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BALTIMORE – While local leaders claim Baltimore crime is down amid President Trump’s threat to send federal resources to the city, Fox News Digital spoke to several residents on the street who said they don’t feel safe and don’t feel crime is being handled as well as advertised.
Fox News Digital recently spoke to over a dozen Baltimore residents about how crime is impacting their community. While locals were split on whether President Donald Trump’s plan to deploy National Guard troops would curb crime, residents said safety concerns were top of mind.
Tasha, a young mother who spoke to Fox News Digital while pushing her baby’s stroller through Baltimore’s Penn-North neighborhood, said she doesn’t feel safe.
“There are so many things and so much going on in Baltimore,” she said. “That’s the stuff that needs attention. You need to be trying to figure out why people are committing and doing the crimes that they’re doing. How can you all prevent people from doing the things that they doing? What can y’all offer people?”
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“No I don’t,” Tasha told Fox News Digital when asked if she feels safe in Baltimore right now.
More than two dozen people were hospitalized in a mass drug overdose event in Penn-North in July. Meanwhile, three out of the seven homicides in Baltimore during August were in the nearby Park Heights, according to local reports.
Between people selling and using drugs on the corner as one police car was parked just down the street, Tasha said that in Penn-North, “everything is back out here running like it didn’t even happen a month ago.”
Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott and Gov. Wes Moore, D-Md., have stood united against Trump’s threat to deploy the National Guard to Baltimore amid the president’s nationwide crime crackdown, which started in Washington, D.C., and has since been floated in other cities, including Chicago.
Scott and Moore argue that Baltimore is experiencing its lowest homicide rate in 50 years and touted “historic reductions in violent crime,” pointing to 91 homicides and 218 nonfatal shootings in 2025, which Scott said are 29.5% and 21% drops.
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“We’re good; we don’t need or want the National Guard here in Baltimore,” Scott said.
Statistics compiled by the nonprofit research institute Just Facts show that Baltimore’s 2024 murder rate is still 6.8 times the average for all metropolitan areas in the nation and that if the murder rate stays the same as it was in 2024, roughly 1 in every 38 people in the city will have their lives cut short by murder at some point during the course of their lives.
While rejecting federal troops, the Maryland leaders announced on Friday that they are sending Maryland law enforcement resources to Baltimore to support public safety. The announcement was made on the heels of Scott and Moore’s high-profile walk through Baltimore’s Park Heights neighborhood on Friday. Trump has trolled Moore for suggesting the president participate in a similar walk through the city.
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Tasha, who told Fox News Digital that Penn-North needs more recreation centers and advocated for a mandatory curfew to keep kids out of trouble, said law enforcement needs to crack down on persistent crime in her neighborhood.
“I don’t care if it is a kid committing the crime. If you do the crime, you’re old enough to do the time,” she said, adding that juvenile criminals “get off so easy” in terms of punishment.
Joseph, a Penn-North resident who spoke to Fox News Digital while a homeless woman slept on his front stoop, said he feels like crime is going up.
“Every time they say the crime’s going low, it’s not going low,” he said. “We got a lot of drug dealers, needles out here. We got people sleeping out here, the girl over there sleeping. Every day she gets up, I try to help her, feed her, give her clothes from the church, but everything changes. She’s still doing the same thing, and she might have AIDS. I don’t even know.”
Joseph said a lot of people in his neighborhood are getting shot over drugs and with dealers around and “every area you go to is getting worser and worser.”
“They’re killing our own people,” he said.
George, another local who spoke to Fox News Digital in Baltimore’s Bolton Hill neighborhood, agreed crime “has gotten worse.”
“It’s just street crime,” he said. “Moo Moo Cows over there. They’ve had their windows broken three times, and this is an ice cream shop. Just by kids running through here just smashing things, and a number of windows along here have been broken.
He said on the weekends, bars blast music until the early hours of the morning, but “the liquor board just doesn’t seem to do anything about it, and they don’t have enough police down here to take care of it,” adding that fights often break out “especially after Steelers games.”
Anthony, a Baltimore resident of 30 years who now lives in western Maryland, said his crime concern began when he found “heroin addicts shooting up behind our house” and that crime ultimately drove him to the suburbs.
“One day I came home from work and went to go to the bank, and then I walked into the middle of a carjacking, and it was a crazy chase through the streets, and this person was getting killed several blocks south of there, and I just thought to myself, what the heck am I doing here?” Anthony said.
While some residents did say that Baltimore leadership is effectively addressing crime, including a woman named Anette Lang who said Mayor Scott is doing a “great job” while placing blame on the Trump administration, the majority expressed concern.
Daren Muhammed, a local radio host who called Penn-North “ground zero,” rejected the narrative that crime is down in Baltimore.
“They’re fudging the numbers,” Muhammed claimed.
Fox News Digital reached out to the offices of Mayor Scott and Governor Moore for comment.
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