“Baltimore is worse in the sense that Baltimore is a city that has more people of color and more poor people of color, so we are likely to see more excesses, and that is manifest in the report,” said Lisalyn R. Jacobs, an expert on race and gender bias who works closely with the Obama administration on issues including sexual assault.

The Baltimore police commissioner, Kevin Davis, who vowed Wednesday to turn his department into “a model for the rest of the nation,” did not dispute the Justice Department’s findings. He said in an interview Thursday that he was already taking steps, including putting a trusted captain in charge of a new sex offense unit and assigning a sergeant to act as an “L.G.B.T. liaison,” to address the problems.

“The challenge of interacting respectfully with victims of sexual assault is a challenge to our profession,” Commissioner Davis said, “and we are getting better at it in Baltimore, and we are paying attention to it.”

African-Americans make up 63 percent of the population in Baltimore, and the city has been in the thick of its own painful conversation about race and policing since the April 2015 death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man who sustained a fatal spinal injury in police custody. Tessa Hill-Aston, the president of the city’s branch of the N.A.A.C.P., said the Justice Department’s report this week had pushed the conversation about victims of police bias beyond black men.

“There’s a lot of women in the same communities that have been victimized just as much,” Ms. Hill-Aston said, adding of the police, “They just didn’t care, because it was a poor black woman or a poor black neighborhood.”

Civil and women’s rights advocates in Baltimore have been saying for years that the police do an inadequate job of investigating rape and sexual assault cases. In 2010, The Baltimore Sun reported that in the previous four years, the police had routinely failed to solve rape cases; in reviewing F.B.I. data, the newspaper found that the percentage of rape cases dismissed as false or baseless was higher in Baltimore than in any other city in the country.