The truth about crime in American cities? We asked 50 mayors.

Peoria, Ill., saw a spike in violent crime through the pandemic that startled local leaders.

Gun violence among young people in particular was going up at a disturbing pace in a city that already had one of the highest murder rates in the country. Democratic Mayor Rita Ali needed a plan to yank the numbers back down.

She hired a new top cop two months after being sworn in in 2021 who sought to make the police more visible and opened a tip line at the beginning of 2022. The city launched a violence “interrupter” program. A community center started offering school tutoring, physical fitness classes and mentoring on how to handle conflicts without picking up a gun.

Peoria still had a high rate of gun violence last year. But shootings and homicides fell roughly 26 percent, compared to 2021, a drop Ali and other local leaders attribute to the new suite of programs.

“We’re looking block by block how we can address gun violence and really transform the situation within these hot spots,” Ali, the first Black woman elected to lead Peoria, a city 160 miles southwest of Chicago, said in an interview. “We think if we can interrupt the violence within these hot spots, that it’s going to have a collective impact within our community.”

There’s a similar scene playing out across the country. Leaders for communities of all sizes are desperate to restore the broad, steady declines in violence that preceded Covid-19. What’s happening is an experimentation with anti-crime methods that respect the protests that erupted across the nation after the police killing of George Floyd in 2020. How mayors address the issue of public safety will decide their political fate, whether their cities prosper or stagnate, and to what degree their residents can live without fear for their lives or their family.

For 2023, POLITICO assembled 50 mayors — one from every state — to shine a light on the challenges their communities face and offer up the lessons they’ve learned on the job. Throughout the year, members of the inaugural Mayors Club will share their perspective on key issues that weigh on them and their peers, in both surveys and interviews. We’ll hear directly from leaders who are far from Washington’s corridors of power, representing cities and towns big and small, urban and suburban.

The first topic we asked the members of the Mayors Club about: Crime and policing.

Ali and mayors all over the country are grappling with a similar surge in violence, anchored with the huge responsibility of reducing crime rates with limited money and limited power. It’s a confluence of forces that leave mayors exasperated — often feeling boxed in by a frightened public and an intractable problem.

Here these mayors will discuss their search for solutions to many of the same problems: Understaffed police departments facing low morale — and a public uneasiness with the people hired to protect them. A steady flow of illegal guns. Inflamed and inaccurate rhetoric. State lawmakers who get in their way. And, of course, insufficient funds.

“It’s a very volatile situation,” Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb, a Democrat, said of crime in his city. “We can have a very safe month, then you can have a mass shooting and the next month is challenging.”

Louisville, Ky., Mayor Craig Greenberg, a Democrat, campaigned on combating gun violence, and a few months into his tenure he’s trying to fulfill that promise. It’s an issue that became deeply personal for him **and predates the recent shooting **: He survived a shooting at his campaign headquarters last year when a candidate for city council fired several rounds before a door was closed and barricaded. No one was injured but a bullet grazed the sweater Greenberg was wearing.

A few weeks into office, Greenberg announced a new plan unique to Kentucky: Guns seized by the police department would be disabled before being turned over to the state. Their firing pins would be removed and a label added saying that the gun may have been used in the killing of a child or to commit other homicides in Louisville. Kentucky law mandates that all forfeited guns must be auctioned, a requirement Greenberg said is “dangerous and absurd” because it allows for the weapons to be recirculated.

“There are thousands and thousands of guns in our possession we are going to be rendering inoperative,” Greenberg said in an interview. “We believe it’s important to do everything we can to continue to reduce gun violence.”

Greenberg, as mayor of Kentucky’s largest city, is likely setting himself up for a legal challenge to this workaround as well as a confrontation with the conservative state legislature behind the decades-old law. And proceeds from the auctions go toward buying equipment like body armor and tasers for police departments.

The Kentucky State Fraternal Order of Police opposes the mayor’s plan and said it “will have far reaching ramifications for police and sheriffs departments.”

Greenberg has promised that his initiative won’t hurt funding for law enforcement.

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Mayors told POLITICO they are consumed with figuring out how to keep guns off the streets — and they’re facing new challenges all the time.

In Lancaster, Penn., Mayor Danene Sorace said the police department has discovered an uptick in ghost guns — untraceable firearms that can be bought online or assembled at home using a 3D printer. A recent federal report found that the use of ghost guns has risen by more than 1,000 percent since 2017.

“As a mayor, you feel that you have no sense of control over these things, especially given the climate around guns in our country and the lack of support for law enforcement to help stem the tide of illegal guns,” Sorace, a Democrat, said in an interview. “It’s really frustrating.”

In Columbia, S.C., Mayor Daniel Rickenmann is in the process of setting up a new anti-gun violence office, an effort he imagines will consolidate resources and deploy a coordinated response across city agencies. Rickenmann, a Republican, has sparred with the city council over funding, arguing that Columbia — which experienced more shootings in 2021 than any year on record — needs a central hub dedicated to the issue.

Some council members have balked at the price tag, which is estimated at more than $800,000 in federal funds over three years.

Rickenmann also wants to see the state legislature, ruled by a Republican supermajority, pass some gun restrictions while also preserving the right to own a firearm.

