The Monitoring Team overseeing the Baltimore Police Department’s reform believes that the department needs a complete overhaul.

"We view the situation as so bad that we need to rebuild the department from the beginning,” said lead monitor Ken Thompson. “Its that bad."

The monitoring team presented the progress being made on the consent decree to a crowd of 22 city residents at the quarterly update meeting, held at Sacred Heart of Jesus Catholic Church.

The problem is large, and they acknowledge they are just getting started on the many issues facing the department. Matthew Barge, subject matter expert on use of force said "Rather than putting band aides on an issue that has been festering for decades, we need to blow up the system and really fix it.”

Seth Rosenthal, deputy monitor, said that one of the most important parts of the work they are doing revolves around getting good data. "We also need to be capturing data, to make sure that the things we are doing now are even making a difference.” Officers currently write paper contact receipts to document every interaction they have with the public, but the forms for the last three years are sitting downtown, waiting to be entered.

"It is exceedingly difficult to see what is going on in the department when we don't have the data,” said Rosenthal.

Thompson said that the solution is for the department to embrace technology that would make collecting and processing this data easier. "We are waiting to see if the city is willing to spend the money to really fix what needs to be fixed."

On Monday, Councilman Ryan Dorsey questioned why the Office of Professional Responsibility - BPD’s Internal Affairs - was so spread out over the department. Barge agreed this setup made investigations less effective.

“The work of the Office of Professional Responsibility is very important to rebuilding the trust with the community. Right now, there are different feifdoms in the department that make it ineffective.”

There need to be additional policies put in place regarding how OPR interacts with the Civilian Review Board, an independent review board composed of citizens selected by the Mayor. "We need to focus on how OPR interacts with the Civilian Review Board,” Barge said. "There have not been policies about how the two departments interact."

Charles Ramsey, deputy monitor, talked about some of the work he had done in Philadelphia to improve how citizens could report misconduct. “We set up essentially a secret shopper program, where we would test how different districts took complaints, and what they did with them. The results weren’t always good, but it was a starting point to see where the problems were.”

Barge clarified that, while Baltimore does not have a program to test how complaints would be handled, that will be implemented down the road. The process first needs to be implemented by the BPD that will persist past the end of the consent decree, and then the monitoring team will set up a separate one that will make sure complaints are being handled properly.

But Rosenthal stressed the audits are not waiting. “We selected 60 complaints at random, and we are making sure they are being handled properly, and that the complainant is being properly updated on the investigation. After we do those, we will select another 60.”

The process of entering a complaint is also becoming easier and more anonymous.”It is easier, today, for a citizen to make a complaint,” Barge said. “Before, you had to go into the station and put the complaint in ink. Now, there are more avenues: phone, email, over the internet. And citizens do not have to give their name."

Ramsey also talked about staffing levels. "Staffing is a problem." Until recently, OPR officers were being sent on patrol to cover for shifts, which was leaving misconduct cases waiting.

“Those are not things that can be happening." Barge said.

Rank and file officers are also being drafted to work extra shifts, commonly right after their normal shift, which is putting additional stress on the officers. “This is not a long term strategy,” Thompson said. “Long term, we need more officers to be hired.”

Lack of staffing also hurts the department’s ability to effectively discipline officers. “The department is dysfunctional because of staffing,” said Thompson. “They have enough officers to keep us safe, but we also need enough officers where the office of personal responsibility can remove an officer without impacting the force."

Rosenthal also talked about their investigation into the handling of the investigation of Detective Sean Suiter’s death in Harlem Park. "The things that gave us concern were the length of time the perimeter was held. Its appropriate to hold it for 36 hours, but it was held for four additional days. People were unlawfully searched entering and exiting the neighborhood. The crime scene was a vacant lot."

They are also looking at some of the unconstitutional searches that occurred in the course of maintaining that perimeter. "We also have concerns about the fact that the BPD did warrant checks on every person that entered or left the neighborhood,” Rosenthal continued. “They did not have probable cause for them to do warrant checks on these people. They also did a pat down on one individual."

But Barge reiterated that the most important indicator of success is when the community says that the BPD is working in a way the community wants. They offer quarterly meetings to make sure residents are updated on what reform is happening, and to keep the community engaged.

"The most important part of this are meetings like this where these changes are not happening behind closed doors. And if you think the changes are too incremental, tell us so we can look at what is not going right."