Part I: Interview with Police Commissioner Bealefeld

This week, Baltimore police released good news from the often dismal crime-fighting scene: Total crime in the city is down by 9 percent, gun crimes have decreased by 17 percent and shootings by 21 percent so far this year over last year’s figures.

The news comes as Baltimore Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III prepares to mark his second year as the city’s top cop next month. Exhibit A sat down recently with the commissioner for a wide-ranging interview on his tenure and mission.

As the recession strains city budgets, the police department is clamping down on overtime and city officials are shifting popular Police Athletic League centers to the Department of Recreation and Parks’ jurisdiction. But all is not lost. Federal stimulus dollars will enable Bealefeld to step up his quest to take crime fighting high-tech with purchases of Blackberry-like devices for each officer.

In the first installment of a conversation, Bealefeld, who started out as a rookie cop on foot patrol in the Western District in 1981 and is the city’s sixth commissioner since the mid-1990s, recounts highs and lows of the job.

What are some of the challenges and successes you’ve faced in the nearly two years since your tenure began?

One of the challenges has certainly been dealing with the different strategies that have been imparted to the police department in a very narrow band of time. They’ve been pretty diverse – from [former commissioner Thomas] Frazier’s community-oriented policing style to [former commissioner Edward] Norris’s strict enforcement, zero-tolerance model to [former commissioner Kevin] Clark’s having reliance on drug arrests, some kind of middle ground of that with [former] Commissioner [Leonard] Hamm, and then kind of charting out my own public safety strategy, which is one that is certainly not unique, but branded around what hasn’t worked in the past and convincing the rank and file to get on board with that strategy and not just simply wait out until the next strategy is imparted on them.

So your strategy is more about community-oriented policing?

I’d like to think it is, but I think regardless of what I think about it and what the mayor thinks of it, the jury on that is the 660,000 people that live out there in the city. So we ask: Are we developing things that make them believe in us more? Are we being more responsive? Are we solving more problems or are we just reacting to problems?

When you look at grassroots level efforts like Citizens on Patrol, it all sounds so nice, warm and friendly, but when you go out there and see it in action, see what people are doing to take it to the next level, to grow it, to expand it – the trouble with Baltimore is Baltimore loves self-flagellation. People think this is just a gritty, blue-collar town and nothing good happens here. A lot of great stuff happens here, incredible things happen here. And it’s tough to get even your own rank and file to focus on that, your own work force. We’ve worked across the board on a lot of creative ways to have people believe in what they are doing here.

Is the rank and file just worn out? Why wouldn’t they believe?

They get bombarded with the negative. And it’s not smoke and mirrors. People perceive that. They say, “It’s just fuzzy math – the crime rate’s not really going down, look at all this unreported crime.” There was a big push on that when I first got here, there was a lot of noise about all the numbers, and [people saying] it’s a lie, and part of that is fed by disgruntled people. We had people working against us inside the police department. I had to get rid of them. And there were people who focused on the anecdotal and, God bless them, here’s a reality: You think cops up here in the early 1980s weren’t taking reports? You think cops in the ’90s weren’t taking reports? And so, in 2008 when people say “Oh, my gosh, they didn’t take a report!” It’s happened before.

What changes though, what breaks that culture down, is holding people accountable. We’re ramping up that degree of accountability, saying if you don’t take a report, you’re going to lose a lot of days. [A spokesman later clarified that this refers to a penalty of holiday time and other personal time off if an officer fails to file a report.] We have built systems to figure out whether you’re doing that or not. There’s a whole bunch of systems, and someone said to me, “How do you even know [a report wasn’t taken]?” I’ll tell you: every single morning, comes across my Blackberry, the significant calls for service in the past 24 hours. I can go through there and see if an attempted robbery that was reported in Southeast District was taken on a report. And if we didn’t, I’ll challenge it from time to time.

And my commanders at lower level use this on a more frequent basis, but every now and then I’ll have one of my aides call the victim up and say “What happened?” And there are a lot of ways to quality-control this. And we’ve put them in place since I’ve been here. Accountability is huge. You want to make sure when you talk about accountability that it isn’t so much a top-down thing, what makes the wheels turn here is from a bottom-up perspective.

Do you still ride around on patrol on a regular basis?

As much as I can. It’d be easy for me to go out and put on a crime-fighting hat and get tied up in that. What’s really instructive for me is to be able to see what’s going on and hear what they have to say about it. That’s probably the most instructive part. Listen, in my career, I’ve made thousands of arrests for everything imaginable, and so, yeah, I still get excited about catching bad guys. I love it. Outside of New Year’s Eve, I would love to get a bad guy with a gun, any time. I’m always looking for a guy with a gun whether I’m going to get a sandwich or going home.

