Baltimore residents reveal what changes they want to see to combat crime amid National Guard threat

BALTIMORE – While politicians debate how to combat crime in Baltimore, Maryland, local residents who spoke to Fox News Digital advocated for more affordable housing, recreational centers and accessible community resources.

Earlier this month, Gov. Wes Moore and Mayor Brandon Scott deployed the Maryland State Police and the Transportation Authority Police to partner with the Baltimore Police Department after President Donald Trump floated deploying the U.S. National Guard to crackdown on crime. 

“We got so many kids getting into stuff and killing and on drugs, especially down here in this neighborhood on the Penn North,” Tasha, a young mother who spoke to Fox News Digital earlier this month while pushing her baby’s stroller through Baltimore’s Penn-North neighborhood, said. 

Tasha said more kids need access to rec centers because “so many of them are getting hooked on drugs and caught up in things that they don’t got no business getting caught up in, all because they don’t have nothing else out here to do.”

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Fox News Digital spoke to more than a dozen Baltimore residents about how crime is impacting their community. While locals were split on whether Trump deploying the National Guard would curb crime, residents said safety concerns were top of mind. 

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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 reporting. 

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.”

Joseph, a Penn-North resident who spoke to Fox News Digital while a homeless woman slept on his front stoop, said there are abandoned houses and buildings on his street and “all over the place.”

But Trayvon, another Baltimore local, asked, “How can you fix a place and not fix the people?”

“If you fix that, all you’re going to do is make a prettier place to sell drugs,” he said. 

Scott Graham, a Republican who campaigned in 2022 for Maryland’s House of Delegates to represent the Baltimore suburbs, said high property taxes “discourage people from coming in and buying” property. 

“We have vacant housing all over the place, and people are reluctant to come in. That vacant housing is in areas where there’s high crime,” Graham said. 

Moore and Scott have touted “historic reductions in violent crime” in Baltimore, pointing to 91 homicides and 218 nonfatal shootings in 2025, which Scott said are 29.5% and 21% drops. 

But 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. 

The 17 Baltimore locals who spoke to Fox News Digital earlier this month were divided over whether deploying the National Guard is the solution to their crime concerns. While many worried it would raise tensions and inspire riots, others said the troops could serve as a crime deterrent. 

“We just need to get back to where we used to be when we were coming up as kids, where everybody got together and everybody worked together, and they moved people off the blocks, and they made the clean blocks, and they did all of those things,” Ronette, a Baltimore resident, said. “Our city just got to a point where we just, it’s everybody for their self. Nobody works together.”

Trump signed a memorandum this month establishing a task force to address crime in Memphis, Tennessee, similar to his ongoing crime crackdown in Washington, D.C.

He said the effort includes deployment of the National Guard, the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Drug Enforcement Administration, Homeland Security Investigations and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. 

Last month, Trump mobilized 800 D.C. National Guard troops to reduce crime in the nation’s capital. More National Guard troops from Ohio, West Virginia, South Carolina, Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee were dispatched to support the crime crackdown.

In addition to Baltimore, Trump has also floated deploying troops to Chicago and Oakland, but the plans have been met with resistance by Democrats. 

Fox News Digital’s Diana Stacy contributed to this report.