The 11 News I-Team uncovers a dramatic drop in demand on Baltimore's courts.Download the WBAL appIt comes just as the state's court system is making the pitch for more judges not less.The city's criminal court cases are driven by arrests by city police.In both columns, the numbers have dropped significantly and it's not just the 2015 anomaly of Freddie Gray.At the city's district courthouses these days, there's plenty of empty spaces in the parking lots. It is evidence of a 10-year trend in Baltimore that has seen huge reductions in the number of people arrested and cases in court.Between 2005 and 2014, the number of criminal cases filed in the city's district court dropped from 78,342 per year to 38,204 per year, a reduction of 50 percent.The steep slide mirrors the drop in arrests made by city police.City police made 89,367 arrests in 2005 and 46,232 arrests in 2014, a reduction of 48 percent.In 2015, the year of unrest following the death of Freddie Gray in police custody, arrests plummeted further.City police arrested 26,259 people in 2015, a drop of 43 percent from 2014. But the downward trend was already long in play.In Annapolis Wednesday, the court system argued to add two new circuit court judges in the city, part of a bill to add new judges around the state at a cost of $25 million over the next five years."We need to have an informed discussion about our entire corrections and law enforcement systems on the state of Maryland where Baltimore is a driver," said Marc Schindler.Schindler is with the Justice Policy Institute in Washington, which has focused on Baltimore and advocates rethinking how tax dollars get spent. He said the trend in Baltimore should be central to the debate."We tend to overspend on things that don't work very well, particularly incarceration and we underspend on things that we know will work better and lead to safer communities, and that is absolutely what is going on in Baltimore and the state of Maryland," Schindler said.