Like many of the boys in his neighborhood, Leonard Hamm learned early to be wary of the police officers — many of them black like him — who patrolled the streets of South Baltimore in the 1950s and ’60s. Hamm remembered the officers as bullies, philanderers, and carousers, a largely corrupt force that rarely protected or served the people of the community.
“I had no respect for police,” said Hamm, wearing a finely tailored dark-blue suit and shaking hands with nearly everyone who crossed his path on a recent afternoon at Baltimore City Hall. “I thought they used their power to the detriment of the community.”
Hamm’s suspicions were confirmed at 16, when, he said, an officer arrested him and two friends for “obstructing the path” of a sidewalk while he picked up a pair of pants from the dry cleaners. Hamm said he spent the night in jail and had to appear before a judge, whom his father successfully convinced to drop the charges. The experience only hardened his misgivings about law enforcement.
“I never really got over it,” said Hamm, then a team captain and star of City College High School’s city champion basketball team.
Hamm might have held on to that grudge for much longer if he hadn’t eventually needed a job. After graduating from college in Philadelphia and working in New York as a fabric designer, Hamm returned home in 1973 looking for a job. He knew the police department had some openings.
“I knew I would be a good hire: a black boy with a college degree who had never been in trouble,” Hamm said. “I went in looking for work, a paycheck. But I found out in the police academy that law enforcement had grabbed my heart.”
Thirty years later, after steadily rising through the ranks, including a high-profile appointment as the first black commander of the Central District, Hamm was named the police commissioner of his hometown. At 6 foot 2, broad-shouldered, plain-spoken, clean-shaven, and nattily dressed, Hamm, 66, still possesses the self-confidence of the Big Man on Campus he once was and the salesmanship of someone who’s been in leadership roles for two decades now.
Today, Hamm is the police chief at Coppin State University, a historically black university of about 4,000 students in West Baltimore. Given his experience and position, Hamm is perfectly situated to take the gospel of policing to some of the city’s most disinterested parishioners.
Hamm’s career seems like an exemplar for what criminal justice experts call “community policing”: a theory of proactive, less antagonistic law enforcement that prizes officers with close ties to the neighborhoods where they work. The Baltimore Police Department has often signaled a renewed commitment to that philosophy, saying, “Community relationships are important, especially in difficult times” in a recent report.
And in a city where nearly a fifth of black residents are unemployed and more than a fourth live below the poverty line, a career in law enforcement — which can
start at nearly $50,000 a year — has been a reliable path into the middle class in a city where few others exist. Nearly 40% of the 2,646 sworn police officers in Baltimore are black, according to a community policing report, a figure that dwarfs much larger cities like Los Angeles and Dallas.
If the purpose of community policing is to bridge divides between law enforcement and the community, in Baltimore that project has all but failed. Nearly half of residents polled in the 2013 Baltimore Citizen Survey rated police protection as “fair” or “poor,” and the authors of the OutcomeStat Conference report in September noted “negative perception of police has likely increased in the recent months due to the death of Freddie Gray.”
