It’s pushing 90 degrees late one June evening when Baltimore Police Commissioner Richard Worley arrives on scene of a quadruple shooting in one of the city’s most distressed neighborhoods. And he appears to be scowling.
The city has been basking in a remarkably calm era for public safety, at least by Baltimore standards. That’s thanks to a record-setting decline in killings so far this year. Worley, 61, now looks like either the most accomplished or the luckiest commissioner in city’s modern history, maybe some combination of both.
But life in Baltimore always means a reversal of fortune could be right around the corner. In fact, on this sweltering summer night in Carrollton Ridge, Worley is anxious and knee-deep in dealing with this burst of violence as well as a cluster of fatal encounters involving his officers.
“We have to stop this back-and-forth. This district has been on fire for the past week,” he says while surveying the scene.
Worley spends the first 20 minutes assessing the number of victims and the severity of their injuries. On this block of McHenry Street, there are signs of life upended by violence: overturned chairs, abandoned foam cups, half-empty juice bottles. Orange cones now mark the spots where shell casings rained on pavement.
Officers tell their boss it‘s a known drug shop with people who sat around before a driver pulled up and opened fire. A patrol officer heard the shots from a block away.
“Was he close to the line of fire?” Worley asks.
“Oh yeah,” a sergeant responds.
A couple of hours later, a second quadruple shooting will break out. But for now, as the sun drops and the pieces of the crime scene fall into place, the conversation turns more casual. Worley, a former prep baseball star who never hung up his cleats, pulls out his phone and sees the Orioles are down 5-0.
“They still have a chance,” he tells one of his young patrol officers. “If they can get back to .500, they can make a run.”
A baseball season is a grind, and so is being Baltimore’s top cop, even in the best of circumstances. The 27-year department veteran marking his third anniversary as commissioner has seen it all, and those who know him best say he’s a down-to-earth optimist who is cool under pressure.
After a rocky start to his tenure, Worley has been tiptoeing through what could be the most successful stretch in the department’s modern history. The number of homicides in Baltimore, the bane of almost every mayor and long considered the bellwether of violence in the city, has fallen by unprecedented margins. The first half of this year saw the lowest number of victims in at least 50 years. The murder rate through July was the lowest since 1983, when William Donald Schaefer was mayor.
That’s happening with the fewest number of officers on the streets that anyone can remember, while the previously scandal-plagued department has also mostly avoided controversy. Today, the department has about 2,000 officers, a decline of 600 from a decade ago.
Those impressive crime stats have allowed Worley, who doesn’t relish the spotlight, to remain largely under the radar. His public appearances can be few and far between, and his team helps him with prepared notes and talking points.
“He’s a policeman’s police — certainly not the political type,” said T.J. Smith, a WBAL radio host who managed communications for three Baltimore police commissioners in the tumultuous years after the unrest a decade ago that stained the city’s reputation.
Baltimore and violent crime still remain a hot-button issue on the national scene. In his federal takeover of the Washington, D.C., police department, President Donald Trump name-checked the city last week as “so far gone” due to its elevated crime, a characterization Mayor Brandon Scott called untrue.
But relative to other cities, gun violence here remains high, and high-profile cases can force Worley in front of the cameras. During a two-week span in late June, three people died in encounters with officers, an unusual cluster and potential nightmare for police-community relations. After a well-known arabber was fatally shot by a plainclothes officer on Pennsylvania Avenue, people shoved officers and blocked them from rendering aid.
Behind the scenes, Worley acknowledged that the community’s intense reaction to the police-involved shooting showed the department still had a long way to go. But he also bristled, pointing out the “filthy” condition of the neighborhood and comparing the incident with other violence.
“While we were at that scene, we had a young Black man who was shot and killed in the Eastern District. Nobody gave a shit because we didn’t shoot him,” Worley said in an interview.
Still, in Worley’s world, there is good reason to be optimistic because he believes deeply that the department is dedicated to doing what’s right, and marking substantial progress under federal oversight for nearly a decade to address its systemic failure.
