Baltimore police moved to restore some credibility to its disciplinary process by getting rid of its head of the equal employment opportunity commission. We learned earlier this year that Kim Y. Johnson had been moonlighting as a defense attorney for suspects arrested by cops in her own department, all while collecting a $94,000 city salary.

Now, she's either resigned or been forced out.

The move comes just weeks after the department clarified the kinds of cases she could work on during her own time. She was allowed to represent people in cases such as bankruptcy, but not those accused of crimes. Then a website InvestigativeVoice.com invoked her name in a dispute over a falsified discrimination complaint.

My question is when does Johnson find time to be a private attorney when she's got so much work to do in the Police Department? We've seen over and over investigations into misconduct gone awry -- many charges were thrown out because simple filing dealines were not met.

The city deserves a competent and open process to ensure its police force is above-board and working to resolve one of the most vexing problems Baltimore faces, and the cops deserve a system that treats them fairly.

While we're talking about credibility, a city police officer shot and critically wounded a 14-year-old boy Wednesday night on West Lexington St. Police say the boy had been armed with a BB pistol and had just robbed somebody. When the officer pulled up, the victim, a third-year medical student at the University of Maryland, yelled, "He's got a gun," police said.

A department spokesman said the youth ignored the officer's warnings to drop the weapon and turned toward him. The officer fired two shots, hitting the youth at least once in the stomach.

Police have routinely declined to release the names of officers who shoot people, and now are even finding ways to get around identifying them in initial court documents filed along with criminal charges. They haven't yet released the name of the wounded boy, and might not, and will most certainly regard the medical student as a witness to a crime and deem his name unreleasable as well.

All of this will eventually come out in court, if the youth survives, and if charges are filed, but it's impossible for the citizens to ascertain anything more about the incident other than what police have put forward without information that in years past was made public as a matter of routine. The policy of withholding names of officers in such circumstances has been under review for roughly 10 months now and the City Council hasn't followed up prior hearings on the issue.

Police who legitimately fire their weapons to protect themselves or others should have nothing to fear and open process. And the citizens deserve to have information to satisfy themselves that their police force is beyond reproach.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 7:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)
Categories: Police shootings, Top brass
        

Saturday marks the 20th anniversary of the shooting death of Baltimore Police Officer William J. Martin (at left, in picture from Fraternal Order of Police, Lodge 3), who at the age of 37 was shot in the head in an ambush while investigating drug dealing in an apartment building on Pennsylvania Avenue. Other officers returned fire and wounded the suspect, who is serving a life sentence.

On Saturday afternoon, 20 years to the day of Martin's death, a flag will be flown over the White House in Washington in his honor. It will then be escorted up the Baltimore-Washington Parkway and will be presented to Martin's eldest son, William J. Martin Jr., at Hogan's Alley bar at 1501 Covington St., at East Fort Avenue.

The public is welcome to attend and should be at the tavern no later than 1:30 p.m. to meet the police escort.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 7:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Confronting crime, Police shootings
        

Two Baltimore police officers shot and critically wounded a man this morning in Northeast Baltimore who apparently was waving a spatula. Police initially said the officers thought the man was charging them with an edged weapon.

Details are still a bit murky, but cops got a call for a mental patient in the 2400 block of Bridgehampton Drive and said that paramedics approached him first and ran when he emerged with a shiny object in his hand. Police then approached and a department spokesman said they shot him when he refused to put the object down. Police later said the man charged at the officers and it was dark, so it was difficult for them to determine what he had in his hand.

It's unclear as of this moment what exactly the paramedics and the officers saw the man holding. Police told us this morningt that the man called police asking for his mother and a member of the clergy and that he might have been trying to commit what is known as "suicide by cop."

Hopefully, more details will emerge later in the day. This morning's shooting was the 13th involving a city officer this year, compared with 20 in 2008 and 33 in 2007.

Police do have a variety of non-lethal weapons they can use to try and difuse a situation without or before resorting to their guns. But each circunstance is unique and doesn't always lend itself to using either a Taser or in some cases, though not every cop carries one, a gun that shoots a bean bag to disable a suspect.

Back in 1999, a Baltimore police officer shot and killed a man after he mistook a cell phone for a gun. But in that case, officers had been searching for the man who had failed to appear for a detention hearing in federal court on a drug case. The officers chased him through alleys in East Baltimore and reported that several times the man stopped and made a gesture as if he had a gun. The officer had shot at him during the chase but missed.

A few minutes later, police said he made the same move on a street and the officer fired and hit him three times, killing him. When they reached him lying on the street, he had a cell phone, not a gun, in his hand. The shooting was ruled justified.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 11:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)
Categories: Breaking crime, Police shootings
        

Baltimore Police Officer Traci L. McKissick changed her story on the witness stand and a man accused of trying to wrest away her gun during an altercation that left another man dead goes free.

This is a big deal in and of itself, but it's more important because back in February city police officials tried to withhold her name from the public citing a new policy of not revealing the identities of officers who shoot their weapons. McKissick and another officer who fired during the fight that killed the suspect's 61-year-old uncle, Joseph Forrest (seen above in a picture held by his sister, Greta, in a photo taken by The Sun's Jed Kirschbaum).

Police had the charged Forrest's nephew, also named Joseph Forrest, with stepping on McKissick's hand and trying to take away her gun. One officer shot the elder Forrest in the chest and McKissick unloaded her service weapon into the man's right thigh.

Police initially refused to name the officers, then blacked McKissick's name from a public police report on a previous shooting she had in 1995 when a suspect stole her weapon. The Sun obtained the name anyway and that led us to documents that countered what police had first told us about McKissick's encounter back in 1995 (instead of being dragged by a vehicle, as police told us, the reports showed she jumped into a car and had her gun stolen by the driver).

Now, on Tuesday, prosecutors were forced to drop charges against the younger Forrest because McKissick, who had identified Forrest as the man who stepped on her, testified in court that the person who tried to get her gun was a "mystery man."

That's quite different from a steadfast identification, an identification that helped a judge back in February order the younger Forrest held in jail without bail until his trial.

The policy of not naming cops who shoot is still being reviewed (it's now been six months) and while some identities of officers have been made public, others such as the most recent shooting of a man during a burglary in Northwest Baltimore have not.

