Baltimore has seen its share of controversies over the performance of its police department. From concerns over violations of the rights of city residents, particularly Black ones, to the continued difficulty filling vacancies, Baltimoreans have long had reason to be concerned about public safety in a community that has seen more than its share of both violent crime and excess incarceration of its youth. From the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray Jr., who sustained injuries in police custody in 2015, to the civil unrest that followed and the federal consent decree overseeing the department’s efforts to assure “constitutional policing,” the spotlight since 2017 has been on the Baltimore Police Department to adopt much-needed reforms. However, the department has often had to pursue such efforts with fewer officers as it struggled to fill vacancies in recent years.

Had the BPD gone too far? Not far enough? Are recent reductions in gun violence sustainable? And here’s the big question: How can the department adequately maintain its uniformed and civilian staffing levels to meet demand?

Part of the answer may turn out to be child care.

Last week, the Baltimore Police Department received approval from the Board of Estimates to move forward with a much-anticipated pilot program to provide child care benefits to 100 employees. The program is both modest and simple. Eligible workers will receive stipends of up to $250 per month (and $3,000 yearly) to help defray the cost of child care for kids from birth to age 12 or with special needs. The thinking here is that police officers and others who work nontraditional schedules will likely need such assistance. It’s not difficult to imagine, for example, an officer called in to unexpectedly work a second shift who suddenly needs help keeping tabs on a son or daughter with primary school homework to do.

We like this idea for several reasons. First, raising police pay and benefits is necessary, particularly to recruit quality employees. Second, investing specifically in child care would seem worthwhile because that is a glaring need of 20- and 30-somethings raising families, surely the target demographic for police recruitment. And third, we like the idea of police officers being encouraged (albeit modestly) to have children. There’s something to be said for officers acquiring firsthand knowledge of dealing with youngsters and working on such skills as communication and patience with preteens. They can use all the credibility they can get when walking the beat.

The BPD could, of course, raise pay for everyone and let those with children spend their wages on child care. But this specific outreach — available only in a limited number of police departments nationwide — comes with the benefit of attracting and retaining parents specifically. Might it not then encourage them to put down roots in the city? Having more mothers and fathers on the force is somehow comforting. And please spare us any suggestion that traditional families (presumably with the male head-of-household working and his spouse staying home) don’t need outside assistance and should instead rely on grandparents (as U.S. Sen. JD Vance, the GOP’s vice presidential nominee, recently suggested). That’s an assumption that is a few decades or so out of date.

The more reasonable question is, why don’t more employers target child care as an employee benefit? The U.S. continues to suffer from a child care crisis worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce estimated that 58% of working parents left their jobs because they could not piece together a working child-care plan. The burden tends to fall most heavily on women — about one-third of U.S. women say they can’t return to work because of the burden of caring for a family member, child or adult. The result is, of course, that mothers are often left out of the paid workforce, which has an attendant impact on the economy.

Obviously, being a parent doesn’t necessarily make anyone a good cop (or civilian public safety employee for that matter), but it’s pretty clear that a working parent lacking much-needed child care is going to have to struggle to get his or her act together. The job is tough enough without having to worry about such things. And while $250 is hardly a cure-all, it’s a nice start. And maybe, just maybe, one year from now when the BPD can measure the impact of the program, we’ll find out that it actually made a difference — and perhaps even helped make Baltimore a bit safer, not just for married police officers, but for all of us.