Two years ago, John T. Bullock was walking his dog near his home on Baltimore's West Lafayette Avenue when three pit bulls escaped from a nearby yard, charged over to Bullock and his dog and attacked them both.
"The police showed up right away and took care of it," Bullock recalled. "One officer even came to the emergency room — I was having my hands stitched up — to ask me how I was doing. He followed up."
Bullock, 32, an assistant professor in political science at Towson University, was impressed — and he wanted to know more about how the police do their jobs and how to establish a working relationship with the officers in his neighborhood.
Bullock was one of hundreds of people who took advantage Friday of the Baltimore Police Department's Community Partnership program, which gave citizens the opportunity to ride along with officers on their rounds, sit in on roll calls and briefings, and challenge commanders with questions in face-to-face meetings.
"That's something people in the community say they want — more interaction with the police," Bullock said from the passenger seat of a Ford Explorer patrol vehicle as a 30-year veteran of the force, Officer John J. Fabula, drove slowly around the parking lot of Mondawmin Mall, looking for anything out of the ordinary.
The only thing they found was a mechanic changing the front brake pads of a customer's car. Fabula stepped out of the Explorer and informed the man, politely, that the parking lot was private property and that he'd have to pack up and leave.
Bullock got a taste of more exciting stuff a few minutes later, at North and Pennsylvania avenues, where a pale blue Ford Mustang smacked into the rear of a Jeep and then fled, in full view of not only Fabula but a second officer in another patrol car.
That officer gave chase and pulled the Mustang over three blocks away. Fabula and a half-dozen other police officers converged on the site, and the Mustang's driver — whose license turned out to have been suspended — was arrested for leaving the scene of an accident and evading police.
"He could have easily hit this kid," Fabula said, pointing to a boy riding a bicycle on Woodbrook Avenue. "Sometimes — it's a heck of a thing to say — people don't always use their heads."
Not long afterward, the radio crackled with a report of another hit-and-run, at Mosher Street and North Carrollton Avenue, where a female pedestrian had been injured by one of two cars that collided. Both vehicles, a minivan and a red sedan, fled after the accident. The woman, who was treated for a minor leg injury by paramedics at the scene, told police that the sedan had been racing up and down the street.
Another officer found the car — a 2011 Buick LaCrosse that had not been reported stolen — abandoned a few blocks away, its hazard lights on and its airbags deployed, the passenger-side door caved in by the impact of the crash. Fabula said it appeared to be a rental car.
"It's the day of the hit-and-runs," Bullock said, surveying the damage.
Across the city, some 280 people participated in the ride-alongs, according to Detective Jeremy Silbert, a department spokesman. Additionally, he said, 60 senior citizens visited police headquarters downtown and about 110 children were given a tour of the police academy in Park Heights.
Friday's outreach events — held for the fourth consecutive year — came at a propitious time for the Police Department, which has been buffeted by the recent prosecutions of several officers. One is being tried for murder, while two others this week received 18-month suspended jail terms after being convicted of misconduct for stranding two 15-year-old boys far from their homes. Another officer was acquitted in the same case.
"We want to show the citizens of Baltimore what we do and what we do best," the Western District's commanding officer, Maj. Robert L. Booker Jr., said Friday at roll call for the 3 p.m. to 11 p.m. shift. He said the aim of the Community Partnership program was to find out from citizens "exactly what they need from the Police Department" and to "show us how to be better police."
In the Explorer, Bullock peppered his affable guide with questions. He asked about loiterers at Mondawmin Mall and elsewhere, about dirt-bike riders screaming along sidewalks, about the effectiveness of spotlights used to illuminate high-crime areas, and about whether police officers ever give anyone a ticket for littering.
"Me, personally, I haven't," Fabula said. "But others might."