10 years of violence prevention work in Baltimore, a milestone that traces back to the organization’s entry into the citywide Safe Streets Baltimore initiative in early 2016. The program operates as a community violence intervention strategy, using trained outreach workers and “violence interrupters” to identify brewing conflicts, mediate disputes, and connect high-risk individuals and families to services intended to reduce retaliation and prevent shootings.

Safe Streets Baltimore was established in 2007 as a public health-oriented approach to reducing gun violence in neighborhoods with historically high rates of shootings and homicides. Oversight sits with the city’s neighborhood safety infrastructure, which contracts with community-based operators. Catholic Charities currently runs four of the city’s 10 Safe Streets sites: Cherry Hill, Brooklyn, Penn-North, and Sandtown-Winchester. LifeBridge Health’s Center for Hope operates the other six sites citywide.

What data show—and what they do not

A major academic evaluation released in 2023 examined homicides and nonfatal shootings in areas served by Safe Streets across multiple sites and years. The analysis found an overall association between Safe Streets implementation and reduced gun violence, while also identifying variation by site and by the program’s length of operation. Longer-running sites showed clearer reductions than newer sites, and at least one site showed an increase for certain outcomes during the study period—underscoring that results were not uniform across all locations.

More recent city updates have highlighted neighborhood-level milestones at specific sites, including periods of a year or more without a homicide within defined “catchment” boundaries. In early 2026, city officials reported that the Park Heights catchment area had surpassed one year without a homicide, while also providing citywide mediation totals for 2025.

How Safe Streets work is structured on the ground

Safe Streets teams are typically composed of a site supervisor, a violence prevention coordinator, and multiple outreach workers/violence interrupters. The model emphasizes street outreach, relationship-based engagement, and real-time conflict mediation, paired with referrals to supportive services. While the program is often discussed in the context of shootings and homicides, the daily work frequently spans trauma response, community events, and coordination with other prevention and support systems.

• Conflict mediation aimed at preventing imminent violence
• Outreach to individuals assessed as being at elevated risk
• Connections to services such as counseling, employment support, and other stabilization resources
• Community-based events designed to promote safety and strengthen local networks

Funding and oversight remain central issues

As the program reaches a decade of Catholic Charities-led operations, Safe Streets also continues to face recurring questions about stable funding, evaluation capacity, and program monitoring. Public audits and reporting in recent years have emphasized internal controls and documentation requirements tied to program expenditures, reflecting the complexity of running a citywide intervention model across multiple operators and neighborhoods.

Over 10 years, Catholic Charities’ Safe Streets work has become a permanent part of Baltimore’s violence prevention infrastructure—operating alongside health systems, city agencies, and neighborhood partners as the city measures progress and confronts persistent disparities in safety.

The 10-year milestone arrives amid a broader period in which Baltimore has reported substantial year-over-year declines in key violence indicators, even as officials and researchers continue to stress that outcomes vary by neighborhood, and that sustained reductions depend on consistent implementation, staffing, and long-term investment.