When he was 15 years old, Leonard Hamm was arrested for reasons that remain unclear more than 40 years later. The police commissioner of Baltimore remembers the moment as though it were yesterday. He should. It captures some of the historic mistrust between his city and his police department that Hamm wishes finally to heal after all this time.

Sometimes he seems to be making progress — and sometimes not.

This is a police department that recently arrested and handcuffed 7-year-old Gerard Mungo for sitting on his dirt bike (and later arrested his mother), a department criticized for too many “nuisance” arrests since City Hall instituted its own version of New York’s so-called Zero Tolerance police. It’s a department that has cut significantly into street crime while homicides remain tragically high — and hears critics call for an independent audit of its statistics. In a city that’s roughly two-thirds African-American, it’s a department where the racial balance of the command staff is questioned, as is a policy that allows commanders to live outside the city they serve.

Hamm hears the criticism. He’s a man who seems to carry wariness as part of his survival equipment. Last week, on the day the city’s Board of Estimates voted him a pay raise — to $162,000 — he reflected on the job he’s held for the last 18 months.

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And how it connects with that arrest 42 years ago.

“I was coming out of the cleaners,” he remembered, “and an officer had two of my friends up against a wall. He said, ‘You get up there, too.’ I’m standing there with my fresh-cleaned pants inside the wrapper.”

He lived in South Baltimore’s Cherry Hill, where antipathy between the cops and the community was a historic constant. He was a 10th-grader at City College. Though he was friends with the other two kids arrested that day, there was a difference between them. Hamm had a father at home, and they didn’t.

“They put us in the old Southern District lockup for the night,” Hamm said. “I was upset, because I wanted to see ‘I Spy’ on TV that night. With Bill Cosby, yeah. But then, the next morning, my father went to court with us. He talked to the judge.” It was Harry Cole, one of the city’s first black judges.

“You young men go back to school,” said Cole, instantly throwing the case out of court.

Cole understood the games police sometimes played. All these years later, Hamm remembers the police department of those days as a model — “of how not to police.”

There were racial tensions and class tensions. If you needed help, Hamm says, “go find a priest, not a policeman.”

It is precisely not the kind of department he wants to lead. He is police commissioner, but he is also a lifetime Baltimorean who is trying to establish previously unknown levels of mutual trust.

But, in a time when police statistics show a clear drop in serious street crimes, it raises the issue of “nuisance” arrests — of the city’s attempts, since the beginnings of Martin O’Malley’s days at City Hall, to crack down on those whose minor lawbreaking leads to the larger dissolution of neighborhoods. But such arrests have also led to antagonisms between the police and some civilians — antagonisms that surfaced with the recent arrest of 7-year-old Mungo.

“Citizens should feel we’re on their side,” Hamm said. “But we have to show it, too. You’re on your beat, you have to deal with those who are clearly criminal. Look, in the African-American community, we have a tradition of hanging out on the street corner. Now, the law says you can’t loiter on some corners. But we’ve got guys 70 years old down on that corner, solving the problems of the world.

“They’re not the problem. The problem is the 16-year-old, or the 24-year-old, who’s getting into real trouble. When people see the police making that distinction, they respect you. But we have to make that distinction. You know, when O’Malley was mayor, he never used the phrase ‘zero tolerance.’ ” The phrase carried too many negative connotations, often race-based. But the intention was clear: The city needed a return to civility.

“There’s a criminal element in certain neighborhoods,” Hamm says, “that thought they could do whatever they wanted — and, ‘How dare you say I can’t urinate on the street,’ and ‘How dare you tell me ...?’ They think they can do whatever they want, to the detriment of the community.

“And we’re saying, no, this is not acceptable. We have values as a community. And we believe the majority of people in those communities want those values held up.”

Tomorrow: Leonard Hamm, part two.

Please send news tips to Michael Olesker at olesker@baltimoreexaminer.com