Legal group wants inquiry into city’s handling of police records

“We’ve always known the blue wall of silence is the castle that protects police misconduct, but the Baltimore City Law Department is its moat.”

A community legal organization is asking Baltimore Inspector General Isabel Mercedes Cumming to investigate whether the city’s law department is purposefully withholding records of police misconduct from the public.

The Baltimore Action Legal Team, a community nonprofit known as BALT working to make the legal system more accessible to the public, filed the complaint Thursday with Cumming’s office, and also is suing the city’s law department in federal court. The lawsuit, one of several BALT has pending against the city, was filed originally in Baltimore Circuit Court but was sent to federal court at the city’s request.

The complaint to the Office of the Inspector General and the court complaint are virtually identical, with BALT alleging obstruction by the law department, including an incident where the city attempted to charge the nonprofit $1.3 million for 3,000 records that should be public under Maryland law.

“It is our belief in filing this complaint that Inspector General Isabel Cumming will see the ... abuse and disregard of the law by the law department and work with us toward accountability,” the organization wrote in a statement announcing the complaint to the inspector general.

BALT, joined by journalists Alissa Figueroa and Brandon Soderberg, has made 21 requests to the city for police conduct records and body-worn camera footage since 2019, and city officials have not released a police officer’s full history of misconduct since then, the complaint says.

“We’ve always known the blue wall of silence is the castle that protects police misconduct, but the Baltimore City Law Department is its moat,” BALT Legal Director Matt Zernhelt said.

Cumming declined to comment and City Solicitor Jim Shea could not be reached Thursday. Neither the Office of the Inspector General nor the City Solicitor typically comments on pending investigations, complaints or litigation.

According to BALT, the city’s attempt to charge $1.3 million for police misconduct records and body-worn camera footage was an arbitrary decision meant to keep the records from ever seeing the light of day.

Originally, the city’s lawyers told BALT there were 3,000 records responsive to its request, and offered to waive $700,000 of the quoted $1.3 million price tag. Under Maryland law, public information requests can be given a fee waiver if the records are in the public’s interest.

BALT took the city to court over the records, and days before the scheduled hearing, the Baltimore

Police Department determined the initial response of there being 3,000 records was wrong, and that there were actually about 1,000 records, according to the complaint.

In response, BALT lawyers requested the initial fee waiver of $700,000 be applied, which would cover the remaining records. The city law department withdrew the waiver, which BALT claims shows it was acting in bad faith all along and never planned to disclose the records. BALT has successfully sued agencies over police records in the past. Last October, the Maryland Court of Special Appeals ordered Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby’s office to turn over a list her office created of more than 300 Baltimore police officers with possible credibility issues, many of whom continue to be called to testify in court.

In a separate BALT case from earlier this year, the city and the nonprofit reached a settlement in which the city’s attorneys turned over data on the costs and time delays for police record requests based on the requester.

That data showed attorneys averaged higher costs for body-worn camera footage requests, though they wait the same amount of time for records as other non-government entities. Law enforcement agencies requesting records did not have to pay and received their records in about one-third of the time.

“This causes us to wonder why such a disparity in cost and time exists among different types of requesters in order to access the same information,” BALT Data Analyst Vida Fye said in a statement.

— BALT Legal Director Matt Zernhelt