A FORTRESS SOFTENS ITS EDGES
Can yoga and a lactation room help change a Baltimore police station?
BALTIMORE— Maj. Sheree Briscoe stood at the front of her police station like an armed hostess at a housewarming party.
“Welcome, welcome,” she said, holding the door for a group of older neighbourhood women coming up the stairs of Baltimore’s Western District police station, past the new burbling fountain and the outdoor phone-charging stations, over the Thurgood Marshall quote carved into the pristine cement. “Here comes Miss Pearl. Oh my gosh, you brought your mama with you? I’m so glad you’re here.”
On a sweltering July evening, the women were arriving for a community meeting, one of the first since workers completed a $4.5-million renovation — largely privately funded — meant not only to update the 1950s-era building, but also to transform the city’s most-beleaguered police station from fearsome to friendly.
“It’s a blessing to be able to welcome people back to the Western District,” said Briscoe, the station’s commander, as she directed residents to the former courtroom that has been converted into a high-tech (and heavily air-conditioned) community collaboration room. “We want everyone to feel comfortable coming here.”
Devastated by riots in 2015 after the death of Freddie Gray, Baltimore is grappling with a record-setting spike in homicides — it recently reached199 so far this year, compared with 62 in slightly larger Washington — and a massive overhaul of the department under a justice department consent decree. Amid the relentless violence and internal turmoil, Baltimore is joining a growing list of cities betting that a better police station can lead to better policing.
From Brooklyn to Los Angeles, cities are folding the ideals of community policing into station blueprints, hoping their design can help close the growing divide between the people who work in the buildings and those who live around them.
“We’ve been hearing from chiefs and mayors all over the country,” said Leigh Christy, an architect at Perkins and Will, who has worked on station renovations in Los Angeles.
The West Baltimore outpost that reopened in July features a public garden, free Wi-Fi and — a rarity in this neighbourhood — a pair of public washrooms. For their part, police have a state-of-the-art fitness centre and spacious locker rooms, along with a lactation room and a place to launder the uniforms that are routinely soiled by urban police work.
The visitors admired the bright lobby and noted the uplifting sentiments embedded in the winding garden path (“Trust,” “Rebirth,” “Unity”) .
“It really doesn’t even feel like a police station,” one of the meeting attendees said.
But outside the station, where the city is reeling from one of the country’s highest per capita homicide rates, it was easy to find skeptics.
“All the things going on in West Baltimore, and they decided what they really needed to do was make the police feel more comfortable?” asked Ray Kelly, a longtime Sandtown activist and president of the No Boundaries Coalition. “It’s going to take a lot more than a pretty building to make people around here want to go talk to the police.”
William Brown doesn’t begrudge the officers a few nice touches in their workplace. “When you come in from the battlefield, you need a place to decompress,” said Brown, 60, as he sat on the stoop of his house across from the station, where he has lived for 36 years.
But he doesn’t expect the friendly public face to last. “I think they did this with goodwill, but it’s not going to stay this way, it never does,” he said. “In a few months the ‘No Loitering’ signs will go up.”
For years, the Western District station has squatted on Mount St., a bunker in the middle of a troubled city’s most violent precinct. With blacked-out windows and high walls, the station had hardened into a symbol of police isolation well before the police van carrying the fatally injured Gray pulled up in 2015.
After the riots that followed Gray’s death, even starker barriers went up between the cops and the community. Jersey walls and fences blocked access to the station. The community council meetings that had been regularly held at the station were moved to a nearby Baptist church and residents of Sandtown-Winchester felt even more cut off.
“They just shut the place down,” said Elder Harris, the longtime pastor of Newborn Community of Faith Church, who remembers when the station was opened in 1958, at a time when residents knew all the officers by name. “It became a gated community.”
Now, police are hoping that a brighter, more open building will bring a dubious neighbourhood back in.
“The idea is to create a place where citizens feel welcome and where cops want to work,” said Scott Plank, brother of Under Armour chief executive Kevin Plank and the founder of War Horse Cities, a non-profit development company. The NFL’s Baltimore Ravens donated to the effort (the community room is painted Ravens purple in recognition), along with other local businesses and philanthropies. The city reportedly put up about $1.5 million of its own.
The station’s once-forbidding entrance has been stripped of the opaque window screens that blocked all views into the station. A high wall has been replaced with wide front steps that are emblazoned with Thurgood Marshall’s exhortation to recognize “the humanity of our fellow beings.” A freshly planted garden path fills one half of the entry lot; a Zen fountain sits on the other and behind the garden bench a cellphone charging station is meant to invite passing residents to stop and take advantage of the free Wi-Fi.
The back-of-the-house features a fitness centre with yoga pads, medicine balls and free weights. The decrepit bathrooms with lead pipes and undrinkable water have been replaced with bright stone-lined showers and LED lighting.
In a converted cellblock are spacious locker rooms modelled after those used at Under Armour’s corporate campus. The new lockers include gun safes and — in a nod to the unrest that gripped West Baltimore two years ago — enough room to store riot gear. The wall between the men’s and women’s locker room is movable and can be adjusted to fit the gender balance at the station, which is about 20 per cent female in the Western District.
“We also added a small bunk room that will double as a lactation room,” said Ana Castro, the Baltimore architect who worked on the design.
There is still a clear divide between the public and police sides of the building. While the lobby is as spacious and sunfilled as one of Under Armour’s retail stores, the sergeant’s desk has been placed behind a thick sheet of Plexiglas, a move to help officers feel secure in part of the city where hostility toward police remains strong.
“It’s still a dangerous place,” Castro said. “Policing is still a dangerous business.”
Harris, who lived near the station for more than 30 years, said he was glad to hear about the free Wi-Fi and happy the officers had better working conditions. But he would rather see money spent on the neighbourhood’s dire need for addiction treatment. “This is window dressing,” he said. Kelly, too, said the new station was far down on his list of priorities. But he expressed confidence in Briscoe.
“If this helps her do her job, fine,” Kelly said. “But I don’t see it.”
“It’s going to take a lot more than a pretty building to make people around here want to go talk to the police.” RAY KELLY LONGTIME SANDTOWN ACTIVIST AND PRESIDENT OF THE NO BOUNDARIES COALITION