I hope this incident with McKissick shows the department how withholding basic information such as identities prompts unnecessary questions and skepticism, and now that the officer in question has changed her story under oath, that should be taken into account as police investigate the fatal shooting of the elder Forrest.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 8:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Categories: Confronting crime, Police shootings
        

It took two weeks, but Anne Arundel County's police chief, James Teare Sr. finally released the names of three officers involved in two shootings last month. The Baltimore Sun's Andrea Siegel details the cases in today's newspaper.

In January, I took Baltimore police to task for changing its policy of quickly releasing the names of police who shoot people, arguing it undermined promises to run an open, transparent and accountable department and prevented the public from learning crucial details of the officers, their past history and the outcomes of the investigation into the shootings. Baltimore police are still reviewing their new policy.

So we wanted to hold Anne Arundel County to the same standard -- officials had told us when we compared the policies of various departments that they release the names within 12 to 24 hours. But when we sought the names in the two most recent shootings, we were told there is no timetable and the  names might not be released until the investigation is complete.

But Teare called me Tuesday afternoon to clarify. There is no timetable, but the chief conceded that two weeks is too long to wait to learn the names of officers who fire their guns. He blamed the delays on the unusual circumstances of dealing with back-to-back-to-back police shootings that also delayed some of the steps the department takes before making names of its officers public.

"It was beyond my normal expectations,” the chief said. “There is no reason for me not to release that information. We are public servants. We are paid by the public and the public should be knowledgeable about what’s going on in the department, especially when deadly force is involved.”

County police spokesman Justin Mulcahy then sent out news releases with the names of the officers — Dwayne Raidford, who had already been named in court charging documents, along with Lt. Harry Peterson, a 20-year veteran, and Officer Walter weeney, who has been on the force four years.

It's refreshing to learn that Teare gets that the names are important, and I hope to city reveals its decision on whether to revamp its own policy.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 12:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Police shootings
        

Baltimore Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III (at left talking about a drug bust, in a picture by The Sun's Barbara Haddock Taylor) went in front of the City Council Tuesday night to talk about how to best inform the public about crime through the Internet. The department through its new spokesman, Anthony Guglielmi, has been experimenting with Facebook, Twitter and Nixle, a texting program in which breaking crime and other news alerts can be sent to resident's cell phones and emails in their neighborhoods.

During his discussion, Bealefeld also talked about the still-under-review policy of when and how to name officers who discharge their weapons. Baltimore Sun reporter Justin Fenton was at the hearing and here is his story:

The hearing was called by City Council President Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, who wants the city to provide citywide text or email alerts about robberies, missing persons, auto theft and violent crimes (shootings, etc.). But she also wanted the department to talk transparency when it comes to police involved shootings, an issue that has simmered in recent months.

Rawlings-Blake pointed to Chicago, where an independent police oversight commission posts investigative reports of police-involved shootings on a web site. She held up one report that was 12 pages in length and went into detail about what investigators found when they looked into one particular shooting.

Rawlings-Blake wants Baltimore police to do something similar. Bealefeld noted that his staff looked into the Chicago commission and found it had 53 investigators, 11 supervisors and a budget of $7 million. But Rawlings-Blake noted that the commission and its budget are irrelevant - she said such reports are compiled in Baltimore already by homicide investigators and later, prosecutors, and that the only issue at play here was whether to post them on the Internet or not.

"If we're already doing it, is there some reason why redacted reports are not made available?" she asked.

Bealefeld said he endorsed the idea of posting them online but stopped short of saying the department would do it. He noted that many police-involved shootings become the basis for civil lawsuits.

"That's all possible. That's where we should head. I support doing that, but we need to make sure we're covering the legal bases," he said.

Bealefeld also gave an update on the city's policy regarding naming officers who shoot or kill citizens. The department sparked controversy earlier in the year when it said it would no longer identify the officers, ending a decades-long policy citing safety concerns for the officers. Several other large cities do not name officers who shoot or kill citizens, though others continue to do so, including most Maryland jurisdictions. The department was also unable to support the notion that any officers had faced threats after their names were disclosed following a shooting.

At the urging of Mayor Sheila Dixon, Bealefeld said he would re-consider the policy. On Tuesday evening at the council hearing he said that he had met with community leaders and sought their feedback on the policy, and asked them to gather opinions from their neighbors. He also consulted a group of leaders from the faith-based community. He said he received "considerable" feedback but is still contemplating the policy; in the meantime, disclosure of officer's names remain on a case-by-case basis. It's perhaps worth noting that there hasn't been a police shooting since Bealefeld said he would rethink the policy, after a flurry of such shootings to start the year.

Also, on the notion of crime alerts and providing statistics, Bealefeld said he was all about sharing information in new and better ways, but he had serious concerns and in some cases seemed downright paranoid about posting statistics or getting too specific.  Rawlings-Blake said many cities post daily or monthly crime numbers; the department has such data at its fingertips and is shared daily in police stations among commanders. But it has yet to post it online.

Bealefeld said the danger with posting statistics is that things change. He said the department "upgrades" five times as many crimes as it "downgrades," but he said all it takes is one crime being downgraded for the public to become convinced that the department is hiding crimes.

"This police department will not get any credit for" upgrading a crime. "If we change a dot on a map, it would be more damning than opposed to having" provided no information at all, he said. The comment was similar to those he made while discussing the department's use of Twitter, the social networking site, to disseminate breaking information about crime. He said that if police initially believe 6 people have been shot and later determine after an investigation that four people were shot, some will say the police department is "yet again manipulating data."

"We don't want to create problems for ourselves," he said.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 6:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Confronting crime, Neighborhoods, Police shootings, Top brass
        

The Baltimore Sun's Gus Sentementes just posted a breaking story on a off-duty corrections officer who shot and wounded a 15-year-old boy who police say tried to rob him with a toy gun this morning at a convenience store.

Police have not released the officer's name (it's still very early in the investigation), but I'm guessing that because of their new policy of not naming officers who fire their weapons, they won't release the name at all. Police are considering revising the policy but haven't said much about it lately.

Anthony Guglielmi, the Baltimore Police Department's chief spokesman, took issue with my statements and said withholding the name of this corrections officer has nothing to do with the policy but is being done because he's a victim of a crime. Police used to release all victims' names; now they are far more reluctant, and given the climate of retaliation it's hard to blame them. Two others involved in the holdup have not yet been arrested.

Guglielmi also argued that the corrections officer is a civilian and not a cop; in this case, he was off-duty and using his personal weapon (corrections officers have to forfeit their guns when they go off duty). It's also a valid point -- while city cops are always "on duty" even when their off, as in they are expected to intervene in crimes that are in progress and do carry their guns even when not on the job -- it's different for corrections officers.

