Complaints ‘not sustained’
officers used excessive force, according to an analysis of data from January 2013 through March 2016.
Nearly eight of every 10 excessive-force complaints submitted to police over that period ended the same way — “not sustained” — and officers didn’t face any discipline. That rate is more than twice as high as that found in a national study by the U.S. Department of Justice.
The data obtained through the Maryland Public Information Act and the handling of the Fowlkes’ case — detailed in an investigative file that only became public because it was filed as evidence in a court case — provide a rare look into the Baltimore Police Department’s internal affairs. The details of cases are typically kept secret by law.
The experience left Fowlkes and the man arrested skeptical of the system, and they are not alone in cities like Baltimore. In recent years, the American Civil Liberties Union, an outside auditor and department officials have flagged problems in internal affairs with training, staffing, oversight and length of investigations.
Community activists say a mistrust of police and the process has made residents reluctant to cooperate — even in cases against officers.
“Everyone knows the police can’t police themselves,” said Ray Kelly, president of the advocacy group No Borders Coalition, which has gathered stories from West Baltimore residents about alleged police misconduct.
Police Commissioner Kevin Davis, who took the helm last year, said his administration has been overhauling internal affairs, adding more detectives and supervisors and improving the system for flagging officers who routinely draw misconduct complaints. He also said that more complaints against officers have been upheld than under the past two chiefs.
“I’m absolutely confident our Police Department will be a model for police accountability in short order,” he said. “There is a lot to fix, but it’s not a mystery how to fix it.”
The nation’s eighth-largest police department, with 2,300 officers, had been focused on the crime fight, Davis said, and he’s taking a more holistic approach.
“Homicides and nonfatal shootings are important and deserve to be, but there are other parts of policing that are as important,” he said. “You can argue they all work hand-in-hand. They are not mutually exclusive. We can be a crime-fighting police department and one that holds officers accountable.”
The Justice Department has undertaken a wide-ranging civil rights investigation of the Police Department and is expected to release the results within days. Davis has said he’s trying to implement changes now, to get ahead of being told to do so.
Federal officials are digging deep into Baltimore’s internal affairs files — they have requested so many that they had to hire an outside contractor to make copies.
As part of reviews in other cities, the Justice Department has faulted police departments for a bias in favor of officers in internal affairs cases, a low rate of sustaining citizen complaints and a failure to conduct investigations in a timely fashion.
In Baltimore, The Sun’s six-month investigation into more than 1,700 internal and external complaints found:
Internal affairs cases took nearly eight months, on average, to complete. The Justice Department recommends that routine cases take 90 days to complete.
In two-thirds of all cases, internal affairs investigators concluded they didn’t have enough evidence to rule one way or another. For a smaller subset — more than 340 excessive-force complaints — that rate climbs to about three-fourths of cases.
About 4 percent of the excessive-force complaints were upheld, or “sustained,” resulting in one officer getting fired, two leaving in lieu of termination and the others getting lesser forms of punishment, including loss of accrued vacation leave and letters of reprimand.
Investigators were far more likely to uphold complaints of any kind against police officers when they were made by another officer. In those cases, a majority of complaints were sustained, compared to 8 percent of citizen complaints.
Another 2,500 lower-level complaints were forwarded to the police districts to be investigated by staff there, not internal affairs. Half were closed without any findings.
Internal affairs also struggles with understaffing and community relations.
While a number of reforms have been implemented in recent months, police say they are still juggling workloads of 15 cases per detective, or more than twice as many as in Prince George’s County, Maryland’s third-largest police force behind Baltimore City’s and Baltimore County’s.
Moreover, internal affairs investigators are sometimes diverted to help cover patrol duties and provide security at special events, as the Police Department grapples with vacancies and high rates of violent crime in the city. Policing experts say these diversions should never happen, because the investigators are supposed to be independent from the rest of the force.
Baltimore officials also say they are frustrated by a lack of citizen cooperation and a wariness that has deepened in recent months, as the nation is roiled by a number of civilian deaths at the hands of police and retaliatory killings of officers.
Over the past year in Baltimore, police have been working to repair community relations following Freddie Gray’s death after suffering injuries in police custody. Six officers have been cleared of criminal wrongdoing in the case, and their internal affairs reviews are being handled by the Montgomery and Howard county police departments. Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn J. Mosby has said the criminal case is an example of Baltimore police being unable to police themselves.
In the civil case brought by the man arrested in Fowlkes’ neighborhood, Abdul Salaam, two witnesses in addition to Fowlkes stepped forward to testify. So did Salaam, who didn’t talk to internal affairs. He says he tried to reach police to complain;
Top police complaints
internal affairs says he wouldn’t cooperate.
