A federal judge said Thursday that she was prepared to release Newark from the U.S. Justice Department’s decade-long oversight of its police department, a step that will mark the end of a court-imposed overhaul of an agency that was for years both feared and reviled.

The judge, Madeline Cox Arleo, acknowledged the city’s “vast improvements in policing” since 2011, when the federal government began a sweeping investigation that found the police regularly used excessive force and conducted unconstitutional stops and searches.

“I hear today a resounding theme that progress has been made,” Judge Cox Arleo told a courtroom filled with many of the city’s top officials and leaders of organizations that had, for years, demanded reforms.

“I have great hopes that the good work will continue,” she added, noting that the public has two weeks to submit written comments before she issues a final order.

All of the speakers who addressed the court during the hearing on Thursday noted a stark and positive cultural shift within Newark’s Department of Public Safety.

The 1,100-member force is far more racially diverse — 83 percent of its officers are Black or Latino — and better trained. New recruits attend classes at a state-of-the-art academy equipped with a virtual reality studio where officers practice de-escalation techniques. Seasoned veterans are required to take 40 hours of refresher courses each year. Payouts stemming from excessive-force lawsuits have plummeted.

So has crime.

In 2015, the year before the city signed the federal consent decree, there were 106 murders and 1,826 robberies. Last year, 37 people were killed in Newark and there were 468 reported robberies.

As of Tuesday there had been 22 homicides this year, putting Newark, a city of roughly 305,000, on track for its lowest murder rate in decades.

“There are a lot people who believe consent decrees can’t work or don’t work,” said Brian O’Hara, Newark’s former public safety director, who is now chief of the Minneapolis Police Department. “Newark showed that it can.”

No one is suggesting the job is done. Some categories of violent crime, including aggravated assault and rape, remain stubbornly high, and a report last month by the independent monitor, Peter D. Harvey, noted problems with the department’s data collection and policies tied to internal affairs investigations.

“The consent decree did not end police brutality,” said Lawrence Hamm, the chairman of the People’s Organization for Progress, who has been a leading Newark-based activist since the early 1970s. “But I believe had it not been in place we would have had more cases.”

A release from the consent decree will represent not only the end of an era in New Jersey’s largest city, but also at least a temporary pause in other similar policing efforts nationwide.

President Trump, upon taking office in January, backed away from consent decrees in place in Minneapolis and Louisville, Ky., as his Justice Department shifted its focus toward legal actions against Ivy League universities and liberal cities. The change in priorities also led the government to halt investigations of alleged civil rights violations by the police in other cities, including Phoenix; Memphis; Oklahoma City; Trenton, N.J.; and Mount Vernon, N.Y.; and at the Louisiana and New Jersey State Police departments.

Mr. Harvey, a former New Jersey attorney general who was hired to monitor Newark’s adherence to the consent decree, said he was optimistic that the federal government will, in time, return to its overt commitment to safeguarding residents from constitutional violations by law enforcement officers.

“It will pick up again,” he said. “It’s not done for good. It’s done for now.”

The Newark consent decree has in large part defined Ras J. Baraka’s tenure as mayor. As an activist, Mr. Baraka, a son of the poet Amiri Baraka, who was brutalized during the racial unrest that engulfed the city in 1967, had railed against police misconduct.

He welcomed the federal intervention that has now extended through his three terms, and cost the city roughly $10 million in administrative expenses.

“The police department is better for it,” Mr. Baraka, a Democrat, said. “And I think the city is better for it.”

“We still have to make sure we continue to drive these numbers down,” he said.

Prodded by the consent decree, Newark wrote or rewrote 16 policing policies and financed infrastructure upgrades; the department had actually been housing its forensic evidence in a dilapidated building that was partially condemned. Police were equipped with body-worn cameras before they became mandatory statewide. Supervisors now review footage from two or three cameras, at random, during each shift, the public safety director, Emanuel Miranda Sr., said.

“We saw when people are watching, people act differently,” Mr. Miranda said.

There is perhaps no better symbol of the altered relationship between the police and the community than in what was once known as the West District precinct. A wooden sign once hung over the front desk that read: “Welcome to the Wild West.”

“That communicated to people who walked in what we thought about you, but also what people thought about the police,” said Mr. O’Hara, who was assigned to that precinct when he joined the Newark Police Department in 2001.

It was there, in 1967, that a Black cabdriver was beaten after his arrest. Rumors spread that he had been killed, unleashing five days of violent clashes between the community and the police, resulting in 26 deaths. Blocks of the city were reduced to rubble as the fires raged, a contributing factor in the disinvestment that would define Newark for the next half century.

In 2021, the precinct was emptied of police officers and converted into a pioneering city-run program called the Office of Violence Prevention and Trauma Recovery.

The three-story building now houses social workers and so-called violence interruption specialists. A war room painted with floor-to-ceiling murals run by the Brick City Peace Collective coordinates with dozens of community-based organizations, part of what the deputy police director, Leonardo Carrillo, refers to as a “public safety ecosystem.”

“We are a completely different department today,” Mr. Carrillo said. “The consent decree is the best thing that ever happened to the police department — for sure.”

Lakeesha Eure, the city’s deputy mayor for public safety, said the focus on violence prevention had enabled Newark to better target the root causes of crime. For example, she said, a new program, led entirely by men, was formed in February after it became clear that roughly half the city’s murders, and many of its aggravated assaults, stemmed from domestic violence.

“Our job is to talk in real time so we can get in front of this stuff,” said Ms. Eure, who noted that the public safety division last year referred 2,800 people to the Office of Violence Prevention for support and services.

In 2020, the renewed trust between the police and the community was put to the test.

As protests roiled the nation after the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, thousands of people gathered in Newark to express what Junius Williams, the city’s official historian, at the time called “righteous anger.”

At nightfall, they gathered outside the precinct where the rioting had begun in 1967. Across the Hudson, in New York City, looting and violent clashes were so widespread that the city imposed a curfew, its first since World War II.

But in Newark, peace prevailed. Members of the Newark Community Street Team, run at the time by a former gang member, stood between officers dressed in riot gear and protesters and made it clear that it was time for the crowd to disperse.

There were no protest-related arrests. Tires were slashed on squad cars, but none were set ablaze.

Mr. Harvey, the federal monitor, expects to be out of a job in two weeks. But he is confident the department is in good hands, and will continue to be guided by partners that include the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, which has been part of the monitoring team.

“It’s not as if they believe themselves to have gotten to the finish line and they’re saying, ‘OK, we’re done,’ ” Mr. Harvey said. “They recognize that they have more work to do — but the difference is they are now willing to do that work.”