“We’ve got to show people you’ve got to be responsible,” he said in an interview. “I don’t think we should take away the opportunity for people to own a firearm … but it doesn’t mean you can take it to the mall.”

He added: “I don’t think the intent was that everything is a free-for-all, and I do think we’ve got to have some boundaries and restrictions.”

An increasing number of cities across the country are rolling out violence interruption initiatives — programs that send individuals out onto the streets to deescalate the potential for crimes before they occur. These interrupters often have a criminal record and relationships with gang members after following that life themselves. Their salaries are paid for by a combination of federal and local funding, depending on the city.

In Birmingham, Ala., Mayor Randall Woodfin is bringing the city’s interrupters into the hospital by sending workers to the bedside of gunshot victims admitted to the trauma department.

“What we want is not only for that victim to survive, what we want is for them not to retaliate,” Woodfin, a Democrat, said.

But these interrupter programs have run into problems getting off the ground, mainly with building the trust of law enforcement and community members and convincing those leaders to spend significant sums. It’s difficult for advocates of these efforts to prove they prevented crimes that never occurred and the interrupters can sometimes face tremendous risk.

In Baltimore, which has had a violence interrupter program since 2007, three workers employed on behalf of the city’s Safe Streets initiative were recently shot and killed on the job over an 18-month period. One of those men was Dante Barksdale, the director of Safe Streets and a close friend of Democratic Mayor Brandon Scott, a Black man who grew up in the Park Heights neighborhood, a predominantly low-income area with high crime rates.

Following the murders, Baltimore’s leaders faced questions about the program’s risks and whether there are better approaches.

“The day that [Barksdale] died is one of the hardest days of my life as an elected official,” said Scott, who got choked up when talking about his death. But he said Barksdale was committed to the effort.

Barksdale would tell Scott: “We’ve got to go deeper. We’ve got to do more of it, not less, because it’s necessary and it works.”

Scott is pushing a comprehensive public safety strategy that not only relies on law enforcement but also programs like Safe Streets and the recently reimagined Group Violence Reduction Strategy that directs job training, drug counseling, housing and behavioral health support to at-risk individuals.

“When you think about gun violence as a disease or a cancer, you have to cure the whole cancer, not just one symptom,” Scott said.

Members of The Mayors Club said it is crucial to encourage law enforcement to embrace community policing tactics: being more visible within their cities and towns and directing nonviolent 911 calls to mental health professionals. That approach, they believe, will help build trust between law enforcement and residents.

In few places has that mandate been more difficult than in Tacoma, Wash., where Manuel Ellis, a 33-year-old Black man, died during an arrest in 2020. The incident sparked a crisis for the city and state, pulling in the governor and leading Mayor Victoria Woodards to immediately call for the removal and prosecution of the four police officers on the scene after video footage of the altercation was released showing the officers choking Ellis and repeatedly tasing him. Three of the officers are awaiting trial on murder and manslaughter charges. The Tacoma Police union has called the prosecution’s case a “witch hunt” and that the officers acted “in accordance with the law.”

Woodards, a Democrat and the city’s first Black mayor, said she found the Ellis killing and its fallout “devastating” as she dealt with her own emotions about “representing the system that has now hurt my community.”

“Mayors have to be really careful. … I’ve got to call out what’s wrong but I also have to balance that with still saying that those who are still left, those who are waking up every day fighting crime, still have to be honored in the work that they’re doing,” she said. “It’s a tightrope. It’s not easy.”

Mayors shared deep concerns about the quality of life for police officers, who they say are experiencing low morale amid the national discourse over policing and mental health issues associated with their dangerous jobs.

And law enforcement resources are stretched thin, an issue exacerbated by recruitment challenges.

“People just don’t want to be police officers and that’s a big challenge,” Dubuque, Iowa, Mayor Brad Cavanagh, a Democrat, said in an interview. “Recruiting and hiring is our biggest concern right now.”

The Dubuque police department currently has 14 vacancies and no longer receives a comparable amount of applicants for open positions that it used to.

“It’s a challenge when you have a national narrative where people are not as supportive of the police, and for some really legitimate reasons,” he said of the police department’s personnel setbacks. “There’s been some terrible things that have happened at the hands of police officers in the United States. And it leads to a larger discussion that doesn’t attract somebody to the profession.”

One-third of the mayors in the club reported drugs and addiction as the leading cause of crime in their communities. Nearly a quarter cited economic inequality, poverty and a lack of opportunities.

Some mayors are hoping to address a few of these root causes with a greater focus on lifting people out of poverty or helping those struggling with substance abuse.

In Louisville, Ky., the city is exploring how to create a universal pre-kindergarten program.

The city of San Diego is lobbying the California Legislature to crack down on dealers of illicit fentanyl, who prey on the homeless population.

In Birmingham, Ala., the city has provided more than $3 million in college tuition assistance to more than 800 high school students.

All these efforts are intended to get at systemic issues mayors believe may meet long term policy goals — and could be better realized with the support of state and federal government and more money.

“We’re dealing with the symptom and not the underlying cause,” Democratic Santa Fe, N.M., Mayor Alan Webber said.