Today, Baltimore's Police Athletic League centers will shut down and, in most cases, will be reborn.
The police will leave, though they'll stay for one or two more weeks to ease the transition as 16 of 18 centers become one with the city's Department of Recreation and Parks.
City officials announced the end back on March 18, but residents fought back at budget hearings and in gyms where city leaders let them speak but timed them using red, yellow and green traffic signals.
Residents pleaded over and over again that officers made all the difference, as protectors and role models, when they shed uniforms and donned sweats and mentored kids and organized field trips and helped with homework and coached soccer and kept vulnerable youths off the street and out of trouble.
But minds had been made up. It was the budget, officials said officially, but perhaps more than anything, they just didn't like the idea anymore of police officers permanently assigned as counselors. The police commissioner stated that workers should be "staying in their lanes," and the rec and parks director said, "We don't want to waste officers' time" managing rec centers.
A division that began in the 1990s when the Police Department staged a coup and took over some drug- and crime-ridden rec centers finally culminated with a new, clear division of labor.
The Police Department's chief spokesman, Anthony Guglielmi, notes that far from abandoning rec centers, officers are being required to visit to talk with kids and spend time with them. That way, the commissioner has said, the youths get to know many officers, not just the few they had played with.
But two PALs, Bocek and Rosemont, are closing for good. Rec and Parks is running a summer camp at Bocek, so that will at least have some programming for the next few weeks. But at Rosemont in West Baltimore, in one of the city's most impoverished and dangerous neighborhoods, the doors are locked.
The one officer still assigned there had for the past few weeks been repeatedly assigned elsewhere, and the community services officer left a week ago.
At a community meeting in April, Recreation and Parks Director Wanda S. Durden assured Rosemont residents that if they found a viable nonprofit foundation, they could reopen the rec center.
Rick Mosley ran with the idea and has submitted a proposal to the Parks and People Foundation seeking a $150,000 grant. He has repeatedly called the Rec and Parks offices to follow through but said he couldn't find anyone to talk with. "Not even a call returned," he said Monday.
