Baltimore City – MD issued the following announcement on May 9.
Mayor Brandon M. Scott and Commissioner Michael S. Harrison announced their plan to bring the department into 21st Century policing by redrawing the geographic boundaries of its nine police districts. The Baltimore Police Department’s (BPD) current districts are based on decades-old boundaries and have not been updated to reflect the most recent Census results.
“As a Councilman, I worked with Senator Cory McCray to ensure we were changing our districts regularly to account for our constantly evolving city. That essential work has finally begun,” said Mayor Brandon M. Scott. “This undertaking is long overdue. Population, workload, crime trends, and even individual neighborhoods have changed dramatically in the decades since our district boundaries were last drawn. We must be more thoughtful about our resources, including deployments. This shift will allow BPD to manage crime more effectively, maximize resources, and reflects my commitment to transform BPD into the world-class department our residents deserve.”
“I want to thank Mayor Scott for putting our years of collective hard work into action,” said Senator Cory McCray, District 45. “Our residents have invaluable input informed by years of living and working in our great city. We need to tap into that knowledge in order to make the best decisions possible to make Baltimore a safer place to live for all.”
The Redistricting Plan intends to keep neighborhoods together, manage the crime more effectively in each geographic area, create better alignment for the Crime Reduction Strategy, provide officer workload balance, and optimize resource allocation for smarter policing.
“We have been deploying police resources based on a more than 50-year-old model that does not account for changes in population, housing, and other demographic data,” said Commissioner Michael S. Harrison. “This change is in line with our Reimagining Policing Plan and brings us one step closer to making the department a 21st-century agency.”
“It’s important to continually evaluate the operations of our police department, and modernizing police district boundaries is a key part of that,” said Councilman Mark Conway, District 4, Chair of City Council’s Public Safety and Government Operations Committee. “This redistricting process will allow the department to reflect the city as it is now — balancing workloads between districts, improving response times, and better meeting the public safety challenges people and neighborhoods are facing.”
"Police District boundaries have been outdated for quite some time. Areas such as the Tri-District (Western/Southwestern/Southern) with high criminal activity are representative of the need for a more targeted approach to public safety," said Councilman John Bullock, District 9. "Updating this map will allow for coverage that betters reflects current conditions and patterns."
The BPD will institute a public input process before and after the new maps are determined. The department will also use data related to calls for service, crime trends, high violence areas, and population changes to determine the new boundaries and reallocate resources and personnel.
"As a community that is located in the Northeast District, the Baltimore City police district with the largest number of square miles to be served, Coldstream Homestead Montebello welcomes this much needed and long overdue redistricting," said Mark Washington, Executive Director of the Coldstream-Homestead-Montebello Community Corporation. "We believe it will yield a more effective, efficient, and responsive Baltimore City Police Department and lead to improved public safety outcomes for us all. We are eager for the process to begin.
Redistricting will enable the BPD to:
Efficiently manage law enforcement resources
Provide the appropriate resources to the districts
Respond to crime faster and more efficiently
Create a better balance between calls for service and geographic areas
Maintain a constant presence in high-crime areas
Increase patrols and interactions with neighborhood organizations
Save money
Provide a greater sense of safety to residents
“Redistricting is long overdue. We have been working with unbalanced manpower and inefficient allocation of resources. These changes should bring a renewed sense of safety and involvement to the community,” said Commissioner Harrison.
All district stations will:
Be located within the district’s geography
Be accessible by transit lines
Have sufficient parking and bike racks
The BPD is calling for public input before and after the maps are drawn. Go to baltimorepolice.org to submit the online feedback form.
Original source can be found here.
Source: Baltimore City – MD
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