Baltimore 10-year-old spends day as police commissioner, meets top officers

Treasure Mack spent a day at the top of Baltimore’s police department, taking the oath of office, wearing Commissioner Richard Worley’s jacket and touring Baltimore Police headquarters while meeting with the department’s top officers.

The 10-year-old Baltimore City Public Schools student was selected for the “Commissioner for a Day” experience through UniFIED Efforts Inc., a community violence deterrent program that says its aim is to show elementary school-age children that careers in law enforcement are possible and worth learning about early. The visit was built as more than a photo opportunity. It put a child inside the city’s policing command structure at a moment when Baltimore leaders are still trying to rebuild confidence in institutions that most young residents first encounter through crisis, sirens or crime reports.

UniFIED Efforts, which says it has run out-of-school-time programs since 2012 and operated in Penn-North since 2015, has long tied youth programming to violence prevention, bullying intervention and reducing unsupervised after-school risk. Its founder, Debbie B. Ramsey, is a former Baltimore police detective, patrol officer and community policing officer, a background the organization says helps connect children to public service and crime reduction in a city where trust in police remains uneven from neighborhood to neighborhood.

The commissioner-for-a-day idea is not new. In 2017, WBAL reported that a similar event was in its fourth year, when Forest Park High School student Charles Dixon met the commissioner, rode Marine Unit One, met Foxtrot pilots and toured the crime lab. That history suggests the program has become a recurring form of outreach rather than a one-time ceremony.

The timing also matters. Baltimore said in January that 2025 ended with 133 homicides, the fewest in nearly 50 years, alongside a 31.44% drop in homicides and a 24.51% drop in nonfatal shootings. Police said nonfatal shootings fell to 311 from 412 the year before, and sworn hiring rose from 164 in 2024 to 241 in 2025. Officials have tied the reductions in part to restructuring, intelligence sharing and data-driven deployments under Worley, who was nominated in June 2023, confirmed in October 2023 and sworn in that same month.

Against that backdrop, Mack’s day inside headquarters carried a message beyond ceremony. Baltimore police are not only presenting a safer city on paper; they are trying to shape how children see the department before attitudes harden. The sharper question now is where that outreach lands, which neighborhoods it reaches and whether the symbol of a child commissioner becomes a pathway into civic service or simply a polished image of it.