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In Baltimore, a Revolving Door at Police Chief

by Richard A. Oppel Jr. @ NYTimes.com, Jan. 9, 2019

The job of commissioner of the Baltimore Police Department has proved to be one of the most tenuous in the country.

The mayor this week selected Michael Harrison as the city’s fifth police chief in four years, and asked him to try to solve a list of persistent problems that chased most of the others from the job. Among the tasks: Reducing one of the nation’s highest murder rates; building trust among residents who widely view the department as racist, corrupt and indifferent; and earning the support of rank-and-file officers.

And lately, doing all of this under a federal court order intended to curb the department’s long history of abusive and discriminatory practices.

If that were not enough, perceived success has often boiled down to one yardstick — the tally of murders and other violent crimes — whose roots, many experts say, lie to a large extent in a stew of deeper problems beyond the reach of a police chief.

Those include the privation in some of the country’s poorest big-city neighborhoods, where incomes, and life expectancy, are stunningly lower than in Baltimore’s prosperous districts.

Mr. Harrison, 49, has a reputation as a reform-minded superintendent of the New Orleans Police Department, and has won plaudits for overseeing sweeping changes in police practices required after the Justice Department found widespread civil rights violations and other abuses.

“He understands the similarities between us and New Orleans,” Mayor Catherine Pugh of Baltimore said in announcing his appointment.

Baltimore was the subject of its own scathing Justice Department investigation in 2016 that found that its police force had systematically harassed and hounded black residents for years, among other abusive practices. But the city has struggled to carry out its consent decree, and Baltimore officials hope Mr. Harrison’s appointment will smooth the process. [....]

He was sworn in March 12, 2019 according to the Baltimore PD website. On his biography there, it said he was a member of the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives, which was new to me so I checked their website out. Didn't explore it much yet. From their "About Us" page, is clear that they are not a minor organization:

The National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives (NOBLE) serves as the conscience of law enforcement by being committed to Justice by Action. NOBLE has nearly 60 chapters and represents over 3,000 members worldwide that represent chief executive officers and command-level law enforcement officials from federal, state, county, municipal law enforcement agencies, and criminal justice practitioners. The combined fiscal budget oversight of our membership exceeds $8 billion. NOBLE serves more than 60,000 youth through its major program components which include: Mentoring, Education, Leadership Development, and Safety.