The Baltimore Police stand to receive around $7 million in federal stimulus funds. How will that be applied to local crime fighting?

I think it’s a great opportunity. In this country, we have over the years, since Sept. 11, 2001, had a lot of focus on homeland security, and rightly so. It was right and proper that we address those things. But there are only so many armored vehicles you can buy, only so many gas masks you can buy. And what people really need in their community are cops walking in their block. And homeland security money didn’t allow for such a thing.

It’s a shame that it takes such an economic downturn disaster to focus this kind of resource allocation, but domestic law enforcement needs it in a big way. And cities like Baltimore, Philadelphia, D.C., Detroit, we really need it to address these concerns. And so, we’re able to turn those dollars into things that affect people’s lives right away.

When I tell you about the Pocket Cop idea [issuing handheld computers to officers], you say, OK, well, it sounds like you’re going to take your department to a new level, but my real motive there is to provide good intelligence to cops and put this technology into their hands and clip it to their belt. But I could have taken that money and achieved that same result by mounting a computer in their car. Much easier to do, much easier to maintain, very secure, all those things, you don’t lose it, don’t go running in a foot chase and it pops out and it’s gone, you dog doesn’t eat it, all those things that happen.

But my real purpose behind it is community engagement – to get cops out of cars. And you can’t do that if you tether them to a computer in the car. It just keeps reinforcing this. So stimulus money is going to enable me to get cops out of cars.

Are you going to be able to hire more officers with stimulus money?

We are requesting in the first year, 2009-2010, to hire 25 new officers – essentially positions frozen from before. We’re going to increase the total number of authorized strength by 25 in the first year, and then another 25 in the second year, and then re-evaluate our request. That is a big number in relation to the numbers being requested nationwide and I’m pretty optimistic we’re going to get them.

What’s going on with police overtime?

There’s a lot of debate about overtime, just as there is a lot of debate over whether making more arrests led to fewer homicides. You know, we really had to disprove that. In 2005, we had 105,000 arrests in this city, and there were still 270-plus murders. Last year, we made around 80,000 arrests and posted our fewest number of homicides in 20 years. And so, to draw these direct correlations is very difficult. We’ve trimmed overtime at the same time that the crime rate is going down.

At the same time, you have to be strategic, and being resourceful, I think we enjoy the confidence of the mayor to appropriately administer our resources, to show that we can. We’ve trimmed overtime by $11 million in the two years I’ve been here. You know, that’d be one thing to say I trimmed overtime by $11 million, but if crime went through the roof, they’d run me out on a rail. But the fact is that we’ve done that and we’re increasing the homicide clearance rate as well.”

What impact has technology had on crime fighting in Baltimore?

I think to be successful in 2009 any law enforcement agency worth its salt really has to base a lot of what they do on good intelligence information. You draw that in from a variety of sources; the community is a big fuel for that. You have to make good intelligence from your field forces, what the cops see on the street, what is derived out of investigations – from witnesses and victims – a big one is what you get from the criminal element through confidential informants, debriefing bad guys. You have to make good use of that.

And this is where in the start of my career in the early 1980s, it seems like we were hammering on stone tablets compared to what these guys do today. We’re figuring out creative ways to use stimulus money to equip our cops with essentially a Blackberry device, called the Pocket Cop, as a handheld electronic device. They could get pictures of people that are wanted in their sector right there in their handheld device. And so it’s good use of intelligence information that will take us to the next level.

Maybe over the last 10 years or so, with the advent of this Comstat process, there was this great notion at the beginning of that of putting cops on dots – and the bottom line is you essentially map where crime is and occurrences, and you get high probabilities and you factor them in and you put cops in those areas where those dots are. The beauty of those is not assigning cops where the dots are on the map, it’s figuring out where they should be ahead of time.

Do you know baseball? If you’re a batter, what’s more important? Is it more important to analyze your at-bats afterwards or is it more important standing there trying to figure out what the pitch is after it leaves the pitcher’s hand? Good hitters are trying to pick up the rotation of the ball the second it leaves the pitcher’s hand. Trying to analyze it after it’s in the catcher’s glove is stupid. You get no production. You may have a bunch of numbers, but the thing you’ll lack are hits and driving in runs. That’s what we want to get to – we want to be at the point that we’re analyzing pitches coming out of the hand, and not in the catcher’s glove. That’s the beauty of intelligence-led policing.

Part II: Commissioner Bealefeld on the growing number of police cameras on Baltimore’s streets, the often-strained relationship with the Baltimore State’s Attorney’s Office, and policing via Twitter.

Melody Simmons is a freelance writer based in Baltimore.