BALTIMORE _ For the past year, Ganesha Martin has had two goals: facilitate the Justice Department civil rights investigation of the Baltimore Police Department, and beat it to the punch in applying solutions to some of the police agency's most glaring problems.
The idea was to jump-start reforms while working to assist the Justice Deparment in enumerating the problems.
"If you change the culture of the police department, you can't help but change the trajectory of a city," Martin said. "We're willing to take our lumps. We're willing to say, 'We really jacked this thing up for X, Y and Z reasons.' But we're also resilient and we're also dedicated to getting this right."
Behind the scenes within the BPD, the yearlong Justice Department investigation _ which found a pattern and practice of unconstitutional policing that disproportionately impacted black residents _ has been an exercise in humility with a sharp learning curve and a heavy mound of work, Martin said.
As chief of the police department's DOJ compliance division, which was created around the same time the federal investigation was launched, Martin was tasked with getting the Justice Department's investigators, lawyers and experts whatever they wanted, which ultimately included tens of thousands of documents and nearly 150 interviews and ride-alongs with department staff, officers and others on the street.
There were boxes of documents to be found and copied. The manner in which the police department created, stored and used those documents sometimes had to be explained. And, there were data demands from the Justice officials that would have been a breeze for other police departments to fulfill, but which took lots of legwork in Baltimore's technologically-challenged police department.
In the meantime, Martin was reviewing Justice Department agreements with police departments in other cities _ Los Angeles, New Orleans, and Cleveland _ and taking cues from each as to what the Justice Department would find as deficient in its Baltimore report. She also sought to ease apprehension in a police department already under intense national scrutiny and pressure following the death of Freddie Gray from injuries suffered in police custody last year, she said.
"It would have been that way regardless for a police department, but particularly in the environment that law enforcement finds itself in now, there's been a lot of tension," Martin said. "But a lot of that comes from not knowing."
It all started after Gray's death caused local officials to call on the Justice Department to transform its ongoing "collaborative review" of the BPD into a more formal investigation.
Attorney General Loretta Lynch agreed, saying the events surrounding Gray's death had "given rise to a serious erosion of public trust."
Suddenly, the Justice investigation was off to the races.
At the time, Martin was then-Police Commissioner Anthony Batts' chief of staff. She began to study the paths of other police departments that had undergone such investigations. She traveled to Seattle to study the outcome there. And she came to a conclusion, she said.
"The problem with the BPD is that homicides are such a focus that everybody is running around with their hair on fire," she said.
"I basically said, 'We need somebody to focus on fixing the department with reforms full time. It can't be somebody's secondary job that they get to at 10 o'clock at night.'"
In July 2015, Batts was fired by Rawlings-Blake and then-Interim Police Commissioner Kevin Davis � since named to the top spot permanently � took the helm. Davis, who had lived through a DOJ review as a commander in the Prince George's County Police Department, agreed with Martin's assessment that a full-time point person was needed, and set up the DOJ compliance division with Martin as its chief.
Immediately, the requests from the DOJ came pouring in.
In all, the DOJ attorneys and investigators collected more than 100 types of documents � including three years of internal emails; 10,000 reports on citizen stops; 800 reports on officers' use of force; every investigation by the Special Investigations Response Team, which handles police shootings; entire databases of patrol data; reports on domestic violence homicides; and every last written policy, procedure or directive to officers from the department's commissioner.
They also conducted 110 interviews, went on 36 ride-alongs, and attended new trainings and Baltimore history seminars for officers. They watched trainings for Internal Affairs officers, the department's new foot patrol curriculum and administrative review boards that handle officer discipline.
The DOJ officials kept coming back for more, through this summer, Martin said. Each time, she and the members of her team were there to meet them.
"We didn't get much reaction from them, because they never wanted to paint the picture with us that anything we were doing was going to affect the findings that were going to come out," Martin said. "Now, we think it's only fair that they acknowledge our efforts, and they have applauded us for everything that we're attempting to do and really said we're one of the most welcoming jurisdictions, but they wanted to keep it very clear that what we were doing was not going to affect the ultimate outcome."
Regardless, Martin wanted to push, and Davis wanted her to push as well, using the consent decree model from past DOJ investigations as "a guidepost" to address problems "we already knew were going to be an issue," Martin said.
So, she pushed to revise the department's use-of-force policy to comply with modern best practices, and revamp the process for auditing officers' compliance with that policy and others.
Martin also helped lead an effort to bring in a new software system for tracking officer training and the dissemination of police policies. She started to look at how officers are trained in de-escalation, and how they handle individuals with disabilities. She started revising the evaluation and "early warning system" for identifying officers who are misbehaving or having personal problems. And she sought funding to improve the department's technology, which she said remains a major hindrance to improving standards overall.
"We have really put ourselves in a position for (the Justice Department) to say, 'Baltimore is not good at X, Y and Z...' and we can say, 'but...'" she said. "It's not going to be a lot of words. We have actions to back up what we said we were going to do and what we've actually accomplished, and a lot of things in the works," she said. "And not little baby steps. Not, let's put some tape on this gushing wound. It's real, substantive work."
In the end, Martin's work was acknowledged by the Justice Department. Vanita Gupta, head of the Civil Rights Division, said she was "pleased" with the cooperation of the police department. And the report, obtained by The Baltimore Sun, praises the police agency for its "cooperation and spirit of engagement" throughout the process.
"Still," the report says, "significant challenges remain."
Martin said she is ready to take on that challenge. She plans to continue pushing for reforms as the Justice Department process continues to play out, through consent decree negotiations and with a federal judge and a court-appointed federal monitor.
She believes the department is "on the brink of great things." She wants the department's officers to know she has their back. But she also wants to ensure they have the training, equipment and resources to be able to do their jobs right in the first place, she said.
"One of my mantras throughout this whole process is, don't ask police officers to do something if you are not giving them the training, if you are not giving them the policies, if you are not giving them the tools to be able to do their jobs as efficiently as we ask them to in this environment. And by this environment, I mean Baltimore is unique in many ways," she said.
"It's a huge, huge culture change," Martin said. "Because when you slow down to actually talk, and actually counsel, and actually train, and actually change policy, then you are literally kind of changing the DNA of this place, because it's always fire, fire, fire, fire, fire, fire, and it's very uncomfortable to slow down and deal with these things. But we have to do that."
