The job of commissioner of the Baltimore Police Department has proved to be one of the most tenuous in the country.

The mayor this week selected Michael Harrison as the city’s fifth police chief in four years, and asked him to try to solve a list of persistent problems that chased most of the others from the job. Among the tasks: Reducing one of the nation’s highest murder rates; building trust among residents who widely view the department as racist, corrupt and indifferent; and earning the support of rank-and-file officers.

And lately, doing all of this under a federal court order intended to curb the department’s long history of abusive and discriminatory practices.

If that were not enough, perceived success has often boiled down to one yardstick — the tally of murders and other violent crimes — whose roots, many experts say, lie to a large extent in a stew of deeper problems beyond the reach of a police chief.

Those include the privation in some of the country’s poorest big-city neighborhoods, where incomes, and life expectancy, are stunningly lower than in Baltimore’s prosperous districts.

Mr. Harrison, 49, has a reputation as a reform-minded superintendent of the New Orleans Police Department, and has won plaudits for overseeing sweeping changes in police practices required after the Justice Department found widespread civil rights violations and other abuses.

“He understands the similarities between us and New Orleans,” Mayor Catherine Pugh of Baltimore said in announcing his appointment.

Baltimore was the subject of its own scathing Justice Department investigation in 2016 that found that its police force had systematically harassed and hounded black residents for years, among other abusive practices. But the city has struggled to carry out its consent decree, and Baltimore officials hope Mr. Harrison’s appointment will smooth the process.

His selection must be approved by the City Council, though he is expected to be on the job within weeks as acting commissioner.

Mr. Harrison, who was on the New Orleans force for 27 years and was named chief in 2014, had initially declined to pursue the job when approached some months ago.

But when the leading contender — Joel Fitzgerald, the Fort Worth police chief — took himself out of the running after learning his son needed brain surgery, Mr. Harrison was persuaded to reconsider, a mayoral aide said.

In an interview, Mr. Harrison said that his first order of business would be to go on a “listening tour” to hear members of the community and the police department and find out “what the real or perceived problems are.”

“That will help me determine what skill sets are needed, and it will help me figure out what the leadership team should be,” Mr. Harrison said.

Lester Davis, a senior aide to the Baltimore City Council president, Bernard C. Young, said that Mr. Harrison had a lot of support on the council, but that his background would be thoroughly vetted.

City leaders hope his selection will finally bring stability to a job that has been a revolving door ever since the retirement in 2012 of Frederick Bealefeld III, a career officer popular in the community.

Since then, Baltimore has run through four commissioners as violence has raged and many in the city — which is two-thirds black — lost all trust in the department, culminating in the 2015 riots that came after a resident, Freddie Gray, died from injuries received while in a police van.

After Mr. Bealefeld, the city hired Anthony Batts, a reformer from California who sought to improve discipline. But he angered the police union and infuriated many officers by characterizing the department as mired in a “cycle of scandal, corruption and malfeasance.”

Mr. Batts was fired three months after the riots and was succeeded by Kevin Davis, the former chief of a neighboring county, who successfully strove to get a consent decree with the Justice Department that mandated changes in police tactics. But he was fired a year ago as the murder rate continued apace.

Then came Darryl De Sousa, a lifelong Baltimore officer, who resigned after just four months after being charged with willfully failing to file tax returns.

The interim police chief since May has been Gary Tuggle, a former head of the Baltimore office of the federal Drug Enforcement Administration, who took himself out of the running for the job last fall, saying he could not commit to the five to seven years he felt it would take to fix the department.

Even those optimistic about Mr. Harrison’s appointment cautioned that there was only so much one man could do to improve Baltimore’s crime rate.

“It’s a mistake to think that this issue stands on its own,” said Michelle Geiss, executive director of Impact Hub, a group that supports community organizers and entrepreneurs in the city. “Until residents feel like their livelihoods and neighborhoods matter to people, I think we’ll continue to have the same conversation.”

Ms. Geiss, who has studied public health trends in Baltimore, said life expectancies in some of the poorest and most violent neighborhoods are 20 years less than in the city’s most prosperous neighborhoods just a few miles away.

Ganesha Martin, who served as chief of staff under Mr. Batts and later managed the department’s implementation of the consent decree under Mr. Davis, said real gains in public safety would only come with improvements in education and health and a narrowing of the income gap.

“You can put perfume on a pile of dung, and it will smell good for a while, but eventually it will start to stink again if you don’t clean it up,” Ms. Martin said, referring to the need to improve underlying socio-economic problems.

Mr. Harrison, she said, “could be the most qualified person in the country, but everybody has to be in the game on this.”

“It’s unfair to put the city’s entire public safety success on the back of one man,” she said.

Yet she said Mr. Harrison appeared particularly gifted at one crucial skill — finding a delicate balance between concerns of the community and of rank-and-file officers.

“You need to be enough cop’s cop for officers to trust you, and you have to have the community believe that you’re trying to rectify harms that continue to be part of some folks’ everyday lives,” Ms. Martin said. “It’s doable, but it’s very hard.”

Source: Read Full Article