“We certainly face challenges, and there are areas we fall short,” Worley told council members at the department’s City Council budget hearing in early June. “But I believe we are operating at a level we haven’t seen in a long time.
“Perhaps ever.”
More than face value
Don’t believe that scowl on Worley’s face.
Worley bears a bit of a resemblance to the tyrannical police commander Stan Valchek from the HBO series “The Wire.” But those who know him best say his gruff expression belies a gentle demeanor.
“He has a way of making people feel secure and cared for,” said Michelle B. Wirzberger, his former chief of staff.
Before the cameras, he presents himself as real police in a four-star uniform with his graying hair cut high and tight. At 5-foot-11, his athletic frame is thanks to an ongoing love of baseball with a career that once brushed the major leagues. He chugs Diet Cokes, and speaks directly, a soft Baltimore accent revealing his roots.
Guy Thacker, who recently retired as a lieutenant colonel after 32 years with the department, says as a baseball guy, Worley “gets into the minutiae like a baseball manager would know the situation with every player that comes to bat.”
In some ways, Baltimore’s remarkable decline in violent crime under Worley simply mirrors a recent national trend.
Cities across the country are seeing decades-low homicide numbers, though Baltimore was both ahead of the trend when those numbers spiked in 2015, and has been seeing steeper declines than the national average. Just as police are often blamed for rising crime, they stand ready to accept credit for the big declines, though there’s likely a mix of factors. Among them in Baltimore is the mayor’s Group Violence Reduction Strategy, which officials credit for offering services to those most at risk of shooting someone or being shot, and building cases against them if they refuse to buy in.
As for Worley in particular, the assessment among community leaders is mixed.
Joyce Green, who has been the president of the Central District’s Police Community Relations Council for more than 20 years, said some previous commissioners have been “all talk and no action,” and Worley seems genuine. Nicole Chang with the Baltimore NAACP civil rights organization described Worley as “approachable and personable” but that when he stepped into the role “his relationship with the broader community was virtually non-existent.”
“While I think he’s very well-liked internally, I think there are ongoing questions about how well he understands or connects with the community most impacted by police,” Chang said.
Jamal Turner, president of the city’s Police Accountability Board, called Worley “cordial” but said, “I don’t have the kind of engagement with him that I would like.” At a recent City Council hearing about police accountability that drew an overflow crowd of residents and activists, Worley was nowhere to be found. A spokeswoman said he wasn’t invited.
At the recent National Night Out to promote safe communities, aides urged him to make the rounds and pose for selfies. But he is clearly more at home huddled with other officers, which is how he spends most of his time at the events.
As a white police commissioner in a majority Black city, Worley touts his homegrown upbringing as a way to connect with residents.
He grew up in Pigtown, the youngest of four. Early on, Worley showed promise in the classroom and on the athletic fields. When Worley’s dad hit the Pick 3 and won $1,000, he sent his son to Cardinal Gibbons School, where he was an A student and earned a football scholarship while also playing shortstop for the region’s top baseball team.
“My mom and dad paid for me to go to school,” he said. “I saw the sacrifices they made, so I had to give it my best.”
After a standout junior year, he hoped to be drafted by a major league team or play for a top college team. He instead landed at middling Oklahoma City University, where in a Roy Hobbs moment, he pitched and hit the game-winning three-run homer. The local press dubbed the school’s planned new baseball stadium “The House Worley Built.”
But that didn’t pan out, nor did his pro dreams. He returned home, where he worked for his sister’s family flooring business and continued to play in semi-pro leagues. By 1998, after the business was sold. Worley, now a 34-year-old single father of two, decided to join the Baltimore Police Department.
He loved it.
“It was like, ‘Man, I’m off tomorrow — I’m going to miss something,’” Worley said. “And I’ve always felt that way. I’ve always loved the job, because you can make a difference in people’s lives.”
He also moved into management quickly. Almost all of his tenure has been spent overseeing patrol operations, the lifeblood of the department, built on rank-and-file officers on the beat.
He made his mark as the commander for four years of the Northeastern District, an area covering some of Baltimore’s leafiest, quasi-suburban neighborhoods where he connected with residents through a regular newsletter. It’s also where he got to know Brandon Scott, a hungry young City Hall aide who would become a city councilman and eventually mayor.
Councilman Ryan Dorsey, who represents the area of the city once under Worley’s jurisdiction, said the district has seen eight leaders in the last decade and sorely misses Worley’s distinct leadership.
“And throughout all of them, it’s been consistent that one person after another would be like ‘Man, it really wasn’t like this when Rich Worley was the major’ or ‘Man, wish we could get Rich back,’” Dorsey said.
Worley has also overseen an especially fruitful period for the near-decade-long federal oversight of the department, which was narrowed this year after the city reshaped policies on everything from using force to receiving reports of sexual assault. Among the marks of success: a steep drop in arrests without probable cause.
The department’s troubled past has also meant that Worley came up through the ranks with some of those who gave the department a bad name. That includes Sgt. Wayne Jenkins, the leader of the department’s Gun Trace Task Force, who was convicted of racketeering, robbery, overtime fraud and planting evidence, and sentenced to 25 years in federal prison.
“You are great at what you do and I have known that,” Worley, who was the district commander at the time, wrote in a July 2016 email to Jenkins amid the wiretap investigation and seven months before he was arrested.
“If we could get the rest of the ops teams even close to your production would be a win for the city. Is there something you can teach or train the other units? Can we have other units or officers tag along with your team?”
Worley has never been accused of facilitating corruption and was hardly alone in fawning at Jenkins’ productivity in those days. But federal prosecutors and two outside reviews would later blame the department leadership’s overall lack of scrutiny and misplaced priorities as root causes of the unchecked corruption.
Worley described criticism of his tenure in the agency amid this kind of broken culture as “fair.” In an interview last week, he maintained that he never saw anything that made him question Jenkins.
“I’ve been here a really long time. My record is clear; I’ve stayed out of trouble,” he said. “There’s a lot of good people here who weren’t involved in those things.”
Early stumbles
For years before Worley, the city turned to outsiders to help right the direction of its troubled police force.
Michael Harrison was recruited from New Orleans to take over in 2019. It was four years after the city was rocked by the police-involved homicide of Freddie Gray, whose death led to unrest. The police corruption scandal around its Gun Trace Task Force further sullied the department’s reputation.
In an effort to attract and retain the best and brightest department leadership, the police commissioner eventually became the city’s highest-paid employee at $311,000.
When Harrison decided to resign after nearly five years in 2023, Scott phoned Worley at 11:30 on a June night and told him he would be named commissioner the following morning. He bypassed a search and soliciting community feedback; Scott says he knew what he was getting.
“One of the reasons Rich and I have hit it off all these years, we’re not interested in the glitz and glamour. What matters to him is helping people, and doing the right thing,” Scott said in an interview. “I know he cares about public safety in Baltimore, and he’s going to work hard and get the job done.”
It wouldn’t take long before one of Worley’s biggest tests.
Less than a month after becoming commissioner, Worley was faced with a mass shooting at Brooklyn Homes public housing community, where 30 people were shot and two of them died. A highly critical after-action report chided police for their failure to prepare for the annual community party, adjust as the crowds swelled, and contain the violence in the shooting’s aftermath.
“It seems from what we’ve learned so far, this was an even greater breakdown in communication and judgment that was just unacceptable,” Worley told city council members in July 2023, about two weeks after the shootings.
Then came the September 2023 killing of tech CEO Pava LaPere in the city’s Midtown neighborhood. The anger over the homicide was compounded by the revelation that her killer, Jason Billingsley, attacked two other people in West Baltimore just days before the slaying. Police hadn’t notified the public of the first crime, and Worley would apologize for comments seen as disparaging the victim in that case.
It was just a week before Worley’s scheduled confirmation hearing before the City Council. The Baltimore chapter of the NAACP weighed in, saying Worley was not cut out for the job and citing “missteps, mistakes, and miscalculations” that “had fatal and unacceptable consequences.” Worley prevailed on a final vote of 14 to 1, though not without a warning.
