‘Why didn’t you know?’
Within weeks of returning from leave, Jenkins and six other members of Baltimore’s Gun Trace Task Force were in handcuffs. The reckoning wasn’t the result of a citizen complaint or a tip from a concerned cop. It began when a member of the squad was talking on the phone with a drugslinging childhood friend. He was picked up on a wiretap investigation of a drug crew by police in Harford and Baltimore counties.
Those wiretap recordings, and the subsequent criminal charges that caused officers to flip and tell all, finally allowed the police department’s dark underbelly to be exposed.
On Feb. 23, 2017, a federal grand jury indicted the seven men, but it was kept quiet for a few days. On March 1, they were lured by ruse to the Internal Affairs office in East Baltimore — where Commissioner Kevin Davis met them. He wanted to look each officer in the eyes and convey the disgrace they’d brought to the badge.
Davis recalled that most of the officers dropped their heads or looked away when they saw him. But Jenkins stared back defiantly.
“He didn’t look away, he didn’t blink, he didn’t show any signs of remorse or regret or embarrassment — all the things everyone else did,” Davis recalled. “I have to believe he knew this fate was eventually going to meet him. I guess he was at peace with it.”
It was under Davis and his command that Jenkins had been put at the helm of the elite unit, which they had charged with taking on the rampant violence roiling the city since 2015.
Why hadn’t Jenkins and his unit been found out earlier? A mix of reasons likely played a role: Victims who weren’t willing to come forward or weren’t believed. A police department at best focused on near-term results, at worst enabling certain units that “got the job done.” Prosecutors and judges who gave great deference to the word of a police officer, particularly in the he-said, she-said scenarios inherent in the work.
In 2011, an attorney in one of the civil suits against Jenkins told a jury that a message needed to be sent to cops like him.
“Let these officers know that ( just) because we give them a gun and a badge doesn’t mean they can disobey the law,” Richard Woods had argued.
The jury went on to affirm the plaintiff’s claim that Jenkins had wrongly detained a man. But then it awarded just $1 in damages. No disciplinary action was taken by the police department.
Six years later, in June 2018, Jenkins appeared in U.S. District Court a convicted criminal. He had pleaded guilty to a sweeping racketeering charge and civil rights violations, admitting among other things to years of stealing drugs and spearheading robberies.
He had run his two plainclothes squads “like a criminal gang,” a prosecutor said. “They were, simply put, both cops and robbers at the same time.”
Jenkins wept. He said only that he had made “so many mistakes” and was remorseful.
His mother told the court in a letter, “I promise you, he is not a ‘monster.’ ”
Judge Catherine C. Blake sentenced Jenkins to 25 years in prison, a few years less than the maximum.
Jenkins was a Baltimore police officer from 2003 to 2017. Had he been groomed over time by a broken police department that tolerated corruption?
His misconduct spanned the administrations of four police commissioners. The Sun asked them and their deputies how they could explain what took place on their watch. Those who responded — some key figures did not — said they hadn’t been told about Jenkins. They said they acted firmly against misconduct when such information was brought to them. They said they otherwise relied on commanders beneath them to respond to complaints and impose discipline. And they cautioned that any system of justice must act on evidence, not rumors.
“You get exposed to individual puzzle pieces, and eventually the whole thing comes together, and people say, ‘How did you not recognize that was a picture of dogs playing poker?’ ” said former Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III, who led the department from 2007 to 2012 and was a deputy before then.
“It’s just not that clear,” Bealefeld said.
One commander served in the police department during all four administrations. Dean Palmere led the plainclothes division under Bealefeld. Then he rose to serve as a deputy under Commissioner Anthony Batts (2012-2015) and under Davis (20152018).
Palmere, now retired, declined to be interviewed for this article, saying he’d been advised by his lawyer not to. A man who served prison time after having drugs planted on him has sued Palmere, alleging he failed to supervise Jenkins. No one has accused Palmere of being aware of the unit’s criminal activity.
Another commander who supervised the gun task force, Sean Miller, was demoted from lieutenant colonel to lieutenant after the indictments. He remains with the police department. Miller declined to comment for this article, citing rules against speaking to the media. He has not been accused of knowledge of the unit’s crimes.