I still believe that given an appropriate amount of time, the names of everyone who shoot people, whether it be civilians or law enforcement officers, should be made public. I don't like the  city police policy, and I believe eveyone should be held to the same standard. 

Ironically, police union lawyers were in court today to argue that a trial for a city cop charged with manslaughter in a duty-related shooting last year should be moved out of the city because the policy prohibiting the release of names of officers who shoot has created so much controversy. The police commissioner has said that he will release names of officers in questionable or bad shooitngs; this officer was named and his lawyers are now saying the department has publicly convicted him before trial.

The real story is that the officer's name was released before the policy was introduced and that it would've been released anyway upon indictment. The irony is that the union supports not naming cops who shoot but will argue the opposite in court. It just shows the confusion this new policy has brought. The judge said he would make a ruling within a week.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 9:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)
Categories: Police shootings
        

Early Tuesday, a 13-year-old boy was shot in the ankle while being arrested by a Baltimore school system police officer. The cops were at the Harlem Park complex in West Baltimore checking on a report that some kids had broken into the school.

The school system issued a news release but did not identify either the officer or the child who was struck (it appears the officer's gun accidentally discharged through his pants and hit the youth). Baltimore police are reviewing their policy on withholding the names of officers who fire their weapons and have not yet made a final determination.

I asked the department's chief spokesman, Anthony Guglielmi, for the names of the child and the officer, and he referred me to the school system. A spokeswoman for city schools, Edie House, told me they would definitely not release the name of the young victim citing confidentiality laws. City police have been sporadic about naming victims because of witness intimidation issues, but in the past they routinely released the names of all victims, child and adult.

As I hold Baltimore police accountable, I'm calling on authorities to release the name of the officer who fired his weapon and say more about the shooting -- was his weapon drawn or how did it discharge? And without the name of the child, we have no way of determining whether he was a student at the school and what his defense might be.

House told me she would check on whether they can release the name of the officer, but she said it  probably wouldn't be done until after Baltimore police conclude their investigation. City police are running the investigation, and in the past, when they routinely released names of police officers who shot people, they also released names of officers from other agencies who discharged their weapons:

In 1990, city police told us that Officer Kenneth M. Dean III of the now defunct Housing Authority police shot and killed Eli McCoy, a 17-year-old youth.

In 1997, city police identified Armis Paul Strickland, 46, a police officer with the University of Maryland at Baltimore who fatally shot a mentally disturbed woman who had just been released from the hospital.

Here is the statement issued by the Baltimore school system of the shooting:

Continue reading "City school cop shoots child" »

Posted by Peter Hermann at 9:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Categories: Police shootings
        

City Council President Stephanie Rawlings-Blake introduced a resolution on Monday calling for more police accountability in police shooting investigations. She referenced a new initiative by the Chicago Police Department -- through the city's Independent Police Review Authority -- that puts final reports about police shootings online, complete with statements from witnesses and officers (though names are withheld).

I hope Baltimore police take this seriously as they revise their policy on withholding names of officers who discharge their weapons. One of their central arguments in defending these new rules is that the department does a thorough investigation. That is true, but it's also true that there is no mechinism to tell the public the result. It's a two-tier review -- the State's Attorney's Office reviews the case to determine if a crime is committed. When they are done, the department begings an internal review to determine if the shooting was in policy or out of policy.

This can take weeks if not months. But here in Baltimore, the results almost always fall into a void. What Chicago has done is put it all out there, and I think it helps the department. Since most of the shootings are ruled justified (and aren't criminal) at the very least sharing the report with the public shows them just how thorough the investigation was, and that will go a long way toward eliminating doubt.

But it shouldn't be a compromise. The names of the police officers should be released shortly after they discharge their weapons, within 24 to 48 hours, to ensure there is accountability on the front-end as well. The city already has in place some mechinisms to ensure public scrutiny of police, but like the Civilian Review Board, they are painfully wanting. The CRB, established 10 years ago, discusses cases in such cryptic form that it's next to impossible for anyone sitting in the room to discern what they are talking about. And their semiannual reports do not say whether the police commissioner even took their advice.

Rawlings-Blake, in her resolution, also points out that the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington publishes lives crime statistics on its website; she has proposed setting a up a system in which city police text people crime updates. And police now have a Facebook page and are twittering some breaking crimes on-line.

These are all steps in the right direction. Here's Rawlings-Blake's idea:

Continue reading "Baltimore police accountability" »

Posted by Peter Hermann at 7:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
        

At the end of yesterday evening's Baltimore Police Civilian Review Board meeting, the panel's overseer Alvin Gillard, head of the Community Relations Commission, thought it would be good for members to weigh in on the department's policy of withholding names of officers who fire their weapons.

The policy being is reviewed, and possibly will be revised, after an outcry that it could cripple the trust citizens have with police and keep witnesses from coming forward if they think the cops are too scared to put their own names out there. Who better to have an opinion than the citizens picked by the mayor to scrutinize police conduct and advise the commissioner on investigations conducted by internal affairs?

The topic sparked the most spirited debate of the evening, with most of the members voting to urge Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld to overturn the policy. It turns out that the review officials had been talking about actually is a review. Members said community leaders have been asked to poll their constituents at meetings and report back to Bealefeld.

"I don't see why the names of anybody should be withheld," said William Brent, who represents residents in the Southwestern District.

Countered Pearlette Anderson from the Western: "I don't think the names should be out there because then people can come after families and I'm a family."

Brent reminded her that an officer in a recent shooting had previously shot two people, and didn't she want to know that?

Anderson said her daughter is a police officer, and "I don't want to have her name out there if she shoots someone. That puts me in danger and puts my grandkids in danger."

Other board members pointed out that members of the CRB are identified, debate police conduct cases in public and could be targeted as well. And Brent noted that 23 threats against officers and cited by police to justify the new policy had nothing to do with police-involved shootings.

In the end, a letter will be sent from the Civilian Review Board to the police commissioner.

In defending the new policy, city police continually referred to other departments that also don't release names. One was Washington, but it appears from my reading of The Washington Post that too might be changing. After the city policy made its pages, I noticed that in two shootings involving DC officers that The Post seemed to be challenging the department.

In one, the Post wrote that the Metropolitan Police Department in D.C. refused to name the officer who shot someone but cited no policy prohibiting the disclosure. Later, the Post used sources to identify an officer and said the department had in the past routinely publicized the names but now, under a new chief, that practice had stopped.

