Redistricting involves redrawing the geographic boundaries of the Baltimore Police Department’s 9 Police Districts as required by law. It also involves the reallocation of the resources and personnel of the BPD among the districts based on census population and housing data.

According to a law enacted in 2019, the district boundaries must be redrawn every 10 years in conjunction with the U.S. Census.

According to the law, the BPD has one year from the release of the Census data to fulfill the requirement.

Redistricting allows for balanced allocation of personnel and resources. This makes the Department more efficient and better reflects the city’s changing population and law enforcement needs. It allows us to keep neighborhoods together, better address crimes according to geographies and focus on community interaction. It will also allow officers to respond to calls faster.

District boundaries are re-evaluated based on public input, data about calls for service, crime trends, violence and population changes.

While it is too early to finalize that decision without sufficient public input, BPD intends to develop a map that maintains 9 police districts. These would include the Central, Eastern, Western, Northern, Northeastern, Northwestern, Southern, Southeastern and Southwestern Districts.

No. The stations just need to be located within the boundaries.

Yes.

No. Redistricting creates a balanced workload and ensures that officers in one district have the same level of responsibilities as any other district.

View the demographics of the current and proposed district boundaries here.

View the statistics for the distribution of workload, crime and population in the current and proposed districts here.

View data collected from the Public Survey Analysis for Redistricting -- Phase 1 here.

View data collected from the Public Survey Analysis for Redistricting -- Phase 2 here. 

The redistricting process is based on an analysis of five years’ worth of service data at the unit level and more than 200,000 records of Part I crimes, including homicide, shooting, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, larceny from auto, auto theft and arson from 2016 to 2021 as well as 2020 U.S. Census data at the neighborhood level. “Neighborhood” was used as the unit of analysis in accordance with Baltimore Police Department’s initiative to improve public safety and crime prevention through community policing and positive interactions with the city’s 278 diverse communities.

Calls for service data were cleaned and analyzed to estimate the workload for each neighborhood to ensure that the workload is well balanced in the proposed district boundaries. Correlational analyses were also conducted to understand the relationship between workload, crime and population as a guide for further analysis. As an example, workload has a strong correlation with crime and population at the neighborhood level. Workload is also highly correlated with the amount of vacant housing units in a neighborhood. Through the analysis of crime data and the meetings with Chief of Patrol’s office and Chief of Criminal Investigation’s office, high crime areas in need of a unified crime reduction strategy were identified and controlled in the redistricting process.

Aggregated workload, crime and population data were imported into ArcGIS Territory Design solution to generate preliminary district boundaries based on different models. The redistricting team met every week to discuss the best ways to balance workload, crime, population and the size of the district effectively while keeping the current district stations in the proposed districts. The first round of public input data was also analyzed and incorporated into the redistricting process to make sure that the issues brought up by the public are addressed as much as possible in the proposed district boundaries with a balanced consideration on workload, crime, population and the size of the district.

With the data driven approach, the proposed boundaries significantly reduce the deviation of workload, crime, population and size between districts with accommodations to the public input. With an understanding that the second public input process might bring new data and perspectives to the redistricting process, the redistricting team will work with new data and perspectives to adjust the boundaries as needed.