More than two years after the indictments, the Baltimore Police Department has never said what it learned from its Internal Affairs investigation of what went wrong. Like prior internal investigations of Jenkins and the other convicted officers, the results will likely stay secret, per state law.
A commission created by the Maryland General Assembly is still looking into what happened and says it will issue a public report.
Many people who worked with Jenkins say they have wrestled with the question of how they failed to see.
“Wayne didn’t do what he did because ‘everybody knew,’ ” said defense attorney Jeremy Eldridge, who as a former city prosecutor recalls questioning Jenkins about one of his cases. “The reality of the situation was, he did an amazing job of toeing the line.”
But Eldridge thinks he and others should have known.
“As much as we want to blame Wayne for what he did, prosecutors are guilty of not figuring it out, the cops around him are guilty for not figuring it out, and the supervisors,” he said.
“No one’s hands are clean.”
Leaders of the Baltimore Police Department and Baltimore State’s Attorney’s Office told The Sun they didn’t know about the criminal activity of Sgt. Wayne Jenkins and his officers. Why not? Here’s some of what they said:
Kevin Davis, commissioner, 20152018: “I had no knowledge of these guys personally. … This is a challenge for an outside police commissioner. You rely on other people around you to make decisions in the best interest of the police department. With a one-dimensional police department, what rules is productivity. Productivity can create blind spots.”
“Productivity, in BPD, has always reigned supreme. If you’re productive and you go out and hunt and gather and get bad guys with guns and drugs, people are inclined to give those all-star players the benefit of the doubt.”
Jason Johnson, deputy commissioner over Internal Affairs, 20162018: “I had no knowledge of the history of these guys . ... Anyone in leadership who knew about it, in my opinion, should have raised a flag. But they didn’t. … I guess the problem was a failure of supervision — I can’t describe it any better than that. Nobody seemed to know what these guys were doing.”
Anthony Batts, commissioner, 2012-2015: Declined to comment.
Jerry Rodriguez, deputy commissioner over Internal Affairs, 20132015: Said he doesn’t remember the internal charges against Jenkins in 2015. “When I heard of him [after the indictments], I remembered he was one of the superstars that people in the ops side used to say how great they were. … During my time, I only remember one specific case where we had an allegation of theft, and I put a lot of efforts into trying to get that guy.”
Fred Bealefeld, commissioner, 2007-2012: “It’s insanely rare that you have that kind of knowledge over a 3,000-person force, while also trying to manage the crime fight and lead your command staff and develop training and all the other things we were focused on. In the course of the day, you’re dealing with hundreds of issues.”
Anthony Barksdale, deputy commissioner over Operations, 20072012: “I can’t jump to the conclusion that you’re good or bad just because I keep hearing your name. Your harderworking cops will get complaints. I had complaints in my career. But the thing is, I was doing the job. And sometimes if you’re a good cop, some of these organizations will pay people to make complaints on you. That’s why the Internal Affairs process is so crucial. You trust the internal process.”
Leonard Hamm, commissioner, 2004-2007: “Those kinds of things were left up to people who were under me. I do know I had people in those positions that I trusted . ... Part of the investigation is [victims] coming forth and giving statements. A lot of times that doesn’t happen.”
Gregg Bernstein, Baltimore state’s attorney, 2010-2014: Said he doesn’t remember his office’s investigation of Jenkins in 2014. “Investigations of police officers did present unique challenges, because oftentimes these cases required corroboration from fellow officers. And while in some cases we found police officers who … were willing to come forward and tell the truth about what they observed, sometimes you didn’t.”
Michael Schatzow, deputy state’s attorney, 2015-present: “A real problem is that the police and some prosecutors tend to discount the allegations because of the sources of the allegation. If a drug dealer says ‘Yeah, those are my drugs, but I had $12,000 and they’re only reporting $8,000,’ that in the past has been an allegation that’s treated with some skepticism, because it appears on the surface to be self-serving …
“The nature of the conduct was so extreme, it would be hard to imagine that a sworn police officer would engage in it once, let alone have that be the basis of a career.”