In Prince George's County, police this week revealed the names of 14 officers involved in a single shooting. And today The Post wrote a story about how one of them had been involved in two previous shootings.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 12:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)
        

The civil wrongful death lawsuit now under way in U.S. District Court in Baltimore, filed by the family of 44-year-old Cheryl Lynn Noel, raises some interesting questions:

1. Did a member of the Baltimore County police Swat team unnecessarily fire a third and fatal bullet into the chest of Noel, who was already wounded, as she lay on the ground, unable to pose any threat?

2. Did county police overdo it by sending in a heavily-armed 16-member SWAT team dressed in camouflage gear, some armed with assault rifles, using a flash grenade and carrying ballistic shields with bright lights, to serve a search warrant on a Dundalk home for drugs?

Terrell N. Roberts III addressed the 10-member jury selected on Monday and set to hear at least two weeks of testimony in a case that will examine what at the time was a routine police shooting. I'll take  you through the statements by Roberts and the county attorney defending the officers, letting each tell the tale:

Roberts began by talking about Jan. 21, 2005, which he described as a "cold winter morning" in which, at 4:50 a.m., Cheryl Noel, a 44-year-old "devoted mother and wife was asleep in her bed" and, on a normal day, was to have gotten up shortly to get ready for work at the Baltimore City Department of Public Works, where she was a water technician at the Back Water Treatment Plant. Instead, Roberts told the jury, "She was shot by a police officer who is sworn to protect and serve."

What she didn't know as she slept so soundly in her bed was that "outside her home amassed a SWAT team of about 16 officers" who were about to swarm her home after having conducted an investigation that began when a county officer stopped her 19-year-old son a few weeks earlier and found a single pill of Percocet for which he did not have a prescription. Cops later searched the household trash and found "remnants, traces of marijuana, traces of cocaine." The son, Matthew, had been living downstairs in the basement. (He was convicted of marijuana possession and served 90 days in jail stemming from charges filed after the raid in which his mother was killed).

Roberts described for the jury a high intensity, high-risk home invasion by cops for what he called a minuscule amount of drugs. "The way they entered the house is what this case is all about," he told the jury on Monday. "They did not knock and announce. They took a battering ram, knocked down the front door and stampeded into the home."

He talked about the explosion, a flash grenade, set off outside the house as the cops went in, designed he said to confuse occupants so they don't know who is barging inside. He said it was timed to go off, from a pole set up outside the house and near Noel's second floor bedroom window, just cops who were already inside rushed through the bedroom door. The husband Charles, who was asleep on the bed, sat up, but "before he could say 'What the ...' his door was banged down and he saw two muzzle flashes. He looked over to see his wife beginning to go down."

Roberts said Cheryl Noel, hearing the flash grenade, grabbed her legally-registered handgun and was standing at the foot of her bed, pointing it in a downward manner, when the cops burst through the door; Officer Carlos Artson, seeing the gun, immediately fired two shots, hitting her in the upper right and upper left part of her body. She fell, and the gun came lose from her hands.

Her husband, Charles Noel, complied with officer's demands to put his hands up and said he told his wife, "Put your hands up, babe." She responded, "They shot me in the chest."

Roberts said Artson then yelled three times for her to move away or move her hand away from the gun. Roberts said Charles Noel will testify that his wife posed no threat, that she was incapacitated and could not comply with Artson's demands. He said Artson then fired a third and final shot, downward, into the center of Cheryl Noel's chest. That, Roberts told the jury, "was the kill shot."

Roberts described haphazard training. He pointed out the cops didn't have an arrest warrant, but merely a search warrant, and that the main target was Matthew Noel, Cheryl Noel's 19-year-old son who lived in the basement with his girlfriend and who fully cooperated when different officers yelled down the stairs for him to surrender. Roberts said Cheryl, had she known cops were inside her house, would've done the same given the chance. He said the officers who conducted the raid knew she feared for her life because people had called in death threats in connection with her son -- one threatened to burn the house down -- but that his clients were not dangerous individuals.

He did conceded that Charles Noel had been convicted of second-degree murder 30 years ago stemming from a fight with other teens. He said he left for the army but returned to plead guilty when charges were brought "and he served his time. It's been a matter of shame for him." He now works a waste station at the Fort George G. Meade Army base in Anne Arundel County, and has for the past 13 years. Matthew Noel also had problems -- he had recently shot a man in the foot with a .45 caliber handgun, an incident that Roberts described as fight among teens.

Of Cheryl Noel, Roberts said, "This woman did not have fair warning that the police were entering her house." He said he will put on experts who will tell you what police won't -- that such raids are designed to hide the fact that cops are busting into homes and that the use of flash grenades prove the cops want to cause as much confusion as possible. And when she was shot, "she was not going for the gun. She was incapable of going for the gun."

Of the raid itself, Roberts said: "We're not going after Osama bin Laden. We're not even going after a murderer. This wasn't even an arrest warrant."

County attorney Paul M. Mayhew, who is defending the two sergeants and three officers, stood up and wondered aloud if what his counterpart had just described was more like Nazi Germany than Baltimore County. Of police, he said, "This is not a terrorist organization we're running here. These officers are highly trained and dedicated."

While Roberts described Dundalk as a suburban enclave, Mayhew described it as part and parcel with the city -- same type of housing, same type of problems. Dundalk might as well as be East Baltimore: "We live in a very violent city and a very violent nation and a very violent world, full of guns and drugs, unfortunately."

He described how the investigation unfolded, not a keystone cops type of a thing, but from a simple stop of a car by a patrol officer of 19-year-old Matthew Noel, who was driving on a suspended license. The cop noticed a pill that was Percocet and the young Noel told the officer "he had a pill problem." The case was referred to a federal task force investigating what Mayhew described was formed in "response to a growing prescription drug epidemic." The sergeant, he said, "did what he was supposed to do -- investigate."

Officers searched the Noel's trash outside the house and three separate times found evidence of drugs -- small amounts of marijuana and cocaine, scales for measuring and "the razor blade used for cutting it up." He noted that "drug dealers are business people. They don't throw out their product out in the trash. We always find just a little."

