Maj. Richard Gibson investigating a neighborhood beset by recent burglaries and and leading an intel briefing.

Two years ago this month, a stunned Baltimore watched as arson fires destroyed more than 200 buildings and automobiles and dozens of city businesses. We witnessed the looting of Mondawmin Mall on live television. We saw rocks, bricks, and other objects hurled at police officers, injuring well over 100 officers—including a couple of whom sustained traumatic brain injuries—all in protest of the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray, who had sustained fatal injuries while in custody. Eight days later, in her first official trip in office, then newly appointed Attorney General Loretta Lynch came to Baltimore, offering words of support for Gray’s family, local leaders, and the Baltimore law enforcement community, whom she called “the hardest-working police officers in America.”

In between, City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby indicted the six cops involved in the Gray case.

And ever since, the city and the law enforcement community have been stuck in a complicated, bipolar struggle.

Baltimoreans want police to make fewer stops and arrests, but they also want police to take more violent offenders off the street. “Grandma wants the corner cleared until it's her grandson standing on that corner,” Gibson acknowledges, repeating a familiar Baltimore law enforcement maxim.

Over the last two years, arrests have been down substantially, as is morale, as cops have become more cautious since the indictments of the officers involved in the Gray case. (Those officers were all eventually found not guilty or had their charges dropped.)

The Justice Department was already conducting a collaborative review of the Baltimore Police Department at the behest of Batts at the time of Gray’s death. After the unrest, which came on the heels not only of the Gray tragedy but also an award-winning investigative story on endemic police brutality in the city by the Baltimore Sun—then-Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake requested a full-scale civil rights investigation into the department by the Department of Justice.

Maj. Richard Gibson on the street in his district.

That inquiry revealed stark patterns of racially discriminatory and unconstitutional stops, searches, and arrests of residents whom the Baltimore Police Department was sworn to protect and serve. One black man in his mid-50s, for instance, was stopped more than 30 times in less than four years without ever being issued as much as a citation. The report also recounted the horrifying experience of one woman, who was pulled over for a nonworking headlight and then was forced to remove all her clothing while she was bodily searched, including her anal cavity, on the sidewalk—only to be handed a repair order after nothing was found. (The BPD has faced more than 60 lawsuits over strip searches during the past five years.)

Those findings and others led to the 227-page court-enforceable consent decree signed in January that Mayor Catherine Pugh and Davis promise will overhaul the BPD. The bullet points of the decree mandate include stricter use of force guidelines, greater transparency, computers in patrol cars, improved data analysis, a re-commitment to community policing, an overall focus on de-escalation, and “training, training, training, training,” as Pugh put it at the City Hall press conference announcing the agreement.

William H. “Billy” Murphy, the prominent former judge and attorney for Freddie Gray's family, described the consent decree as “a sea change” in policing in Baltimore.

For his part, Davis is adamant that the BPD will emerge from all of this as a better police department. “Corruption won’t be tolerated. Unnecessary use of force won’t be tolerated,” Davis says. “But if people think reform is writing some policy changes and holding a press conference, it’s not. It’s ugly. It’s getting rid of people who have no business wearing the uniform.”

One of the most pressing issues at the moment for the department, however, is recruiting more cadets to wear that uniform.

Before heading out for a few hours of patrol on a recent evening, Gibson checks in with Comegna to see how many officers he has on the street. Comegna informs Gibson that he has 29 available officers—16 or so less than ideal.

They both acknowledge they’re shorthanded, which becomes abundantly clear in the next half-hour when three separate armed robberies, including a carjacking, are called in to the Northern District in a span of 15 minutes. Those dispatches are followed by the report of a five-car crash involving a stolen car and suspects from one of the armed robberies, who are fleeing across the Loyola College campus at North Charles Street and Cold Spring Lane.

“You see how fast things happen,” says Gibson, as one of the department’s Foxtrot helicopters suddenly appears overhead. “We can get stretched thin pretty quickly.” He flips on his flashing lights and makes a beeline for the school.

Fraternal Order of Police Lodge #3 President Gene Ryan has made this a point of emphasis. He publicly raised the issue of patrol shortages recently when he said the city doesn’t “have enough police officers to patrol the streets safely protecting themselves, much less protecting the citizens of Baltimore.”

(Ryan has also made it clear that he’s adamantly opposed to civilian representation on trial boards for alleged police misconduct cases. It’s one of the most important aspects of the consent decree, in terms of building trust in the community and among activists, and an issue that remains to be negotiated with the FOP.)

Davis wasn’t keen on the fact that Ryan’s decrying of patrol shortages became fodder in the media, but he responded immediately by promising to move 114 uniformed officers to patrol. More recently, in light of the Gun Trace Task Force indictments, Davis announced he was moving 46 other officers, typically dressed in plainclothes and “modified” uniforms, from specialized units to patrol. Partly, he explains, because these units—referred to as “knockers” and “jump-out boys” in areas of the city—generally draw the most citizen complaints for aggressive behavior. But, Davis adds, he also wants to see more uniformed men and women on the street to help suppress crime. He says, however, that still leaves the department 300-400 patrol officers short.

Davis also acknowledges two disconcerting facts in making the patrol changes.

For starters, the current four-days-on, three-days-off patrol shifts that were negotiated with the union under Batts, are unsustainable and exacerbating current staffing shortages to the tune of $1.6 million in departmental overtime each pay period. (Or, to look at it another way, 70-90 officers each day are “drafted” into working overtime past their regular 10-hour shift.)

Secondly, annual officer attrition via retirement, resignation, transfer to another police agency, etc., continues to significantly outpace recruitment.

Roughly 220-plus officers now leave the force each year, a figure that jumped to 249 in 2015. The annual attrition number essentially returned to normal in 2016, but the academy is only averaging three classes a year. Each generally tops out at 45-50 cadets and runs 27 weeks, followed by three months of field training. (However, two classes were canceled altogether after the unrest of 2015, and the first class of 2016 was down 50 percent in size.) And then there is another obstacle: The 40 hours of annual additional training for officers ordered by Davis in the wake of consent decree negotiations will take even more uniformed patrols off the street.