The Baltimore Police Department continues to make slow and steady progress in a wholesale reform effort mandated by its agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice and a federal judge, but hopes of exiting that oversight anytime soon remain dim at best.

At the department’s budget hearing two months ago, Police Commissioner Rich Worley expressed hope that the department may be able to exit the agreement within two years. But after listening to federal judge James K. Bredar on Tuesday during the quarterly hearing for the federal consent decree, that timeline appeared too optimistic.

The Police Department is in full and effective compliance with only two of 17 overarching sections of the consent decree: transportation of people in custody and officer assistance. But the bulk of the 510-paragraph agreement, crafted in in the wake of a DOJ investigation spurred by the death of Freddie Gray in 2015, is still in the works.

Bredar and Worley agree on the biggest holdup: Staffing shortages are hampering the department’s ability to satisfy core requirements of the decree, such as the goal of having patrol officers spending 40% of their time in a “non-enforcement” role, meeting with community members and listening to their problems, rather than shuffling between constant calls for service.

Patrol officers are continually drafted to do mandated overtime shifts, burning out the ranks and hurting morale, creating a feedback loop of dwindling staff numbers, Bredar emphasized.

As those staffing levels “continue to worsen,” Bredar said, it has created a dynamic that is “downright dangerous” for police officers and the public. He also warned city and police leaders that he would continue to “hold the line” on the agreement’s baseline requirement level of 2,600 sworn officers.

“It is true that the city is currently getting by with fewer than 2,000 sworn officers, but that comes at a cost that the consent decree and the court, and frankly, the community will not abide for the long term,” Bredar said.

Here are three takeaways from the court hearing:

Despite worst fears, police reform hasn’t made Baltimore more dangerous

In his opening remarks, Bredar started by emphasizing something that never materialized: concern that federal scrutiny of the Baltimore Police Department would hamper officers’ ability to fight crime and prove to be a boon to criminals.

And yet, Bredar pointed out, “the experience in Baltimore seems to teach that constitutional policing does not mean lax policing.”

The judge cited Police Department data showing a 36% decrease in the city’s homicide rate, a 30% decrease in non-fatal shootings, as well as homicide clearance rates jumping to an unheard-of 70%. The city’s spike in youth gun violence has also receded, he emphasized, while gun seizures have continued apace.

“Police reform is undeniably happening in Baltimore, but crime is not going up,” Bredar said. “It’s going down.”

Exacerbating low staffing, officers are often doubling up in vehicles

Bredar indicated Tuesday that he would not let up on his campaign to make the Police Department’s staffing level central to its compliance with the agreement until the agency is able to get its number of sworn officers above 2,600.

As he often does, Bredar spoke about the department’s staffing levels as a slippery slope, fearing that the agency could be reaching a “tipping point” in which staffing levels would drop so low that it would become an “accelerating and cascading problem.”

Stephen Salsbury of the city’s Law Department responded that Baltimore’s leaders “share those concerns.”

“At the end of the day, we’re doing our best, we have to go farther, we have to do more,” Salsbury said. “Of course, that is going to require striking a complicated balance with the city’s other budgetary obligations.”

Later in the hearing, Bredar spoke about attending a recent roll call in the Southeastern District at which he was paying close attention to how many officers there had been drafted on overtime shifts, and how many posts were empty that day.

Then, Bredar said, he started noticing how many officers were going out the door in pairs. He said there were so few police vehicles last Tuesday during one shift that “every single vehicle went out with two officers covering two posts.”

“We’ve got this shortage of officers where we can’t cover all the posts, and then it turns out that we’ve got fleet issues that further diminish your effectiveness in terms of deployment,” Bredar said.

After speaking with a commander, Bredar said he learned that the cars were all “in the shop,” where they often don’t return for five or six weeks. He termed the fleet shortages an “effectiveness issue but also a morale issue.”

Worley responded that it’s possible that some vehicles are sitting in the city’s Department of General Services lot awaiting maintenance, but those with mechanical issues covered under the warranty are sent to the dealership, which takes them off the road for extended periods of time.

“I’d be remiss not to put some of it back on our commanders, because they’ve got to manage their fleet a little more,” Worley added, saying that sometimes marked cars are available but assigned to certain units other than patrol.

Officer misconduct investigations remain flawed

While the Police Department has made significant progress in reforming its internal affairs division, known as the Public Integrity Bureau, Bredar said, the department is still lagging in key areas of misconduct investigations.

One of those areas is the timeliness and consistency of notifying citizens about the progress of their complaints, and another is considering the history of complaints lodged against an officer when investigating for misconduct, Bredar said, citing assessments from the independent monitoring team gauging the department’s compliance with the consent decree.

For example, only 6% of misconduct investigations considered the past complaints that were not sustained, and just 7% considered BPD training records for that officer, Bredar noted.

Third, the department is not completing its administrative investigations within 90 days, which is required by the agreement. Bredar attributed that deficiency “almost entirely to staffing, so, until we solve staffing, we’re not going to make much progress here.”

Still, Bredar lauded the department for “enormous progress in reforming its internal affairs function.”

“No part of the Police Department was more badly broken when this reform initiative began,” he said.