Mayor Scott’s rapid response press secretary attacked a social media ranking account — while Baltimore’s violent crime rate sits 2,175% above the national average. The FBI data was right there.
By Michael Phillips | MDBayNews
Baltimore City’s rapid response press secretary went to war this week — with a restaurant ranking website.
Jonas Poggi, a former DNC research associate and ex-White House intern installed as Mayor Brandon Scott’s social media attack dog at a taxpayer-funded salary of $75,000 per year, fired off a public rebuttal this week targeting a viral post from local news anchor Chris Papst. Papst had shared an infographic from the Daily Rank Dept. — a website that, as Poggi correctly noted, primarily ranks restaurants — listing Baltimore as the 5th most dangerous city in America.
Poggi’s critique was methodologically accurate. Daily Rank Dept. publishes no primary data, no FBI sourcing, no methodology. It is, in fact, a restaurant ranking account on Instagram with 46,000 followers that has branched into clickbait city rankings. Chris Papst probably should have sourced better.
But here is the problem with Jonas Poggi’s victory lap: the FBI’s own 2024 Uniform Crime Report data was sitting right there the whole time. And it does not say what Poggi’s boss needs it to say.
The Numbers Poggi Didn’t Cite
According to the FBI’s 2024 UCR data — the gold-standard federal dataset that Poggi could have cited in any of his tweets — Baltimore City’s violent crime rate stands at 1,606 per 100,000 residents. The national average is approximately 70 per 100,000. That is not a typo. Baltimore’s violent crime rate is 2,175% above the national average, and 278% above the Maryland state average. The city’s overall crime rate of 5,763 per 100,000 exceeds the national figure by nearly 172%. Baltimore ranks 68th safest out of 74 cities in Maryland.
None of those figures appeared in Poggi’s rapid response.
Baltimore’s violent crime rate is 2,175% above the national average. The city’s rapid response press secretary chose to fight an Instagram restaurant account instead of citing it.
To be fair to the broader picture: Baltimore’s homicide numbers have genuinely improved. The city recorded 201 homicides in 2024 — its lowest total since 2011 — and the trend has continued into 2025, with the city finishing that year near 133 homicides, a figure not seen in nearly five decades. The city’s Group Violence Reduction Strategy, a Scott administration initiative, deserves credit for accelerating a real decline.
But “improving” and “safe” are different words. A rapid response operation that confuses the two, or that attacks a junk source to avoid engaging with real data, is not a communications shop. It’s a reputation laundry.
A Nationwide Trend, Presented as Local Achievement
The homicide decline Poggi is implicitly defending is also not primarily a Baltimore City policy achievement in isolation, and it is certainly not a trend unique to jurisdictions run by Democrats.
The FBI’s 2024 national crime data, released in August 2025, recorded the lowest violent crime rates since at least 1969. Murders fell 14.9% nationally from 2023 to 2024. Gun homicides were down 16.7%. The country had back-to-back years of historic homicide declines — the second of which occurred during Donald Trump’s first year back in the White House.
As MDBayNews documented in a May 5 analysis (“Baltimore Got Safer. Maryland Didn’t.”) the statewide homicide improvement Moore and Scott both claim credit for is almost entirely a Baltimore City story — and even within Baltimore, the improvement began before Moore took office, tracks a national trend, and is substantially attributable to city-level strategy rather than state policy. Outside Baltimore City, homicides held nearly flat — 262 to 263 — for Moore’s first two full years in office.
The 13-year homicide low that Poggi is implicitly defending did not occur because of Brandon Scott alone. It occurred because the whole country got safer in 2024, and Baltimore accelerated a trend already underway.
The 13-year homicide low Poggi is defending happened during a year when murders fell nationally by nearly 15%. Every mayor in America is presiding over declining violence right now.
The $1 Million Communications Operation
Poggi’s position did not exist before Mayor Scott’s second term. It was created specifically for him, titled “press secretary for rapid response and research,” and funded at $75,000 annually out of a communications budget that Scott nearly doubled between his first and second terms.
According to Baltimore Brew’s reporting, Scott expanded his communications office budget from $631,000 in FY24 to $1,062,000 — a 68% increase — to accommodate a cohort of newly hired operatives described as “out-of-work D.C. political operatives, mostly refugees from the Biden-Harris administration and Democratic National Committee.” Poggi fits that description precisely: DNC research associate, former White House intern, now a $75,000 city employee whose job title includes the phrase “rapid response.”
What does rapid response look like in practice? This week, it looked like a city government official — paid by Baltimore taxpayers — publicly attacking a journalist for citing a bad source, while offering no better data in return. The implication of Poggi’s posts was that Baltimore’s dangerous city reputation is the product of sloppy sourcing. The FBI’s numbers suggest otherwise.
The Real Story Poggi Fumbled
Here is the genuinely frustrating part, from a pure communications standpoint: there was a legitimate story for Poggi to tell.
Baltimore’s homicide trajectory over the past four years is remarkable by any honest measure. From a post-pandemic peak of more than 330 homicides in 2021, the city has cut that number by more than half. The GVRS strategy is credible and documented. Federal partnership under Project Safe Neighborhoods produced real prosecutorial results. The 2025 final count, near 133 homicides, is genuinely historic.
A competent rapid response operation would have said: “Daily Rank Dept. is not a credible source — here is what the FBI actually shows, including the 50% homicide reduction Baltimore has achieved since 2021.” That is accurate. It is defensible. It credits real work.
Instead, Poggi’s response amounted to: the source is bad, therefore the premise is bad. That is spin logic, not communications. And it left the underlying FBI data — which still shows Baltimore as one of the most violent cities in America by rate — completely unaddressed, because addressing it honestly would require admitting things the mayor’s office does not want to say out loud.
A $75,000 rapid response press secretary who won’t cite the FBI is not doing communications. He’s doing reputation management — and he’s not very good at it.
What This Is Really About
Jonas Poggi is not the story. He is a symptom.
The Scott administration has built its public safety narrative on carefully selected metrics — homicide counts from favorable baselines, city-specific improvements attributed to state leadership, and a systematic avoidance of the total crime, property crime, and violent crime rate figures that put Baltimore’s improvement in honest context. That narrative is now being enforced at $75,000 a year by a former partisan operative whose job is to attack anyone who complicates the story — even when, as in this case, they do so with a bad source.
The irony is that Poggi handed critics the better argument by making it. By attacking Daily Rank Dept. without engaging the underlying data, he implicitly acknowledged that the city’s communications strategy depends on keeping the conversation at the level of bad sources and viral infographics — because the moment it moves to FBI UCR data, the “greatest public safety turnaround in the country” narrative gets significantly more complicated.
Baltimore’s violent crime rate is 2,175% above the national average. The city is getting safer. Both things are true, and both deserved to be in Poggi’s response. Only one of them was politically convenient.
A $1 million communications budget should be able to tell the whole truth. This week, it chose not to.
Sources: FBI Uniform Crime Reporting Program, 2024 Crime Data · PlainCrime.com (FBI UCR analysis, Baltimore 2024) · AreaVibes Baltimore Crime Data 2024 · Baltimore Brew: “Mayor Scott expands his communications team” (May 6, 2025) · CBS Baltimore: “Maryland saw major reduction in violent crimes in 2024” · Daily Rank Dept. Instagram (@dailyrankdepartment) · MDBayNews: “Baltimore Got Safer. Maryland Didn’t.” (May 5, 2026) · Center for American Progress: Nationwide 2024 Crime Data (Aug. 2025) · Baltimore Police Department 2024 Mid-Year Crime Report
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