After Freddie Gray died nearly a decade ago from injuries sustained in police custody, sparking unrest throughout Baltimore, Officer Rashad Hamond was assigned to a foot patrol near the Penn-North Metro station.

A native of Northeast Baltimore, Hamond was in his 20s back in 2015. The young officer wasn’t surprised by the protests sweeping through the city. That pent-up frustration, he said, represented the start of a conversation that was long overdue.

Though the Baltimore Police Department was in turmoil, Hamond’s assignment represented the city’s hope for a better future.

Instead of surveillance or detective work, Hamond spent entire shifts on the streets of the Upton neighborhood, focused on forging relationships, not just making arrests.

“People would just tell me, ‘That house has drugs,’ ‘Check on those kids — go play football with them,‘” Hamond said. “They would tell me who was what. You wouldn’t have to do as much, because I guess I built that trust.”

A decade later, Hamond, now 38 years old and a sergeant, still carries those lessons. But the trust he is helping restore between Baltimore Police and the citizens they are sworn to protect and serve remains frayed.

It was April 12, 2015 — 10 years ago today — when officers chased Gray and arrested him after finding a small knife in his pocket. The 25-year-old man from West Baltimore was shackled and placed unbuckled into a police van. The medical examiner concluded that the subsequent trip inside the van was so jarring that it left Gray with a severe spinal cord injury that led to his death, which was later ruled a homicide.

His death sparked days of protests that boiled over at times into violence and destruction, prompting the deployment of the National Guard. Six officers were charged in Gray’s death but later were either acquitted or saw their charges dropped.

In 2017, Baltimore Police and the city entered into court-monitored oversight after a U.S. Department of Justice investigation found widespread unconstitutional policing practices in the city that disproportionately targeted Black residents.

Baltimore was one of the last cities in a wave of federal police consent decrees launched under former President Barack Obama. The agreements required new policies and other changes designed to prevent abuses and renew confidence between officers and people in historically overpoliced communities .

In Baltimore, and throughout the country, opinion is divided over their success.

Officials credit the reforms for bringing about new accountability measures, such as increased reviews of footage from officers’ body cameras.

But police unions and some rank-and-file officers claim that the mandates have been too burdensome. Meanwhile, many criminal justice reformers see the agreements largely as a box-checking exercise that funnels more resources into broken departments without actually serving the community.

Eight years after signing the consent decree, Baltimore continues slowly to adopt reforms. The police department has spent millions to come into compliance with four of the agreement’s 17 key provisions and remains years away from exiting oversight.

Over the years, the impact has been undeniable. Officers arrested 36,761 people in 2014. Last year, in 2024, they arrested 15,563. Arrests without probable cause, which were in the thousands in the years leading up to Gray’s killing, have similarly plummeted.

Gun violence in Baltimore surged in the wake of Gray’s death, with the city recording more than 300 homicides every year between 2015 and 2022. Starting in 2023, as social services resumed following the disruption of the coronavirus pandemic, gun violence dropped precipitously. Over the last two years, it has fallen at historic rates.

Last month, Lucky Crosby, 57, walked past the empty basketball courts next to the now-vacant Lillian S. Jones Recreation Center in Sandtown-Winchester, not far from where Gray was arrested.

Crosby, who has lived in West Baltimore all his life, said he remembers when he was a kid and officers patrolling on foot would “snatch us on the corner and teach us boxing, teach us how to play pool and ping-pong.”

“That’s gone,” Crosby said.

Now, Crosby said, he only sees officers in the neighborhood after something terrible has happened.

“You only see them after someone is murdered, after someone is harmed, after the crime,” Crosby said.

A 2023 community survey found that only about one in four respondents said officers had good working relationships with community members. Officials push back against that narrative, including criticizing the survey itself.

“It’s changed a lot for the better,” Police Commissioner Rich Worley said in a recent interview. “We’re getting a lot more cooperation. … We’re getting people offering up their Ring cameras for us to look at.”

Still, Worley concedes that there are “some issues with people not wanting to [cooperate], and I get that.”

“Some of them are scared, and rightfully so sometimes,” he said. “But I think our officers and our detectives have become so much better at dealing with the community and they are starting to win them back.”

There are high-profile examples, however, that cast doubt on that assessment.

In July 2023, hundreds of people attending the annual “Brooklyn Day” block party in South Baltimore scattered in all directions after more than a dozen guns were fired. Two died and 28 were wounded.

Baltimore Police had been taken completely off guard.

While the crowd ballooned in size, and the risk of violence grew, officers sat by and watched, failing to respond to calls for service, quipping instead that they would need to redirect some calls to the National Guard, according to a department post-mortem report.

It turned out that the relationship between officers and community in Brooklyn was as fractured as the DOJ had found citywide nearly a decade earlier. The 2023 report described the reluctance by police to engage with the crowd as “officer indifference.”

For years, despite historically high crime rates in the neighborhood, officers had neglected foot patrols and business checks, the report found.

Police had come to “over-rely on transactional and formal community associations to learn about community events, in lieu of building informal relationships through proactive engagement of residents.”

That failure didn’t shock former state senator Jill Carter, who worked in the city’s Office of Equity and Civil Rights when the city first fell under federal oversight.

“Most of the changes that have occurred, and there have been improvements, but I think they stem from the people, activist organizers, grassroots efforts, and ultimately the laws the legislature passed,” said Carter, referring to a package of police accountability laws that she spearheaded and that were passed by the General Assembly in 2021.

Carter said that the consent decree, as a whole, has had “little impact on substantive change other than modernization.”

“And I don’t believe we are getting to our ultimate goal by modernizing oppression,” she said.

‘Much work to do’

Now working in the city’s Forest Park neighborhood, Hamond recently went on a semi-regular “community walk” with the hopes of winning some people over.

Standing at 6-foot-1, Hamond moved with a relaxed demeanor. “It’s just good to be out here in this space and trying to figure out ways to solve problems,” he said.

Not far into the walk, Hamond approached a busted-up, abandoned sedan. Police say abandoned vehicles can be used to stash drugs and guns in Baltimore’s most violent areas.

While Hamond checks out a nearby alley, another officer with him already knows the drill: submit a ticket about the car to 311, requesting that the city tow it.

Back in 2015, Hamond’s role in the department — “neighborhood coordination officer” — didn’t exist. When the program launched in 2017, he was one of its first. The consent decree required police supervisors to design and implement community policing plans that would encourage officers to communicate more informally with people in their patrol areas.

Those plans have yet to materialize fully.

Baltimore Police has “much work to do to meet — and prove that it has met — its obligations regarding officer engagement with the community in the field,” according to the latest assessment of its community policing progress, released in August 2023.

As part of the consent decree, an independent monitoring team has, in part, blamed staffing shortages. Officers spend the majority of their time responding to calls. That has prevented them from a goal of spending 40% of their time patrolling on foot, the team concluded.

Worley, the police commissioner, said community policing is one of the department’s “biggest challenges because we’re 500 cops short.” The department currently has around 2,000 sworn officers.

Community police officers are also supposed to check in regularly with local businesses where they log their visits.

In interviews earlier this week, one worker in Forest Park said officers had stopped by regularly, but another employee across the street said he hadn’t seen the officers since their last visit in mid-March. (The store staff did not want their names used for fear of reprisal.)

Baltimore Police said in response that the precinct’s neighborhood coordination officers conduct business checks based on crime patterns and community needs. A spokesperson said the officers in the area have collectively done more than 160 checks so far this year.

Ray Kelly, a police reform activist from Sandtown-Winchester, said the department’s attempts at so-called community policing are bound to fall short without real input from community members.

“There’s nothing that they can do in the police lab that’s going to work out here on the streets, there’s not,” said Kelly, who has advised the federal Justice Department on the consent decree. “It’s just going to appear to the community like they’re imposing something on us.”

Others in Sandtown-Winchester — where Freddie Gray lived — see some progress with the police, but remain frustrated with issues beyond their control, including a lack of resources. There’s no supermarket, and only a few restaurants nearby, they said. Shuttered schools and recreation centers also followed in the years since Gray’s death.

“We’ve got more vacants now than ever,” said Inez Robb, a longtime resident of the neighborhood who once chaired its police community relations council.

As for policing, Robb said, she has heard from others in the neighborhood that officers are quicker to respond to calls and more engaging at community meetings.

“It’s not all negative,” Robb said. “I guess it depends on who you talk to.”

Focusing on ‘broken windows’

Baltimore has hundreds of neighborhoods, all with unique problems that can’t be solved by policing alone, said Damion Cooper, who founded a nonprofit that helps Baltimore police officer trainees better understand the city and its young people.

Cooper, who has previously served in City Hall as the director of neighborhood relations for the City Council president, said he has seen a lot of progress in both the trainees and the adolescents he works with.

But he stressed that some parts of the city are so neglected that they have little to offer their residents, especially young people, other than liquor stores and drug corners.

“Until we see some historic investment in these areas, these issues are going to continue,” Cooper said. “And that is something that BPD, the National Guard, the FBI, no one can change. It takes a holistic effort.”

In Forest Park, Officer Steve Tandy, 41, said a community garden was created around the time he started with the Police Department after “there was some violent crime in this area that had been excessive.”

“It was basically established as an effort to reach out and remind people that you don’t have to live this way; we don’t have to endorse such animosity,” Tandy said of the project launched around 2013. “Somewhere they could bring kids to play and stuff like that. But sadly, it’s lost some pizazz. It definitely has.”

Gun violence is down significantly in the Northwestern District that includes Forest Park, police said, but the district still contains two of the city’s five-designated high-violence areas.

Maj. Kirk Yourkovik, who oversees the area, tries to direct his patrols to those parts of the district. But he also saves time for so-called “quality of life” complaints such as vacant homes, lighting and abandoned vehicles. He sees them as an initial step to help lower crime — a strategy he refers to by its old-school name, “broken windows” policing.

Some researchers have cast doubt on the crime-fighting philosophy, which dates back to the early 1980s. But Yourkovik sees it as essential. His officers are currently dealing with a spike in larcenies he attributes to people with substance use issues and unhoused people.

Gone are the days of mass arrests, according to Baltimore Police. The DOJ’s investigation had criticized the city policing tradition of “clearing corners,” often unconstitutionally, in response to complaints of drug dealing or loitering.

Capt. Tashania Brown, who worked in the department’s compliance unit charged with implementing the consent decree, said officers are now trained respond to such complaints with “verbal judo,” or the attempt to use conversations to deter people from being a nuisance.

“It’s about quality arrests,” Brown said. “Not quantity arrests.”

Living where you work

In order to bolster community policing efforts, Baltimore Police says it first needs to add to its ranks, in part by starting at home.

The agency has funneled resources into recruiting trainees and has developed incentives for those officers to live in the city to better understand its neighborhoods. But there isn’t a residency requirement for the rank-and-file — only certain upper ranks.

About a quarter of sworn officers live in the city: 527 out of 2,027, according to a recent report. But those numbers could improve soon. As of last month 57% of recruits are Baltimore residents, a department spokesperson said.

Kwame Rose, a community activist who rose to prominence in the protests following Gray’s death, pushed back against the notion that the Police Department has reformed for the better.

Officers from outside the city who are unable to relate to residents have “always been an issue,” he said.

“If you have a vested interest in improving your community, you just care more,” he said.

Hamond, the neighborhood officer who grew up in the city but now lives in Baltimore County, understands this philosophy. Grandparents on both sides of his family, he said, migrated from the South to the city where he now walks the beat.

“When I think about an officer responding, I’m thinking about, they could be responding to my grandmother,” Hamond said. “How would they treat my grandmother if it’s not the right type of officer?”

Baltimore Banner investigative reporter Justin Fenton and visual journalist Kaitlin Newman contributed to this report.