Part II: Interview with Police Commissioner Bealefeld

Part I of the interview is here.

Last year, 2,800 court cases in Baltimore were dismissed because police officers failed to show up in court. That problem is one of many flashpoints between the city State’s Attorney’s office and the Baltimore Police Department. In Part II of his conversation with Exhibit A, city Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III addressed that issue, as well as the department’s growing reliance on street cameras and an effort to build an automated case system to make arrest details available to every officer’s handheld device.

Nearly two years into the job as the city’s top cop, Bealefeld also reflected on his administrative style and the personal toll a 28-year career in policing has taken.

Your relationship with the Baltimore State’s Attorney’s office has often been strained, as State’s Attorney Patricia C. Jessamy has frequently criticized the police department for many reasons, such as cases dismissed because police officers failed to show up to testify, and evidence handling.
What’s the relationship between your department and the state’s attorney’s office really like?

Listen, I don’t do public battle with Pat Jessamy. I don’t and I won’t because I’ve learned lessons about what works and what doesn’t. I think it’s counterproductive. I think it’s counterproductive on both sides. It’s counterproductive for me to sit here and hypothesize about their conviction rate. If you held a gun to my held right now and said “Your life depends on telling me what the conviction rate is for the state’s attorney’s office” I wouldn’t be able to do it. So I’ll let you draw your own conclusions about their scorekeeping and about whether we’re doing a good job or not.

I think the things that move systems forward and make the city safer are the things we’re doing behind the scenes and the things we’re doing in a positive way to move our agencies forward. So I wouldn’t get into it in terms of their criticism.

I would tell you we’re not sitting on our tail about it. We’ve put great measures in place to try to hold cops more accountable, to get information out to cops. But there are things that people don’t even focus on. A single cop, and it was not unusual for me and it’s not unusual today for police officers to go out and confront gang members, confront bad guys with guns, confront juveniles who are behaving disorderly, to wind up in three different courts every day.

Well, I’ve got to tell you that unless someone has a cloaking device or unless you have a cloning device, I still haven’t figured out a way to get a cop in three different places in one time. Whether it’s juvenile court, circuit court or district court. It’s not unusual for my cops to be in that position, so I’ll hold people accountable, but we need to work together to build a system that works for everybody.

You’re on the cover of Governing magazine for a story on the abundance of street cameras on Baltimore streets. What impact do these cameras have on policing and the public safety here?

I’d like to take credit for the cameras, but the fact of the matter is, in this business you reap the fruit of seeds planted by a lot of other folks. The reality of the cameras is that some very thoughtful, energetic people like [then-Mayor Martin] O’Malley committed the city’s capital to invest in the cameras, and some people worked hard to figure out what kind of technology we should have, hardwiring and investing in all this infrastructural support, because it is huge running cables and developing the capacity. It’s more than just buying a Radio Shack camera and nailing it up on a building. So they did well, and we’ve done our part.

Let me tell you something about this technology. I’m convinced of this: Technology is really going to be the golden tool of law enforcement of the future. Right now, there is “tag reader” technology. You can equip a car with a radar gun, and a camera, and there’s a computer in the car, too, and the computer is downloaded with all the stolen vehicle tags and all of the cars that you’re looking for, suspicious vehicles and cars wanted for different crimes. And there’s a program that as the cars go by those camera, that camera reads the tag number and analyzes within seconds to flash an alert up to the officer in the car whether that car is wanted or not. It’s incredible now. We have them now in a bunch of spots all over the city. We have them in cars.

In the future, we’re going to be able to use those cameras around the city to do tag reader stuff. That is, that camera is focused on the block and a car goes through there, and if it’s a stolen car, it’s going to send an alert to a monitor somewhere saying “stolen car, heading eastbound, 2900 block E. Monument Street,” because they went through our camera grid. It reads the numbers and transfers the numbers into computer speak.

Some people would highlight the Big Brother aspect of it all.

I would tell you that there are about 40,000 open arrest warrants in the city, and on average about 30,000 new arrest warrants are obtained each year in the city. We work hard to keep up with that. But we want to bring as much technology to bear on that so that we’re making neighborhoods safe.

