Reducing and preventing crime in the City of Baltimore is a core mission for our department, but it cannot be done by the BPD alone. By working collaboratively with our City’s residents, businesses, advocacy groups, non-profit organizations, faith leaders, elected officials, as well as with other city, state, and federal agencies, we can provide a multi-layer approach to solving underlying issues that lead to crime. BPD will develop effective deployment strategies that focus on those responsible for committing violent and property crimes and work with residents to address disorder problems that affect the quality of life in their neighborhood.  

While BPD is responsible for policing our community, it is also an integral part of it. We will only be successful in our crime reduction efforts by effectively engaging and listening to the needs of the people who live in the neighborhoods we protect. Working with and learning from our residents, our officers must focus toward fully understanding issues that impact our communities. We will work collaboratively with residents to create problem-solving strategies tailored to the challenges faced by specific neighborhoods and communities in our City. 

BPD will improve policies and training, overhaul antiquated technology, and create accountability systems to provide better services to the community. Through these reforms, BPD will dramatically change its practices to ensure proper uses of force; constitutional stops, searches, and arrests; fair and impartial policing practices; and true community policing operations. BPD must embrace these reforms because the residents of the City of Baltimore deserve a world-class police force that inspires trust, ensures safety, and protects the constitutional rights of the people we serve.

With the reform efforts underway to improve how BPD operates, we must also instill a renewed sense of civic duty, honor, integrity, and a culture of accountability in our department. BPD will implement new performance management practices, better systems of tracking and measuring work performance, as well as new COMSTAT processes that actively challenge its Command Staff to provide strategies and solutions that are responsive to community needs.

BPD will adopt and embrace new technologies and new partnerships within and outside our agency. BPD must become more transparent and more connected, so that we break down information silos and focus our efforts in a coordinated and better organized manner. 

Leadership development within BPD is the key to our department’s long term success. We will invest in better training, adopt improved systems of accountability, and improve how our department operates by hiring civilian professionals to manage administrative processes. We will also improve our recruitment, hiring, and retention efforts to ensure that we can increase our ranks to be able to fully respond to the needs of 21st century policing. 

Effective communication has to be at the heart of everything we do in the Baltimore Police Department and we must effectively engage, actively listen, and work collaboratively with our residents to be successful.  We will strive to improve and maintain effective lines of communication so that we can strengthen our relationships, build new relationships where there are none, and repair the relationships that were broken in the past.