The timing couldn't have been worse for the Baltimore Police Department.

Just five days after Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III explained his new policy of not releasing names of police officers who shoot people to a placid City Council committee, two of his officers killed a man on Orleans Street during a struggle for an officer's weapon.

The fight for information had begun, and is still going, although what Baltimore Sun reporter Justin Fenton reported today leaves many questions about a policy and efforts by the Police Department's public relations staff. They went to extraordinary efforts to hide the past of one of the officers involved in the shooting, to the point where they blacked out information about a suspect and a victim from a public police report to try to prevent us from obtaining a publicly available court file.

It turns out that the 2005 case was botched and prosecutors had to throw out a slew of criminal charges against a man -- in part due to misconduct by one of the officers in a later, unrelated assault. The suspect went free, even though according to his own attorney he admitted he grabbed the officer's weapon and threw it out of a moving vehicle.

This raises troubling questions about whether the department was trying to hide the past of the female officer, who has now been overpowered twice by suspects and had her gun taken or nearly taken. Or whether the department was trying to cover up how the cops couldn't convict a man who confessed to abducting one of their own.

Bealefeld promised that a full accounting of a police-involved shooting is possible without having to divulge the names of the officers involved. We now know that isn't the case; in fact, his public affairs staff went out of their way to prevent a full accounting be aired. Through court documents, the Baltimore Sun learned the identity of the officer, Traci McKissick, 29, a five-year veteran of the force.

The commissioner also had assured council members, as his chief spokesman Anthony Guglielmi had assured reporters earlier, that his office would give out enough information to assure the public that everything was being done to properly investigate use-of-force issues. They would make public lots of things, including the officer's rank, assignment and years on the force. After concerns were raised that without a name, we'd never know whether that officer had been involved in past shootings, Guglielmi and Bealefeld agreed to release that information as well.

But without having a name, it would be impossible to verify whether the department was telling the truth. Trust us, they said.

So now we come to Tuesday. Two officers shoot and kill 61-year-old Joseph Forrest during a domestic dispute call. A backup officer arrived to find  McKissick in a headlock and a man trying to take her weapon. The officers shot Forrest dead during the scuffle.

Few details were released Tuesday night, which is understandable, and not much other than Forrest's name was released Wednesday. On Thursday, reporters at the Baltimore Sun learned that the officer had been involved in a shooting in 2005, another incident in which she had been overpowered and her gun taken. When questioned, Guglielmi confirmed that she had been involved in a 2005 shooting in which no one had been hit and that it was ruled justified.

When pressed for more details, Guglielmi promised to review the file and get back to us. His office eventually faxed over a two-page police report of the 2005 incident, in which McKissick and her partner, Jack H. Odom, had pulled over a car and tried to arrest the driver after seeing an open bottle of whiskey and what they believed to be crack cocaine. When Odom tried to arrest the man, Timothy Lee Faith, police said he got back into his vehicle. McKissick jumped into the vehicle through the passenger door, took out her gun and pointed it at Faith as he sped away.

"She had her hands on the handle and she put her finger ... way inside the trigger all right and ... I was looking at her, she was, she was getting ready to pop me everything in the head you know," Faith told Baltimore homicide Detective William Welch during an interrogation after his arrest. "At this point in time, I took my right hand with my left hand on the wheel and I, I grabbed the hold of -- it was her facing me -- I grabbed the right side of the gun and I pushed it against the headrest of the seat."

Faith later said, "From what I could feel of it, um, I pushed it back against the ah, headrest. At this point in time she was trying to, she was trying to aim it back towards my body and then she fire the -- then she fired the gun. ... I turned the barrel away from me and down towards the ground. At this point in time, she released her hand from the gun and with my right hand I went across my body and the gun went out the window."

After a chase, Faith was arrested, with handcuffs still dangling from one of his wrists. Faith was charged with a litany of crimes, including assault, disarming a law enforcement officer, escape and reckless endangerment. His attorney, Warran A. Brown, alleged in court papers that police officers altered reports of the incident, but prosecutors said they had to drop the entire case after Odom, in October 2005, was criminally charged with assaulting a man outside a Federal Hill pizza shop. Odom received a suspended sentence and resigned from the force, but even before that his testimony was deemed unreliable in court and prosecutors said they could not move against Faith.

Guglielmi said the 2005 case was investigated and it was determined that McKissick acted appropriately. Really? She jumped into a moving car and pointed her gun at a suspect who was speeding away. You have to admire her tenacity, but I know cops who are questioning whether what she did was proper. That her gun fired, sending a bullet into the upholstery of the car, might be ruled a proper discharge, but I have a hard time believing all of her actions that day were within policy.

And the fact the department did everything it could to hide the details makes me even more suspicious. Guglielmi told me this morning that his office blacked out the names of both the victim and the suspect from the 2005 report so we couldn't trace the court file and learn the officer's name. It was not done, he said, to cover up the details or the outcome of the embarrassing 2005 incident. But that's the effect of what he did, or tried to do --  and that is precisely why obtaining the names of officers involved in shootings is so important for the public.

But now we know just how far the department is prepared to go to keep the names from becoming public: blacking out not only the names of its officers from public police reports, but also those of suspects from those same reports. Apparently, ensuring the name of a police officer who fires a gun is so important that people can now be arrested and criminally charged in secret.

The City Council public safety committee, when it met with Bealefeld, shamefully bowed to his wishes without even questioning the merits of his policy. It's too bad, because the first test has ended in failure.

David Rocah, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberities Union told Baltimore Sun reporter Justin Fenton:

"This highlights the utter irrationality and impropriety of what the Balitmore City Police Deparmtent is doing. As the Baltimore City Police Department well knows, police reports like this are public record documents. That's central to our system of justice in this country. People can't be secretly charged with crimes, so their redaction of that document was improper. And the fact that they did it to serve the illegitimate goal of shieldiing names of police officers only doubles the wrongdoing here."

Here is one of many court documents describing the 2005 case: