Specialized police unit in South Baltimore temporarily disbanded amid internal probe

A Baltimore Police operations squad that roams neighborhoods in South Baltimore looking for crime has been out of commission for months amid concerns about a lack of supervision, officials said.

The Southern police station’s district action team was “temporarily deactivated” in late March “due to staffing and supervisory changes within the unit,” department spokesperson Lindsey Eldridge said in an emailed statement.

The disbandment coincided with an internal affairs investigation into a former member of the team that remains ongoing, Eldridge confirmed. She would not characterize the nature of the investigation.

Several people inside the department and not authorized to speak to the media said one member of the team had run afoul of homicide detectives seeking to question a confidential informant. “The misunderstanding with homicide was resolved, but it led to looking at other stuff,” said one source, who declined to elaborate.

Asked about the circumstances of the unit’s disbanding, Police Commissioner Richard Worley said it was “an internal thing that happened and we’ve gotta let it play out.”

In her statement, Eldridge said the sergeant and lieutenant overseeing the Southern District Action Team had left for different assignments.

“We can’t have units unsupervised, especially the discretionary units,” Worley later added.

As the Baltimore Police’s largest district, the Southern loops around the harbor from Fort McHenry to the city’s border with Anne Arundel County, wrapping in communities including Federal Hill, Brooklyn and Cherry Hill.

Still, the decision has raised concerns among some residents who say their neighborhoods benefit from the active enforcement the plainclothes unit did and which they said patrol officers have not. Other community leaders interviewed, however, said they didn’t know about the unit or the change.

Worley said he was not concerned about the disbandment of the Southern’s action team because the agency backfilled for it from “citywide units” and other district’s teams.

Although crime is down overall in the Southern District over the first six months of 2026 compared to the same time last year, aggravated assaults and commercial robberies are up, according to Baltimore Police data. Over the last month, there’s been a spike in robberies, commercial robberies and larceny from automobiles, the data shows.

David Jones, a board member with the Community of Curtis Bay Association, said he’s frustrated by the disbandment of the plainclothes unit, saying its officers “were actually taking people off the street that the rest of BPD weren’t doing.”

“The DAT team is something that’s actually effective,” Jones said. “They make arrests, and they get people off the streets.”

Peggy Jackson-Jobe, president of the Cherry Hill Community Coalition, said she was familiar with the concept of semiplainclothes units but didn’t know “about the actual implementation of it.”

“In terms of the plainclothes action team, I don’t see how the disbandment of it impacts Cherry Hill directly because we have such a good relationship with the police and they’re in the community,” Jackson-Jobe said.

But Angela Cruz Williams, president of the nearby Morrell Park Community Association, said that, while crime is down overall in her neighborhood, larceny is up and “you never know what you’re going to get in the summer.”

“I truly believe that it’s a situation where we should have proactive policing and not reactive policing,” Cruz Williams said. “Morrell Park has really seen its share of a whole lot of crimes happening, and it’s always reactive.”

District action teams assigned to each of the city’s police districts are the latest iteration of operations squads that wear plain clothes underneath vests marked “Baltimore Police” and have a controversial history in the city. Most notorious was the rogue Gun Trace Task Force, whose officers roamed the city robbing residents and planting drugs and guns on people. The district action teams sprung up in 2017 after the citywide gun task force was exposed.

“They may have a new name and a new alleged structure, but they have generally the same problems,” said Debbie Katz Levi, a civil rights and criminal defense lawyer who recently left the Baltimore Office of the Public Defender, where she spent many years focusing on police misconduct.

She said district action team officers target areas the police deem to be “high crime,” which are usually under-resourced communities, and target people under questionable pretexts, such as race.

“It’s like the officers themselves are looking for trouble,” Levi said. “They do anything but build and promote trust in the community. That’s at least the experience I’ve heard from individuals who were victims of their proactive policing.”

District action team officers have been the subject of hundreds of use-of-force complaints and misconduct allegations, according to data collected by the public defender’s office.

Worley told members of the City Council’s Budget and Appropriations Committee this month that another district action team was taken off the streets and placed on routine administrative duty because the whole unit was involved in a police shooting. The commissioner did not say which district it was or when it happened.

Eldridge said a new lieutenant has been assigned to oversee the Southern District’s semiplainclothes unit.

“I think there’s a posting for the sergeant in place,” Worley said. “Pretty soon the district action team will be back and operating in the Southern.”