Baltimore’s approach to fighting a persistent illicit drug trade in the city has shifted remarkably over the last decade, abandoning the aggressive and potentially unconstitutional practice of “clearing corners” in favor of the more targeted approach police use now.

With constrained resources and a focus on violent crime, the Baltimore Police Department and the Baltimore State’s Attorney’s Office have grown more selective about how they pursue drug enforcement, but City Council members say there is mounting frustration from their constituents, who are uncomfortable walking to the neighborhood store due to what they describe as “open air drug markets.”

On Tuesday, law enforcement leaders and a liaison from the mayor’s office laid out their approach, which includes both policing and providing social support and services to offer drug dealers a more legitimate vocation. They pointed out that Baltimore’s struggles with drug trafficking stem from decades of disinvestment in communities and represent a significant public health problem that no one agency can address on its own.

Still, Councilman Mark Conway, chair of the public safety committee, said that the policies in place today “have not yet been sufficient” to address the concerns of his constituents, who recently grilled him over the issue at a town hall.

Conway bristled at the fact that the mayor’s office did not come to the hearing with a plan to deal with the problem, pointing out that there are similar plans and entire websites for fighting gun violence, but no such plan for drug enforcement.

“I understand that it’s a nuanced problem, but it’s not okay for us to not have a plan,” Conway said. “It can take us a month, it can take us six months, but what I don’t want is when people bring this issue up, to not know what we’re doing about it.”

In speaking with Conway, Baltimore Police Deputy Commissioner Kevin Jones pointed out that, year to date, there have been 360 arrests for narcotics violations, compared to 322 at this time last year. He said that increase is due to a more cohesive partnership with prosecutors in the state’s attorney’s office.

Ty’lor Schnella, the mayor’s liaison to the City Council, pointed to historic decreases in violent crime and emphasized the link between that effort and the city’s attempts to fight the drug trade.

“We will not tolerate open-air drug markets,” Schnella said. “We are holding individuals fully accountable to the law, but, enforcing the law alone won’t solve this problem.”

Schnella declined to give Conway a timeline of when he might produce the plan the council chair requested, agreeing only to speak to the mayor’s executive leadership team and return with a response in two weeks.

The hearing on open-air drug markets, called by Conway, was at times contentious. It came on the heels of the mayor’s office pushing back and ultimately indefinitely delaying a separate but related hearing called by Conway on the topic of opioid overdoses in the city. The mayor’s administration said that hearing would have negatively affected ongoing litigation on the issue.

During the hearing, Conway repeatedly emphasized his view that open-air drug markets came in varying degrees of severity: some will require intensive law enforcement takedowns, while others may be alleviated with a softer, social services-focused approach.

He requested a plan that identified the different approaches to handling those types of scenarios in detail.

Other council members also weighed in, echoing Conway’s concerns and saying they receive similar feedback from their constituents.