“If BPD produces this type of performance again … I will call for his resignation,” said then-Councilman Eric Costello, who voted for Worley.
With his position finally secure, Worley largely shrank from public view in the ensuing months.
Easing in
The reality of the job of the city’s top cop is that very little of it is fighting crime on the streets.
Instead, Worley, a night owl, pores over crime reports and other paperwork into the early morning hours. By the time he’s at his desk on a Monday morning, looking ahead at a day full of meetings on the department’s fifth-floor headquarters overlooking the mouth of the Jones Falls Expressway, he has written out every single major reported crime in a color-coded chart that he says helps burn them into his brain.
His approach has drawn praise from State’s Attorney Ivan Bates, the city’s top prosecutor, who lauded him for bringing on a new executive to address juvenile crime. And police union president Mike Mancuso, who blasted previous commissioners as “carpetbaggers” who took a “hands-off” approach to fighting crime, said in a statement that Worley has encouraged them to “take the necessary action needed to fight crime.”
But the union also called the jury “still out” on Worley’s legacy as it urged him to take bolder steps to hire more officers and increase their pay.
Back at a commanders’ meetings this summer, Worley can be seen deferring to his deputies and other commanders as part of a deliberate effort to grow the department’s leaders. Insiders say he’s boosted the efforts at intelligence gathering, sharing that information in daily internal calls.
Though much of Worley’s days are crammed with meetings, he also has to be ready to race to a scene.
On June 17, plainclothes officers approached Bilal “BJ” Abdullah near the subway stop at The Avenue Market after being told he had a weapon. Abdullah ran, then shot at police, who fired back with more than 30 shots.
Distraught bystanders rushed to the dying man, yelling at officers and preventing them from tending to him. Social media videos captured the melee as the outnumbered officers tussled with the crowd.
Abdullah was a member of the arabbing community, and several tense days and nights followed as some in the surrounding community mused about the possibility of a “riot” over a case that seemed “just like Freddie Gray.”
During these fraught times with the city on edge, Worley didn’t meet with community leaders to calm tensions. He said he had staff for that, and he was confident that the video from the scene backs up his officers’ actions as proper even as the city sat on the video’s release for nearly a week.
The day after the shooting, Worley vented his frustrations.
“My take is that we still haven’t really mended the community-police relationship,” he said in an interview, referring to “citizens like that who want to get involved without knowing what’s going on.”
He lamented the “culture that hangs at Pennsy and Laurens,” and the condition of that intersection and surrounding neighborhood. “They just throw trash on the ground. It’s like, there’s trash cans right here. …This is your home, this is your city.
“All some people care about as soon as we pull the trigger, they assume we’re wrong,” he said. “And I think we’ve proven time and time again that we’re right.”
The weekend sees another volley of street violence, which Worley monitors while playing in two adult baseball leagues with fellow officers outside the city. When police are finally ready to share the footage of the shooting with the public on June 23, Worley has his talking points ready.
“We understand that any use of force by law enforcement leads to a high level of public concern and possible criticism. We are committed to continuing conversations with our residents, stakeholders and leaders,” he told reporters upon the video’s release.
“We remain dedicated to an ongoing and open dialogue with our residents and full, thorough investigation.”
A reporter asks what he thinks. Off to the side, his spokeswoman Lindsey Eldridge shakes her head indicating he shouldn’t answer given the pending probe.
“I think the officers did an exceptional job,” he says.
This time, there will be no sequel to the kind of unrest that erupted a decade ago following Gray’s death. The burst of street violence is followed by a weekend without a shooting, and during a stretch in late July and August, no one is killed for 16 days, a respite once considered almost unimaginable.
Worley was once asked if he could have ever conceived of Baltimore with only 150 homicides or fewer after so many years of a number of killings at least double that figure.
“Honestly I always did,” Worley said in a May radio interview. “Because I’m usually positive. I always think we can do things that, and all we need is someone to tell us you can’t do it, and then you go out to prove yourself.
“Why can’t we?”
Banner reporter Emily Opilo contributed to this article
This story has been updated to reflect Worley’s alma mater as Oklahoma City University.
