Frederick H. Bealefeld III strides into a classroom at the Gunpowder State Park firearms range, his back still stiff from a night of adult-league ice hockey, and stands before an entire shift of Southern District police officers, seated in rows, who are about to embark on a month's worth of training and instruction to sharpen their skills.
As tough crowds go, this should be a layup for Bealefeld, a 28-year veteran of the Baltimore police force and a self-described "damn good drug cop."
But Bealefeld launches straight into a defense of his Diamond Standard training program, determined to convince the array of veteran and rookie officers before him that he hadn't brought them here to waste their time.
"I understand cops a little bit, and you know what you do? You say, 'I hear Bealefeld about his training. I hear all this mess. But he'll be gone in a minute. I'm just going to keep doing what I do.' Right?" asked Bealefeld, a blunt talker whose bloodline counts several beat officers from the city force.
"Well, I'm here to tell you there's a better way."
Almost three years into his job as city police commissioner - approaching the expiration date for his predecessors in the past decade - Bealefeld is still defending himself. And not just to his fellow officers, who have seen enough drive-by commissioners and half-baked policing strategies the past few years to be skeptical of anyone with stripes on his sleeves.
The tougher crowd is the 635,000 residents of Baltimore, whose city remains one of the most violent in America despite having less deadly crime than before the Southwest Baltimore native took over as its top police officer.
Each new week sees Bealefeld again taking to the airwaves, decrying the latest brutal or spectacular crime and chastising suspects with his trademark colloquialisms, calling them "morons," "idiots," "knuckleheads" or often "bad guys with guns." After two officers were shot last month, his comments denouncing the suspect - who was killed by the officers - prompted the 80-year-old grandmother of the suspect to declare she wanted to "punch him in the mouth."
More recently, Bealefeld has been forcefully defending his agency against proposed budget cuts that he calls "unconscionable."
Homicides are at a 20-year-low in Baltimore and have continued to fall this year, along with a decline in gun violence. Yet the commissioner - who might be the most successful in a decade, if statistics mean anything - is standing before groups of officers, or addressing the public at neighborhood functions or on newscasts, struggling to convince them that their city is slowly improving, not spiraling into chaos.
"It's going to take a while [to change perceptions], because there's been a mountain of energy going the other way," Bealefeld, 47, said. "But while I'm here, man, I'm going to work my ass off to try to tip it back."
Policing the drug tradeWhen he joined the Baltimore Police Department in 1981, dropping out of Anne Arundel Community College after a broken collarbone dashed his hopes of earning a lacrosse scholarship, Bealefeld preferred working the streets as a drug officer to pursuing a leadership position. He was following in the footsteps of his grandfather, who once walked a beat along Greenmount Avenue, and a great-uncle, who was killed in the line of duty.
He appeared primed for a quick ascent, however. By age 22, he had passed the department's sergeant test, and he is believed to be the youngest person in the department's modern history to earn such a distinction.
"He was more thoughtful and had a better grasp of what was going on than anybody else I talked to," said Adam Walinsky, a former top aide to Robert F. Kennedy who came to Baltimore in the 1990s to develop a federal police development program. "He really understood" modern-day policing.
When Bealefeld's climb to the top began, it was remarkably quick, taking him from major to chief of detectives to deputy commissioner in slightly more than two years. In 2007, as then-Commissioner Leonard Hamm grappled with soaring homicide numbers, police officials say Bealefeld began essentially running the department. And when Mayor Sheila Dixon removed Hamm, Bealefeld became interim commissioner.
Initially reluctant to pursue the commissioner's job, Bealefeld quickly warmed to it and began forming a tight circle of confidants. One of the first ideas they had was to further distance the department from the zero-tolerance strategy implemented under former Mayor Martin O'Malley.
They couldn't declare war on everybody anymore, he said. But this wasn't about easing off, either. It had to be a targeted approach, identifying key individuals responsible for the city's violence, and getting in their faces to jack them up on open warrants or a probation violation.
"They know who these guys are," Bealefeld said of the city's police officers. So he told them: "Go and drop a bomb on their head."
Another Bealefeld strategy was reconnecting with the community. He declared that officers needed to get out of their cars and walk their beats, like his grandfather, and they had to get involved in their community by working with kids.
And he began appearing on television so much that some fellow cops started calling him "WBAL Bealefeld," after the local television station.
As he pursued a permanent job as commissioner, Bealefeld had competition. Dixon's advisers pressed her to go with a known commodity, and, preferably, one who was black. Former Washington Chief Charles Ramsey sat for several interviews and generated backing from Dixon's chief of staff, Otis Rolley III, and from O'Malley, who was then a key Dixon ally. In the blue-walled commissioner's office overlooking the mouth of the Jones Falls Expressway, Bealefeld was hearing that Ramsey's appointment was imminent.
Retirement became a real possibility for Bealefeld, he said. For years, he had imagined that the perfect option would be riding a golf cart around Disney World as a security consultant.
"Here's this beautiful place, and everyone's happy. None of this putting up crime scene tape and seeing dead bodies and all that, just a complete escape from it all," Bealefeld said. "I thought, 'What a stark contrast, to go from West Baltimore to Disney to work in retirement.' "
But Dixon, brushing off her advisers, decided Bealefeld was the right man for the job.
"It was something in my gut that felt [Bealefeld] was the best person," Dixon said in an interview while she was still mayor. "I could just feel his passion."
But perhaps most important, as Bealefeld settled in as interim commissioner, the crime spike was already showing signs of subsiding, knocking the city off a collision course with the grim milestone of 300 homicides to finish with 282.
