Baltimore Police Sgt. Louis H. Hopson Jr. may have filed his racial discrimination suit against the city department in 2004, but the issue he was complaining about first surfaced way back in 1994.

A report concluded then that black police officers were being fired at rates higher than their white colleagues for similar infractions. The report was written by former Officer Donald Reid, who concluded that of 139 officers fired from 1985  to 1994, 99 were black and 37 were white. The conviction rate for white officers was 60 percent compared to 90 percent for blacks.

It was a perfuctionary report that would follow police commissioners and mayors for years, finally ending this week when the city finally agreed to settle a lawsuit filed by Hopson in 2004 over the issue. The city agreed to hire a monitor to oversee the disciplinary process for three years and pay 15 plaintiffs $2.5 million. The consultant will cost another $2 million and the city has spent more than $1.3 million in legal fees.

Police leaders dating back to Thomas C. Frazier either ignored the report or tried a series of fixes that never worked. The federal government stepped in at one point and said there was a histroy of racial disparity on the city force, and that police had violated black officers' civil rights by punishing them too harshly, prompting leaders to replace white commenders in charge of discipline, training and hiring with black officers, revamp the disciplinary process to remove discretion from mid-level sergeants and lieuteants, who were mostly white and impose a "matrix" that was supposed to make discipline fair.

The racial issue blew up under Frazier when he ousted the department's top black commander who called on the commissioner to resign if he didn't fix racial problems, including discipline. The nasty public fight led to court filings and protests in the street, and ended with the commander back on the force but relegated to an obscure office in City Hall.

Commissioner Edward T. Norris was forced to take a slew of police officers who had serious problems but got caught up in the dispute. And now we have another fix -- at least now police leaders can try to rectify the problem without the cloud of a lawsuit.