“What a lot of us would like to know is if the police and the mayor are going to be held accountable for past injustices, or is it all going to be swept under the rug?” Charles Zdravesky, 70, asked Damon P. Martinez, the acting United States attorney for New Mexico, during Monday’s meeting in a community center in the city’s working-class southwestern quadrant.

“Nothing is going to happen if you leave it up to the city,” interjected Mike Gomez, whose 22-year-old son, Alan, was fatally shot in 2011 by a police officer who mistook a spoon he was holding for a gun. “The city has had a chance for years, and it hasn’t done anything.”

Mr. Berry has called the video of the shooting of the homeless man, captured by an officer’s helmet camera, a “game changer.” He said the video and the protests it set off had made him confront the profound deficiencies of the police force, which he had tried to address through changes in policies and requirements.

“It’s horrific to watch someone be shot,” Mr. Berry said in his office on Tuesday. “So it brought from an emotional standpoint questions about policy, about procedure, questions about action that really broadened the discussion and got people involved in the conversation that hadn’t gotten involved before.”

He dismissed the calls for his resignation that came out of the Justice Department meetings, pointing instead to the progress he had made. If not been for the lapel cameras he began requiring officers to wear in January 2013, he said, the circumstances surrounding the homeless man’s killing — like the officers’ setting a dog on him, or the man’s ramblings, or the seemingly small threat he posed — may have never been fully understood.