With 234 killings the following year, city officials declared the momentum genuine. In 2009, Baltimore finished with about the same number of homicides, but the city saw a drop in nonfatal shootings of more than 20 percent. All told, about 200 fewer people were shot on the streets of Baltimore last year than in 2007.
The degree to which Bealefeld and his officers can be credited with the drop is unclear. Other major cities saw a similar decline - including Philadelphia, where Ramsey is now chief - and despite its recent success, Baltimore remains the fourth-deadliest city among jurisdictions with 100,000 or more people. That makes it hard for people to buy into the notion of progress, said Doug Ward, director of the Johns Hopkins University School of Education's Division of Public Safety Leadership.
"The numbers aren't as important as how people feel," Ward said. "In a bad year, Boston has 60 murders. Why is it that Baltimore's murder statistics remain high? Bealefeld is doing the right things, but it's not his alone to solve. He can't fix the schools or the economy."
Bealefeld is adamant, however, that his strategies and the closer working relationships of all law enforcement agencies have had a measurable impact on crime.
"They've said it's luck. It's cold weather. It's better trauma care, or they're shooting lower. Lunar tables and the tides. But it's still happening," Bealefeld said. "I think that what we've built, and what we're constantly refining, are the systems that will allow us to sustain our gains and build upon them."
Getting into neighborhoodsWalking the grounds of West Baltimore's Calverton Middle School, Bealefeld, a married father of two teenagers, smiled as he greeted students and parents, talking sports with the older boys and squatting to check out a younger one's Transformers backpack. Then he and his security detail veered off into the community, "where the real problems are," according to the officers, passing lampposts adorned with T-shirts memorializing victims of gun violence and showing young men flashing gang signs.
As they walked, Bealefeld stepped onto porches and stopped men on the street. If you or people you know have made up your mind to take the wrong path, he told them, then fine. Just leave the younger ones out of it. "I need folks like yourself to pass the word around," he said.
This was not photo-op policing. There was no news release. Bealefeld attends block parties and citizen walks as many as four nights a week or more. Such events aren't publicized, partly out of fear that they could be perceived by residents as public relations stunts.
But Bealefeld has also restricted access to the department. News briefings are exceedingly rare. The department stopped releasing the names of officers who shoot and kill people (a year later, the policy was reversed) and imposed a daunting fee schedule for access to public records, among other changes. The Baltimore Sun filed a lawsuit in October challenging the department's inaccessibility.
Meanwhile, the department has sought to funnel information to residents directly, through Twitter, Facebook and events.
Marvin "Doc" Cheatham, president of the local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, gives Bealefeld high marks for approachability but says the department "lacks transparency."
"There are internal cases being thrown out, and we don't know why," Cheatham said. "There are officers who shoot people, and their names are not being relinquished. The people around him are not giving the information that we need."
But Bealefeld said such directives are coming from him. In interviews, he says providing more information would serve as extra ammunition for the department's critics rather than help clear the air.
"One of the things that's worked against us, in terms of criticism, is making everything available," he said. "What do we get out of it? Does it move the department forward? Does it make us a better agency?"
Meanwhile, the department faces serious internal challenges. Bealefeld's declines in crime have come with 200 fewer officers than his predecessors had, the equivalent of an entire police district. The leadership ranks have thinned through attrition, and looming pension woes attracted 800 disgruntled officers to the Fraternal Order of Police lodge last month.
Robert F. Cherry, president of the local FOP, said City Hall is cheering the declines in crime but said the rank-and-file officers who made it happen are growing increasingly frustrated. He recalled something Bealefeld said to him when they worked together: "You can only beat down your horses for so long before they give up."
"There's no harder-working cop in the department than Fred Bealefeld, and you can't deny that under his tenure, Baltimore has had significant reductions in crime," Cherry said. "But there are times I wish he was a little more aggressive at making sure the rank-and-file are appreciated for the work they've done."
That might be changing. Bealefeld began denouncing proposed cuts to the department's budget even before Mayor Stephanie C. Rawlings-Blake formally presented the plan, which her aides insist is only a preliminary doomsday scenario.
Since taking over as mayor, Rawlings-Blake has offered only modest endorsements of Bealefeld, and often talks about the city's success not in the context of the past three years - when homicides started coming down from a decade high - but over a 10-year span, a reference to the beginning of ally O'Malley's term as mayor.
Walinsky agrees that the police budget is key to Bealefeld's legacy and the city's future. Walinsky rattles off the names of a number of well-respected police chiefs he has gotten to know over the years - for example, he helped arrange the first meeting between New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and William Bratton, the chief credited with that city's remarkable turnaround in crime. He doesn't hesitate to place Bealefeld among that group.
"He has the chance, if he gets enough time and has anything like the resources that he should have, that he literally could go right to the top. This guy is top-shelf," Walinsky said.
Driving away from the firearms range after addressing the officers, Bealefeld said that many speculated he would bolt after achieving significant reductions in homicides during his first year and ride off into the private sector, before the economy and the city's budget woes had a chance to tarnish his legacy. But the veteran said he has unfinished business.
"Don't judge me on what I say, because I'm a good talker," he said. "Judge this police department on what is being done."
Frederick H. Bealefeld III Occupation: Baltimore police commissioner, appointed October 2007 after serving as interim commissioner from July 2007
Age: 47
Highlights: 20-year low in homicides in 2008; total shootings down more than 30 percent since 2007