The drugs combined with the scales led police to believe the house was being used to sell drugs, not just occupied by people who used them. He said cops did a background check on the occupants and turned up, yes, the old murder conviction for Charles Noel, but also the shooting case against the son Matthew, that his girlfriend, a nightclub dancer, also was wanted on a warrant and that there was a second handgun registered to a person in the house. They also found mail indicating another man with a long criminal record for burglary, drugs and assault might be living there. The threats Cheryl Noel was worried about were directed at Matthew.

Putting all that information together -- there were guns in the house, it's linked to drugs and occupied by people with violent histories -- the officer "went and got a warrant. That was the Noel's fourth amendment protection." Then Sgt. Robert M. Gibbons had to decide how to go into the house.  He said Gibbons had to think of all that they learned, including that another son, who had moved out, had been arrested and charged with selling marijuana "outside the home" by an officer who happened to be on the raid team. That charge was dropped when the suspect "flipped" on "someone else with more drugs," Mayhew told jurors.

In addition, Cheryl Noel, the dedicated mother and worker, had a previous conviction for possessing marijuana and driving under the influence of alcohol. Gibbons, Mayhew told jurors, "didn't think it was remotely safe to send a patrol officer knocking on the door. He knew the house was occupied by a convicted murderer and a man who had just shot another man with a .45." Police officers, he said, are here to "serve and protect" but "that doesn't mean they have to forfeit their right to protect their own lives."

He disputed Charles Noel's statement that his wife never moved toward the gun; he said Artson saw her move her hand toward the weapon and fired. He said the officer showed incredible restraint in stopping after he fired the first two bullets and yelled three times for her to move away from the gun. His partner was still subduing the husband on the bed by training an assault rifle at him, and that "any other officer, any one of you, would've kept shooting" until it was clear Cheryl Noel couldn't move again.

Mayhew told the jury, "We do not apologize one minute" for the shooting. He held up the box containing Cheryl Noel's gun to the jury: "This is a a legally registered handgun. Would you wanted it pointed at you?" ... He noted that county tactical officers have conducted 3,000 "high-risk" raids in the past 30 years and only three times "have they discharged their weapons." He said Charles Noel complied with the officer's demands and wasn't hurt at all.

He said flash grenades are not used to cause confusion but to "momentarily distract" someone as cops go in. He said in this case, officers broke down the door as a single officer shouted, "Police search warrant" over and over again. The flash grenade was set off 4.5 seconds after the door came down, giving what he said was ample warning to the people inside that police were there. He said it can be debated whether 4.5 seconds is enough time for that to register but he said the tactic has worked in most of the other 3,000 raids.

Mayhew said Cheryl Noel kept her fully-loaded gun under her pillow because she was worried about the threats made toward her son, and that she thwarted efforts by the husband to kick the young man out. He said the idea police want to conceal who they are during a raid is not true, in that cops yell who they are as they come through door, have the words "police" emblazoned on their gear and even on their shields. In fact, Charles Noel, according to Mayhem, said during his deposition that he didn't know cops were inside until he was handcuffed and brought downstairs; but his lawyer said in opening statements that he told his wife to put his hands up and that he was blinded by the light coming from the police officer's shields.

Here is a copy of the lawsuit and the police report that lists the items seized from the house:

Continue reading "Police shooting lawsuit" »

Posted by Peter Hermann at 11:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)
Categories: Police shootings
        

Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon has stepped in the fracus over a new police department policy by to withhold names of officers who fire their weapons and ordered that it be revised.

This sudden turnaround, which she announced during an impromptu news conference yesterday, has her for one of the first times jumping into a policy issue that has embroiled her most important and public agency for weeks and led to tussles with the media and now the City Council, where some members feel misled by officials at a public hearing. Listen to the podcast of Guglielmi's debate on the Marc Steiner show.

Scott Peterson, the mayor's spokesman, told me this morning that Dixon wants to "take a step back" because of reaction to the policy from the press, the public and City Council members:

"Obviously this is a policy we are looking at, that we want to make sure we get right. This administration wants to make sure that policies that we put in place for this city are the best policies for its people. The mayor is working in cooperation with the commissioner. They're looking toward possibly reviewing the policy ... to make sure it fits this city. ... It's a policy debate. This happens in politics. ... Everything is on the table in looking at this policy."

Well, yes, policies do get reviewed in politics, but usually before they actually become policy. Scott is trying to make this sound like a routine part of the process; such debate and research should've and could've been done before the policy actually was thought up and implemented. The police union, the citizen groups, the police civilian review board, the City Council, and others all could've been consulted.

All the spin in the world can't rewrite history -- the policy was implemented, and now the mayor, after public flak that won't die down, is stepping in to revise and possibly reverse it, even after her police commissioner defended it at a City Council hearing and his chief spokesman repeatedly tried to defend it in the media and on a radio show.

This morning, the spokesman, Anthony Guglielmi, told Baltimore Sun reporter Justin Fenton:

"We are revisiting the policy. I think the whole issue has taken on a life of its own and is truly a distraction for the department and City Hall. We're going to try to find a middle ground between transparency and protecting officers families and officers. Each locale is different. What works in the federal government, New York City, Atlanta, may or may not work in Baltimore."

That comment came after Guglielmi had posted an unscientific Baltimore Sun web poll on the topic on the department's Facebook page. Of the 583 people who resonded, nearly 60 percent backed the police policy.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 9:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Police shootings
        

It's time for the Baltimore Police Department to start again naming its officers who shoot people and end this futile policy of withholding identities.

First off, the policy has failed. The names of seven officers who shot people this year have been revealed -- only one has not -- sometimes hours after the bullets were fired into city civilians. Their names have come from public court documents, police reports, leaks from secret sources and once even by the police commissioner himself.
 
Second, it's proved to be a giant distraction for a department that should be focusing on crime and not wasting it defending ill-conceived policies designed by a spokesman from Washington who has no background in urban policing and a proven disdain for openness and accountability on behalf of a law enforcement agency struggling for respect among the city's residents.

Third, the policy openly mocks the mayor's call for transparency in her police and her otherwise laudable push to get the community involved, a difficult task after years in which the police alienated the community by arresting more than a hundred thousand people, many on charges that couldn't even stand up to the review of a prosecutor at the booking center and had to be thrown out.
 
The only way the spokesman, Anthony Guglielmi, and his followers can sustain this policy of secret
policing is through subterfuge -- they've mislead the city and the City Council on the types of threats officers receive, making shambles of their own arguments, blacking out portions of public documents to keep people from obtaining court records, failing to inform the public of an arrest at one shooting, which would have led to a court document with the name of the officer, and providing false information on an officer's previous shooting that made her look heroic when in fact her actions could be described as reckless.
 
