Can Austin do "violence prevention"?

Last year the U.S. recorded the biggest single-year drop in homicides and ended the year with the lowest murder rate since at least 1960. Theories abound, but to me the biggest takeaway is that crime trends do not fit neatly into the most popular narratives around government policy, whether that's the right's focus on cops and jails or the left's focus on social services to address the "root causes" of crime.

But that is not to say that policy is futile. One particularly encouraging model comes from Baltimore, which has seen murders plummet by more than 60% from its peak in 2021.

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Baltimore, whose reputation for gang violence and urban despair was cemented by The Wire in the early 2000's, credits much of its turnaround to the Group Violence Reduction Strategy the city launched in 2022.