I think what people must know about American justice is that the way the system is set up, you have to have a certain burden of proof and if it’s not met, then it’s not met. You can be as angry as you want to be, but you have to understand the system and respect it.

What about you? Do you personally think justice was served?

I can’t personalize it. Like myself, what I would do in a situation like that is talk to the family and see how they feel. If Mr. Gray’s family feels like everything, from the charges, from the state’s attorney proceeding with the trials, everything that has come out of it equals justice to them, then it’s justice.

That’s a careful answer. You’ve always been so measured in answering my questions.

I’m the grandson of poor farmers in rural North Carolina. I truly understand what it means for me being a young black man in this country. But I try not to be divisive, I try not to be polarizing, because that’s the last thing we need right now. We have enough of that going on.

We’ve talked about changes in the city. Have you changed?

Of course I have changed. I have shifted my work; I’ve tried to do things a little differently. You have to be uncomfortable. If you’re not uncomfortable, if you haven’t changed the way you operate from April 2015 to now, then you’re saying the way our city was, was O.K. — and it wasn’t.

So what are you doing differently?

For example today, I’m on the labor committee in the City Council and we voted to send a bill to the full council raising the city’s minimum wage to $15 by 2022. I don’t think that would have happened before last April.

Is Baltimore perhaps a better place now, as a result of Freddie Gray’s death?

I can say that there have been changes in Baltimore for the better. But I can’t say that Baltimore is a complete better place, because we still have a lot of people dying.