At a City Council hearing last night, attended by Baltimore Sun police reporter Justin Fenton, members were angry at the department's explanations. They should have also been angry at themselves for the childish way they acted at a previous hearing when they blew their chance to ask Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III tough questions about this policy. Instead, they bought the department's line to the point where they fawned over the top cop and abdicated their roles as public watchdogs.

Yesterday, Councilman James B. Kraft, who last month told Bealefeld, "We don't want these guys names on the street," said: "I have a concern that if we don't ask the right questions, we don't get the right answers. I was very upset, and I expressed this privately, upset about our last hearing when we were talking about the policy that has been adopted dealing with the disclosure of the identity of officers involved in shootings."

In other words, Kraft is sorry for letting Bealefeld skate through a hearing. When Bealefeld testified that 23 officers had been threatened last year -- a number fed to him by his new spokesman, Guglielmi, who has been throwing the number around since January in the context of this new policy -- Kraft and others rightly assumed that those threats were the results of police-involved shootings.

Guglielmi claims he never meant to suggest that, which is a good thing since none of the 23 officers who were threatened last year had anything to do with police involved shootings. Most threats, numbers supplied by Guglielmi after a public records request by The Sun -- stemmed from arrests, and only a handful were deemed serious. One even involved an officer threatening another officer. But since nobody pressed Bealefeld at the February City Council hearing, he never had to come clean about the number.

And now the council feels misled: "And the 23 number; I believed myself that those 23 were officers who had been involved in shootings and therefore, they felt they were going to be threatened because of that," Kraft said. "I don't think the distinction was brought forth in the hearing. ... I feel that could've been more clearer."

The truth does tend to clear up such matters.

It seems that Kraft, at least, finally gets it: "We are constantly, constantly asking our citizens to come forward, and to be ready to stand up and identify criminals and to participate in the process ... and when a citizen sees that a police officer is afraid to have his or her name out there because they could be a victim, I think it creates the perception that, if the cops are afraid of retaliation, then why should the average citizen help out? The police department, they have vests, they have guns, they have their brothers and sisters in blue. The ordinary citizen doesn't have that. "

On the Marc Steiner show Monday, Guglielmi tried to say it doesn't matter whether the 23 threats involved police shootings, that he wants to be proactive, that he's not willing to wait for an officer to be gunned down after his name shows up in the newspaper. It matters a great deal when you use a number to justify a policy, then the number turns out to be bogus. Guglielmi is not serving his police commissioner well if he sets him up for that kind of failure at a public meeting. Not only does this policy give reason for people to further mistrust police, but the department is compounding the problem by giving us reason to mistrust the guy in charge.

Guglielmi has repeatedly said that the only redacting they are doing is of the officer's name; the citizens still have all the pertinent information needed to judge whether the shooting is justified. Trouble with this is we have to trust the department to tell us what is pertinent, and the track record in the last three months alone is not very comforting.
 
* After Officer Traci McKissick tussled with 61-year-old Joseph Forrest on Orleans Street on Feb. 18, it took reporters' questions to get Guglielmi to admit that she had been involved in a previous shooting in 2005 (he had promised that sort of information would be routinely divulged).

* At first, Guglielmi said only that she had been involved in a previous incident and that it had been ruled justified. Pressed by author and former Baltimore Sun reporter David Simon, the spokesman said that in 2005 she had discharged her weapon after or while been dragged by a car.

* The Sun pressed Guglielmi for further details and demanded the 2005 police report. His office faxed a copy with both the name of the officer and the name of the suspect blacked out, done, one of the officers in public affairs told us, to prevent us from obtaining the four-year-old court document. Guglielmi later apologized for blacking out the name of the suspect, calling it an oversight, but did not apologize for blacking out the name of the officer.

* We obtained the court file anyway and it showed that McKissick had not been dragged behind a car but had jumped into a car when a suspect she and a sergeant had stopped for drugs tried to flee in a vehicle the cops had failed to secure. The driver and McKissick wrestled for her gun, which went off, a bullet striking a back seat, and the suspect got the weapon and threw it out the window. It has never been found. The shooting of Forrest also involved a fight in which the man tried to get her weapon, meaning that twice in four years, this officer had been involved in a fight over her weapon and had been overpowered, details the department tried very hard to hide.

* Also in the shooting of Forrest, police neglected to tell reporters that an officer had arrested a relative of the dead man who they said tried to help wrest away McKissick's gun. She was actually fighting two people, not one, a detail that could help explain why she and the sergeant fired their weapons and how she was overpowered and pinned to the pavement. But releasing the name would have allowed the public to obtain the court document, which contains the names of the officers. Guglielmi told me he didn't know an arrest was made and wasn't trying to hide anything, but given his willingness to obliterate public records to further his policy, I no longer give him the benefit of the doubt. By the way, it was police union officials, who support Guglielmi's policy, who called this newspaper to complain that we weren't reporting the arrest and making McKissick look like she was fighting just one person.

* That brings us to the most recent shooting on Friday, in which Officer Jemell Rayam fatally shot a man who had struck another officer with his vehicle during a traffic stop in Northwest Baltimore. A police spokeswoman, on Friday night shortly after the shooting, revealed that the then-unnamed officer had been involved in two previous shootings that had been ruled justified. In Guglielmi's world, that's sufficient information for you to judge whether the department is being forthcoming.

* On Monday, after the man had died Sunday night, this newspaper again asked for a full accounting of the previous shootings and for the reports. That went on all day until Guglielmi appeared on the Marc Steiner show and at 5:30 p.m., in an effort to assure listeners that his department fully cooperates with the press and the public, said The Sun had asked for the reports and we had them in our hands.

* That simply was not true. The spokesman made it sound as if they had acted promptly to our request for the most basic public record, when in fact it took until 6 p.m. (and phone calls to both Guglielmi and another spokeswoman) to get one of reports, again with the name of the officer blacked out. Guglielmi's office said they had been given the wrong information, hence the delay; I can't help but note that it took the department more than six hours to answer the request and we were furnished with only half of it and after the courts had closed for the day -- meaning we could not pull court documents on the case until Tuesday.

* Do you find it as baffling and ironic as I do that the department, two days after working overtime to keep the public from learning Rayman's name and blacking his identity from a police report, honored him at a public awards ceremony yesterday for shooting someone in a gunfight two years ago (the very same incident covered by the blacked out report)? The agency gave out awards in connection with 24 incidents; all but six involved a police-involved shooting. The threats Guglielmi are so worried about must have suddenly disappeared. The very fact they had this public ceremony makes a mockery of their argument that these names must be kept secret.

