A big job for the Texan at the center of the consent decree

Ganesha Martin, neither a police officer nor a Baltimorean, is the face of police reform for many residents

By Julie Depenbrock
Capital News Service

BALTIMORE — It’s late on a Tuesday when Ganesha Martin steps into a church basement on West Belvedere Avenue, down the road from Pimlico Race Course. It’s not the first meeting the Baltimore police chief has been to this week — or even this Tuesday.

“How many of you all have heard of the consent decree?” Martin says to the group of pastors, parents, grandparents, activists, and teachers — members of the Pimlico Merchants Association — assembled at Manna Bible Baptist Church.

It’s a deadly serious topic — the agreement between the U.S. Department of Justice and the city to reform the police department, forged after the death of Freddie Gray in 2015. But Martin, a police division chief in charge of compliance with the consent decree, interrupts herself, distracted by two older women with matching hairstyles seated in front of her.

She smiles broadly. “Are y'all twins?” She laughs and the crowd laughs with her. “Aww. That is so cute.”

Martin’s in her element here. She can read a room. Sometimes her Texas accent barely registers and other times it’s much thicker. She cracks jokes, and that adds some ease to tense conversations.

Her speech — clocking in around five minutes — is the same at every community meeting.

One night, as she fights a cold at a Harbel community meeting in Northeast Baltimore, Martin smiles as she talks through the police department’s goals. “Good evening, everyone, I apologize. I am a bit under the weather,” she says. “If I fall...any doctors?”

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The perfect job

Martin is a commanding presence. Over 6 feet tall in heels, with hair flowing to her shoulders, she stands around to chat with community members she knows and with those she doesn’t.

“You couldn’t have written this job description and told me it would be perfect for me,” Martin says. “But this job has been really perfect for me.”

It isn’t quite the life she’d imagined for herself when she was a kid growing up in Dallas.

“I had this thought of who I was going to be,” she says. “I was going to be a Texas litigator, in the courtroom — which I got to do, which was fun.”

When she graduated from law school at Texas Tech, after earning a journalism degree at Baylor University, Martin took a job at a firm in New Mexico. “I was bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and ambitious,” she says. “They wanted me to open a branch office, so I moved out to Albuquerque.”

She did open that branch office — and then took over another about three hours south, in Las Cruces.

But Martin missed “the big city flow of things.” In 2011, after six years in New Mexico, she decided to move on.

“I saved up enough money to not have to work for a year and I visited my brother several times in D.C. and I thought, well, D.C. would be a great place for me to figure out what to do next,” she says.

It was in the nation’s capital that Martin decided to start a nonprofit dedicated to introducing underprivileged youth to the world of international economics. But before she could even get the program up and running, another career turn came along.

You can read the full article on the Capital News Service’s web site here.