After a civil trial earlier this year, the jury found that police had violated Salaam’s rights and awarded him $70,000, which the city paid. The jurors used the same legal standard as internal affairs when considering the case — they had to find a “preponderance of evidence” for the plaintiff.
As for her complaint, Fowlkes never heard back from internal affairs about the outcome. Two other residents would file complaints against the same officers for separate incidents within days of Fowlkes; they also said they never heard what happened in those internal affairs cases.
Jonathan Smith, former chief of special litigation at the Justice Department’s civil rights division, where he oversaw more than 20 investigations of police departments, said citizens become frustrated when they complain, don’t hear any response and then see the officers back on the street.
“Police don’t trust communities, and communities don’t trust police,” he said, adding that residents need to believe their complaints are “investigated fairly” and that the outcome is “impartial.”
That mistrust can become endemic and cripple policing efforts, said Samuel Walker, professor emeritus of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska at Omaha who has written several books about police accountability. Police misconduct “alienates” citizens, and their “stories spread among families, friends, and neighbors,” he said.
“People not only do not trust the police, but at its worst, police misconduct also generates fear of the police. Effective crime-fighting cannot work in such an environment,” said Walker, who also has written several reports on police accountability for the Justice Department. “A police department can’t function effectively if it does not know what its employees are doing and fails to correct inappropriate behavior.”
State lawmakers have stepped in to try to make police more accountable, by giving residents more time to file complaints, reducing to five days the time officers can put off talking to internal affairs to find a lawyer, and allowing civilians to be on an internal disciplinary board. But critics say those efforts fell short of what’s needed.
Baltimore police urge citizens to come Ray Kelly, No Borders Coalition forward and not to become discouraged by the process. Davis also points out that he’s fired bad officers, including for excessive force as well as drunken driving, assault, theft and other misconduct. Last year 21 officers were terminated, or retired or resigned in lieu of termination, after internal discipline hearings, or double the number from the year before. So far this year, that number is 14.
“You’ll have officers going, ‘Man, internal affairs is going to do this to you,’ and citizens saying, ‘Man, internal affairs doesn’t care about that,’ ” said Chief Rodney Hill, the head of the office of professional responsibility, which includes internal affairs. “It’s just so not true. If people had any idea.”
Conflicting stories
In the summer of 2013, over a span of 18 days, three traffic stops by a special operations team of Baltimore police officers in the Northeastern District would lead to civilian complaints, lawsuits and one death.
In the first incident, three officers pulled over Salaam’s blue minivan in the alley behind Fowlkes’ house, between Pentwood and Pentridge roads. It was a “pre-textual stop” for alleged seat belt and cellphone violations; the officers were part of an operations unit looking for guns and drugs.
Salaam’s 3-year-old son, Amir, was in the back seat. They had just been grocery shopping.
More than a dozen residents gathered, and more officers were called. But they would tell different stories.
In court testimony and statements to internal affairs, the arresting officers said that Salaam, 37, sped down the alley after they turned on their lights and sirens. When he approached the car, Officer Nicholas Chapman said, Salaam made a “furtive” move.
Chapman said he pulled Salaam out, worried he was reaching for a gun. Chapman said the two fell to the ground as he yelled for Salaam to put his hands on his head. They struggled until officers were able to get Salaam in handcuffs. Chapman said he tried to grab Salaam’s legs to roll him over, and that’s when Salaam kicked him in the jaw.
The other officers with Chapman, Nathan Ulmer and Jorge Omar BernardezRuiz, said Salaam was resisting arrest.
Brian Loiero, a supervisor dispatched to the scene, told internal affairs that one neighbor told him that Salaam was being “combative” and another called police because she worried about her neighbors becoming unruly.
But Salaam said he thought police were after someone else and pulled into a parking spot to get out of their way and not block the alley. He testified at the civil trial that he held his hands out of the window with his wallet.
A couple of neighbors told Loiero that officers “slammed” Salaam, according to the internal affairs file. And Fowlkes told investigators and the civil jury that Salaam never even tried to hit the officers. Two other witnesses backed her version in court.
Court records show that officers didn’t find guns or drugs in Salaam’s car.
While officers talked with bystanders at the scene that night, internal affairs didn’t get involved until weeks later. By the time they reached out to civilian witnesses, most wouldn’t talk or couldn’t be found, and Salaam had secured a lawyer. Investigators interviewed the officers eight months after the incident and followed up more than a year afterward.
One witness told Loiero that she took a video with her cellphone of police slamming Salaam and showed it to him, according to another cellphone video of the scene that was referred to in the internal affairs file and shown to the jury in the civil case. Nearly three years later a witness told the civil jury that she had a video of the
“Everyone knows the police can’t police themselves.”