* Topping it off, a lawyer for the police union is arguing that an officer indicted on a manslaughter charge for shooting a man last year was unfairly singled out as a bad cop, jeopardizing his right to a fair trial, because the new policy dictates that only officers found to have unjustly shot someone be named. Bealefeld had used this case at the City Council hearing to say his department is naming cops whose actions are found to be questionable.

There is a lot of effort being used to promote a public relations policy. Guglielmi says that the only thing the public is missing is the officer's name, but just three months since this new policy took effect, we learn time and time again there is a lot more information that the department can hide when it's not subject to outside review and scrutiny. Without the name, the public would still be unaware that McKissick had been overpowered four years earlier, and not dragged by a car.

We shouldn't tolerate secret policing in our cities. Robert Cherry, the president of the city police union, told me on Tuesday that he objected to Prince George's County officers working overtime at city bars -- city cops are now banned from such jobs -- because citizens here don't need someone from the outside "causing trouble and then leaving without us knowing who they are." By that logic, why should city cops be able to shoot people without their citizens knowing who they are? (Cherry later called to put his comments into greater context: he meant that with outside officers working overtime for private companies, even city police wouldn't know who they are; with a city cop involved in a shooting, city authorities would of course know who they are).

The policy dishonors the good cops who are willing and able to stand by their actions. It paints all cops and all shootings as questionable simply because we have no reason to believe what the department tells us. When the policy was first announced, Gugliemli tried to pass it off as a public affairs initiative, the new guy charging in and helping cops by altering a century-old policy -- and that Bealefeld could do as he pleases, but public affairs would not release the names. That rightly confused City Council members and the rest of as to whether Guglielmi was making his own policy and whether he really spoke for Bealefeld. City Council members told me those fears were put to rest when Bealefeld testified at the hearing last month and owned up to the new rules. I still have my doubts: if this is Bealefeld's policy, he should retract it, apologize and move on to fighting crime. If it's Guglielmi's policy, Bealefeld should order it redacted, admit he was ill-served and not allow a spokesman to form policy again.

Guglielmi's job is to speak for the department, to guide and advise the commissioner and to set his public agenda. But more than that, Guglielmi has a responsibility to the public to be honest, open, up front and to warn his boss when policies contradict the mayor's mission to restore trust in the department. If not, then Mayor Sheila Dixon needs to step in and order her commissioner to reverse a policy that flies in the face of what she's trying to accomplish. You can't ask the unarmed citizens of the city to stand up to criminals when the armed protectors want to hide.

Now, every single shooting by police will be questioned and receive far greater review than usual, until the media and the public are satisfied that the deadly actions were appropriate. Back when the names were released, usually within 24 hours of a shooting, that process was simple, easy and often led to no further coverage. Now, given the secrecy and the obfuscation, the actions of every single police officer who fires his or her weapon will be questioned, doubted and debated.

The commissioner's face should be plastered all over this city talking about ending violence, locking up criminals and restoring order. Bealefeld has served this city well over the past year but has big challenges ahead of him. He has to beat his own good numbers (homicides went down in 2008 but are up this year) with less money and fewer resources. He doesn't need additional headaches from the office he relies on to get his message out, but is instead wasting time misleading the public they are supposed to serve.

Posted by Peter Hermann at 8:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Police shootings
        

Baltimore's chief police spokesman, Anthony Guglielmi, took to the radio yesterday to defend a new policy of not naming officers who fire their weapons. It was not a pretty hour of radio. He got taken to task by David Rocah, a staff attorney with the ACLU and David Simon, a former Baltimore Sun police reporter and author. In his defense, he had Bob Cherry, the head of the Baltimore police union.

The debate raged just days after a city police officer shot a man in Northwest Baltimore and hours after that man died Sunday night of his injuries. Citing the new policy, city police refused to release the name of the officer but did say he had been involved in two previous police involved shootings.

Guglielmi said the main reason for this policy is concern for the safety of officers. He has reiterated the potential for threats and retaliation in interviews and yesterday on Marc Steiner's radio show on WEAA, as did the police commissioner while testifying in front of the City Council.

Before getting to the show and more information about the latest shooting involving a city officer, let me direct you to a new web site put by the Chicago Police Department's Independent Police Review Authority. For the first time, the authority is releasing to the public the results of investigations into shootings by police. The names of the officers aren't there, but this goes a long way toward assuring the public that its police are investigating these cases. See below for a sample of one of the reports.

Yesterday on the show, we heard time and time again that Baltimore officers are thoroughly investigated by both city prosecutors and the department's internal affairs division. Trouble is, we rarely hear when a shooting has been ruled legally justified and within policy by the department. What Chicago is doing, even without the name of the officer, is putting the case out there, showing how thorough the review is and giving the public an idea that something is being done.

Just a few hours before airtime, Guglielmi answered a long-standing request from the Baltimore Sun to detail the 23 threats made against officers last year. At least nine were considered significant, the spokesman said, but none directly involved an officer threatened because of a police-involved shooting. According to the numbers supplied by Guglielmi, 60 percent of the threats were "threats on police after making an arrest," 15 percent were anonymous, five percent were by suspected gang members and five percent came after a trial (in which the names of the officers are part of the public record regardless of whether they're names are printed in the newspaper). One of the threats was one officer threatening another officer.

The concern here is that police officials are justifying the policy of withholding names because of threats even if those threats are not related to police involved shootings. By combining the two numbers, Guglielmi and the commissioner certainly implied there was a cause and effect, both in interviews and to the City Council, which at the very least is misleading.

On the Marc Steiner show, Guglielmi repeatedly brought up the safety issue, the ease with which names can be traced to address in the Internet age and, by questioning the policy, people are forgetting "the families" of the officers who might suffer. Never mind that again, not a single one of the threats last year were due to a police involved shooting. Simon mentioned rightly that plenty of citizens who testify are targeted and in some cases killed (a case of deadly witness intimidation is going on right now in federal court) and by Guglielmi's argument, no names should be released in any case. Why should citizens be named and cops not if safety is the real issue?

Guglielmi and Cherry kept saying that the only thing the public loses under this new policy is the name, and that everything else is available. But we lose much more than the name; we lose the ability to question, to second-guess, to hold our police officials and by extention the government accountable.