If technology is in the hands of unscrupulous people, you’re going to get unscrupulous results. That’s not what law enforcement is about. Not what making neighborhoods safe is about. I think there is certainly a balance and I think there ought to be a lot of public debate about what you do or don’t do. I’m surprised. We talked about installing these cameras all around Baltimore. There were a lot of people that where convinced that neighborhoods just wouldn’t go for it.

The fact of the matter is a lot of neighborhoods clamor to have more security in their neighborhoods than less. These discussions about “They’re going to be using the cameras to watch me take a shower,” or “They are going to be sitting there and watching me, reading my lips, and figuring out my bank account numbers, or talking about my neighbor” – it’s not happening, and people see what we’re using them for: to monitor gang members and make sure they don’t commit crimes, to make safe areas where people walking to work and having to use parking garages are safe, to add an extra level of protection.

We’re using them as a force multiplier, because the reality is the cameras are there. You’ve got to send cops to a call. So if a call comes in that shots are being fired or a robbery is in progress, you can turn a camera there and see the suspect leaving and follow his route. This isn’t conjecture – we have done it. We have caught several bank robbers doing exactly that. And you can follow them all along their route, you switch from camera to camera and you’ll see these guys peeling off layers of clothing, switching cars. It’s incredible.

And one other thing: The cameras have enabled us to educate young detectives about the reality that it takes veterans years to accumulate. It bypasses the need or the collective experience thing that you have to accumulate [over the span of a career]. The camera educates cops in a very big way.

How is the city’s new automated case file system coming along?

I’ll put that system up against any one not just in this state but in the country. We’re working on a system to identify robbery suspects long-term. We can pull out of our data files based on just descriptions. We have tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of reports in there that we could go through and mine good, intel data out of, and we do. So it’s getting better all the time and it’s more comprehensive all the time. It’s a first-class system. Because it’s so expansive, it would overwhelm that system. It needs mainframe support for detectives and commanders to prioritize and figure out where we should be … and to anticipate crimes – then they can communicate info back out to the officers efficiently. The system is up and running. The files are current, as we sit here, detectives are typing reports into that system. It took us a number of years – people before me set this system in motion. But you have to make sure people are there putting burglary reports in there.

The Police Department is now registered on Twitter, sending frequent tweets out on crime happenings in real time. As commissioner, do you use it?

Oh, my goodness. Do you know how many e-mails I get a day? It’s in the hundreds a day. It’s a lot for me to just keep up with crime alerts, e-mails, pin [Blackberry] messages, text messages. I’m laughing because that’s how my wife and kids and I communicate, through text messages more than anything. I personally don’t know that I could handle more, like Twitter. But I think it’s a harbinger of where it’s going.

How is information sharing working out between other metropolitan jurisdictions, such as Baltimore County and the Maryland State Police?

Some of this stuff we can take credit for, but a big player on the state scene right now is Gary Maynard, a very unheralded man, the [state] secretary of Public Safety [& Correctional Services]. I don’t know that he has rivals in terms of his bridge building with other jurisdictions. We get together one morning each month for breakfast with Secretary Maynard, [State Police Superintendent] Col. [Terrence B.] Sheridan, [Police Chief James] Johnson from Baltimore County, [Maryland Department of Juvenile Services] Secretary [Donald] DeVore. All of us sit down together and discuss regional issues, local issues. It’s been very informative and constructive for all of us.

We’ve proposed some gang legislation, we’ve done great work on that issue on educating people and developing statewide gang training standards that were not existent before. We share crime information and encourage district commanders whose jurisdictions [are adjacent] to share, also.

Do you like being police commissioner?

I’m much more comfortable with the job. Listen, I love police work. I love what I do. The thing is, it’s so selfish – the older you are, the clearer that becomes to you. My son is getting ready to go to college, he graduates from high school in a couple of weeks and I’ve missed huge chunks of his life. My daughter’s 13, and you know, just huge chunks. I’m talking about communicating with my family by text messaging, so it’s these benchmarks in your personal life that say, wow, you’ve really been a selfish SOB in pursuing so single-mindedly your career and what you do, so I do love it. I do love what I do, but I also have that introspection that I didn’t have 10 years ago. And so it makes it tough, it makes it very, very difficult at times. Fortunately, I have a good team.

You can read Part I of this interview here.

Melody Simmons is a freelance writer based in Baltimore.