Like any counterinsurgency, units like the task force don’t recognize civilians. Everyone is a potential combatant. They are the reason residents have said they feel both “overpoliced and underserved” by the police. When residents call for help, no one comes. When residents try to walk to the store or the bus stop, they are as afraid of the police as they are of criminals.

The best evidence for specialized enforcement units like the task force is a decade old. When Sheila Dixon succeeded Martin O’Malley as mayor i n 2007, s he wanted both fewer murders and fewer arrests. She was briefly successful, bringing the murder rate below 300 and slowing the staggering rate of arrests with a mix of targeted enforcement and Compstat-style statistics, a crime-reduction management tool pioneered in New York City in the 1990s. (The homicide rate peaked in 2015 and 2017, two years with more than 340 killings.)

But even then, the numbers are unreliable because future task force members were already committing crimes. In 2010, their actions resulted in one man’s death. And as Mayor Dixon resigned from office after being convicted in a corruption trial that same year, things continued as normal. Commanders wanted the statistics to show the "good guys" were winning, no matter how bad the crime looked.

In 2015, when the city erupted after the death of Freddie Gray, much of the anger was directed toward the plainclothes squads that routinely brutalized black citizens. The Justice Department’s 2016 report on the Police Department showed that policing, as carried out by these units, was often unconstitutional and racist.

Meanwhile, in the city’s predominantly white neighborhoods, hard-charging “proactive” squads are generally absent and officers actually respond to service calls. The police say they follow crime and the reason they don’t have gun units in white neighborhoods is because there are no guns in white neighborhoods.

Perhaps the reverse is true. There are no guns in those neighborhoods because the city is not waging war on them.

Right-wing fears about people kicking in the doors of wealthy white gun owners to take away their arms might seem laughable. But that is precisely the kind of thing the task force was doing to the mostly black citizens of Baltimore. And when progressives call for gun control in a city where many of the guns are already illegal, they are calling either for tougher penalties or for more squads like the task force.