Without the name, we have to trust when Guglielmi says that an officer involved in a fatal February shooting was involved in a previous shooting that was ruled justified. The spokesman told David Simon that in the previous case involved the officer being dragged behind a vehicle, when in fact she jumped into a car after a drug suspect tried to flee, got into a struggle with the suspect over her weapon, which discharged, and then the suspect got hold of her gun and threw it out a window of a moving car.

Simon accused Guglielmi of lying about the previous incident to cover it up, arguing that's the reason not to trust the government to tell the whole store. "We release all information that is pertinent," Guglielmi said at one point. Simon answered, "You release the information that you think is pertinent."

And that's the point. After that shooting in February, The Baltimore Sun requested the police report from the officer's previous shooting in 2005. It's a public document. Guglielmi's office faxed over a copy but blacked out both the name of the officer and the name of the suspect. It was done, we were told by one of the spokesmen in his office, to prevent us from pulling the court case which would contain the officer's name. That's how far the department is willing to go to further this policy. We were able to obtain the court file anyway and obtain the name.

Pressed on blacking out the public police report, Guglielmi said on the radio show that it was an "oversight" to also black out the name of the suspect. Rocah said it's illegal to black out anything on a police report. "You can't redact a name by accident," Rocah said, to which Guglielmi responded, "I apologize for redacting the name." The spokesman then said The Baltimore Sun had requested the reports in connection with the previous two police shootings from the officer who shot and killed the man Friday night. He said on air at 5:30 p.m. that the reports had been provided to the newspaper.

That wasn't true. At that time, we did not have the reports. I called his office and was told they had been faxed internal documents, not the reports, and were still working on getting the correct information. The department sent us one of the police reports by 6 p.m. but said there was difficulty obtaining the second report. This time, Guglielmi's staff did not black out the name of the suspect who had been arrested (they did erase the name of the officer involved in the shooting) but The Sun's police reporter, Justin Fenton, was able to find out the name and it is published in his story on the shooting today.

That story also quotes the City Council president and the chairman of the City Council's public safety committee saying they remain concerned about transparancy in the department and that they might have been misled on the issue of threats. They should be concerned. Members of the public safety committee did little to press the police chief on the policy.

Simon and Rocah both reminded Guglielmi that we don't live in a police state with cops with no badges who can arrest people in secret. Withholding the name of officers who fire their weapons deprives the citizens of this city an important tool to check the conduct of the people who are empowered to deprive of them of their liberties and kill them if necessary. We have open justice in this country and people are entitled to face their accusers.

At one point, Simon told Guglielmi: "State officials cannot go against state law."

Guglielmi: "David, nobody is going against the law." He added, "That's why we have courts."

Rocah: "You might find yourself there."

The names of these officers will come out. There have been seven police involved shootings in this city this year, four of them fatal, involving eight police officers. One name was made public by the police commissioner. Others emerged in public court documents or were confirmed by law enforcement sources.

The officer involved in most recent shooting on Friday of 30-year-old Shawn Cannady is Jemell Rayam. Police say he fired into a car after it struck his partner during a drug investigation. He hit the driver, Cannady, in the chest. In October 2007, Rayam shot a man during a traffic stop after the man tried to drive away. The victim was shot in the hands and was later convicted on second-degree assault.

Just a few months earlier, in June 2007, Rayam was involved in an exchange of gunfire with a drug suspect on Barclay Street in East Baltimore. Rayam was injured in the exchange, suffering a graze wound to the toe. The suspect was wounded.

Here's a sample from the Chicago Police Department site on a closed investigation to a police shooting. It's only two paragraphs from a 10-page report. There are no names, but at least it gives af full accounting of what happened and includes statements from witnesses (again, though, without names):

Continue reading "Baltimore police shootings" »

Posted by Peter Hermann at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Police shootings
        

The 30-year-old man shot by police on Friday died from his injuries last night, and if you're keeping score, this is the seventh shooting by city officers this year and the fourth to end with a suspect dead.

It's also the latest police shooting under a new policy in which police do not release the names of officers who fire their weapons. We've gotten names in some, but not all, from various sources, including court documents.

The policy has proven difficult to maintain for a variety of reasons. The first shooting under this policy involved a gunfight between drug suspects and police and left one officer and a suspect wounded. The police commissioner broke policy and announced the name of the officer who opened fire at a news conference, calling him a hero. It would've been impossible to keep the name quiet for long anyway because the man who was wounded was eventually charged, and the name of the officer who wounded him is in public court files.

The most controversial shooting under this policy occurred in February in which two officers shot a man during a struggle for an officer's gun. The man died and police tried hard to keep the public from learning the names of the cops who fired. They acknowledged that one of the officers had been involved in a previous police shooting in 2005, but when reporters at the Baltimore Sun asked for a copy of the offense report, we got it with the name of not only the officer but also the suspect blacked out.

Police told us they blacked the names out of the public document to prevent us from obtaining the court file that would have had the officer's name. We got the court file anyway and published the name of the officer who had been involved in the earlier shooting. The name of the officer who fired the fatal shot was still unavailable. But then we learned police had arrested a person at the scene who tried to help the suspect in his fight. A police spokesman told us he wasn't aware an arrest had been made; when we learned the name, we pulled court records and got the name of the second officer who fired his weapon.

That's the length police are going to keep these names secret.

That brings us to Friday's shooting. Two officers fired on an car that they said was being driving toward them during a drug investigation. The car hit one officer, injuring him slightly, and another officer fired and hit the driver in the chest. That man, Shawn Cannady, died Sunday night at Sinai Hospital. A passenger was arrested, but police spokesman Troy Harris told me this morning he was released without charges.

That means, at this point, there is no public record that would contain the name of the officer who fired his weapon. We are asking for more details on the officer's previous shootings and are awaiting answers. As I stated before, police released a report in the last case but blacked out the names.

I'm still not sure what the previous shootings were about. It's important because as we learned in the second shooting this year, the female officer involved had been in a struggle both in February and in 2005 with a suspect over her gun; four years ago, the suspect actually wrested the weapon away from her and threw it out a car window during an abduction. The gun discharged and a bullet hit a car seat; the shooting was ruled justified but it raised questions about her training and conduct.

What will we eventually learn about the officer involved in Friday's shooting?

Posted by Peter Hermann at 11:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Police shootings
        

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:

Continue reading "Withholding names of police who shoot" »

Posted by Peter Hermann at 4:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Police shootings