BALTIMORE (Map, News) - Deep in this dreary corridor of the Baltimore Police Department’s Eastern District, across a narrow aisle from a row of empty cells, City Councilman Keiffer Mitchell runs into a couple of plainclothes detectives who are not precisely dressed for a night at the opera.

“Trying to find the Gang Unit,” Mitchell says.

“You’re looking at it,” says Detective Dennis Workley, dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, appropriate for his line of street work.

“The whole unit?” Mitchell asks.

“Pretty much,” says Detective Lamont Davis, in sleeveless T-shirt and shorts. “There’s Sgt. [Ted] Frile, but he’s not around. And Detective [Louis] Holley, but he’s out on bereavement.”

“And that’s it?”

“That’s it.”

Mitchell looks at the two of them as if there must be a misunderstanding. Every day we hear how we live in a time of such great change in the crime picture, in which gangs are now the great danger to us all. The increase in shootings is blamed on gangs. Much of the drug trafficking is blamed on gangs. A string of armed robberies and utterly senseless violence has been traced to gang initiations.

Unless the English language has changed, these detectives are telling Mitchell that this tiny handful of officers is the backbone of the police department’s effort to meet this great new challenge.

“We’re the only ones doing this full time in the whole city,” Workley says. “All we do is gangs. And that’s because our major [John Dodson] had the foresight to form the unit.”

“Yeah,” the councilman says, “but you guys are the whole story?”

Not the whole story. Other police also arrest accused gang members, and other police share information with the Gang Unit (and vice versa).

But “put it this way,” Workley says. “We’re the only ones in this department working full time on gangs.”

“We do the enforcement, Davis says, “and we do the intelligence.”

There’s an uneasy echo of an earlier part of the city’s history in such a telling: Nearly 40 years ago, when heroin traffic was beginning to burst across the area, police brass assigned a mere handful of officers to deal with it. Lt. Leon Tomlin headed the narcotics unit of the Criminal Intelligence Division in that era. He’d go to Donald Pomerleau, the commissioner, and beg for more officers.

Deal with it, Pomerleau told him. He thought Tomlin was exaggerating the problem. By the time Pomerleau realized otherwise, the problem had exploded beyond anyone’s grasp. Now, the city deals with an estimated 60,000 addicts.

It sounds uncomfortably similar to today. The Gang Unit’s primary focus is the Eastern District, an area of 4.3 square miles, with 74,000 people whose average income is $13,000 a year. Davis rattles these figures off the top of his head. It’s all been computerized, he says. Then he offers another figure: 1,100 known gang members in the Eastern District, where a lot of the gang activity takes place.

Which is not the same as saying it’s strictly here, or strictly in the city. The detectives say they’re in regular touch with Baltimore County police, who have their own concerns, and they’re hearing unsettling reports from Anne Arundel and Howard counties. Washington and Virginia also have growing concerns.

“But around here, Baltimore’s the hub,” Workley says. “And it spreads.”

Mitchell has come here because he’s running for mayor and has made the city’s unsettling crime numbers a big campaign issue. He wants to hire a lot more police. So does Mayor Sheila Dixon. Maybe they could start with some new numbers in the Gang Unit.

The problem’s been growing for the last few years now, with increasing numbers of young men — and some young women — linking up with gangs with national connections.

Davis walks to the end of this dank, narrow corridor. A few desks are jammed against one side, with the empty cells on the other. This is the unit’s cramped work space. Davis brings back a loose binder from a shelf. The binder’s filled with pages of photographs, background material, criminal records of gang members.

“These are very organized people,” Workley says. “They’ve got ranks, like the military. They’ve got bylaws. They’re tied in with the nationally known gangs, the Crips, the Bloods ...” He rattles off several more. “Heck, there’s a hundred different sects just inside the Bloods. We’ve got it all on our database.”

“And it’s just the four of you, in this whole police department, who work full time on this,” Mitchell says again.

“We’re overwhelmed,” Workley says. “Overwhelmed.”

Tuesday: Part two on gangs.

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