Last year, the Baltimore Police Department gained more sworn officers than it lost for the first time since it fell under federal oversight in 2017.

That progress — a net addition of 81 sworn officers — was enough to convince the judge helping to monitor Baltimore Police to reduce outside supervision.

James Bredar, a federal district judge based in Baltimore, said on Thursday during a public hearing that he agreed with a joint motion by the city and the U.S. Department of Justice that found the Police Department had improved its hiring and retention practices as required.

The department had been suffering net losses of dozens of officers every year, dipping well below its budgeted staffing strength and costing the city millions of dollars in overtime costs.

It is still short hundreds of officers. As of this week, Baltimore Police still had 418 vacancies. Bredar had called the staffing crisis the department’s single biggest impediment to exiting federal oversight.

On Thursday, Bredar said that a massive recruitment campaign by Baltimore Police was likely helping to reverse the downward spiral.

“It’s not the only factor for this change in direction — perhaps there are market forces at work as well that aren’t as unfavorable as those the department was confronting in the previous six or seven years,” Bredar said. “But it does seem that there has been a very significant change in course here, and the recruiting initiative is in particular impressive to me.”

The department must maintain its improvements in recruitment, hiring and stemming the loss of experienced officers for two years before it is considered in full compliance with the requirements and released from federal oversight in that area.

Bredar also ruled Baltimore Police to be in initial compliance for mandated improvements to its technology, though he expressed some skepticism and concern that the cash-strapped city would continue to make the financial investments he deemed necessary to keep the department sufficiently equipped.

In the recent past, boxes of records sat in musty basements, Bredar said, and yellow notepads were essential to the daily work of police officers. Even several years into its agreement with the Justice Department, the department struggled to set up an electronic records management system that would centralize data keeping, but that has since been “completely reversed.”

“In a single step, the department jumped from the 1950s to the 2020s,” Bredar said.

With the department on track for compliance with the two new areas, it has now satisfied, or is on its way to satisfying, seven of the 17 sections of its consent decree with the Justice Department.

That agreement dates back to the aftermath of Freddie Gray’s killing while in police custody. A subsequent Justice Department investigation found a pattern and practice of unconstitutional policing in Baltimore, leading to wide-ranging reform mandates on everything from sexual assault reporting to treatment of people in behavioral health crises.

Beyond centralized electronic record keeping for things such as stop-and-search data and body camera footage, the technology section of the department’s federal agreement requires it to set up an elaborate “early intervention system,” that flags problematic behavior by officers, helping supervisors to recognize those patterns and then rein them in.

That system, Bredar noted, “has not come to fruition as quickly as we might have hoped, but, at the same time, our nurturing of this initiative has been tempered by realism and an understanding of the magnitude of what is being undertaken.”