by Jo Ellen Nott 

The Washington D.C. Metropolitan Police Department (“MPD”), some 3,400 officers strong, has rogue characters engaging in criminal misconduct on the clock and off but using the 160-year-old badge as shield for their bad behavior. Reporting from various sources paints a not so pretty picture of domestic abusers, drunk drivers, stalkers, racists, pistol brandishers, bullies, property damagers, and thieves using and abusing the privilege and power of their blue uniform to engage in behavior that is frankly quite repulsive.

Like many large agencies, the MPD has an unwritten honor code that pressures everyone within the department to protect the bad actors. The disciplinary process had been handled in house for years without transparency or public input except for the initial report filing. The Center for Investigative Reporting reminds us that “details from misconduct investigations … have typically remained hidden from the public, with police departments citing personal privacy laws.”  

In June 2020 everything changed with the BlueLeaks hack. The transparency collective Distributed Denial of Secrets (“DDoS”) stole 269 gigabytes of law enforcement data and published it on its website, exposing the dirty deeds of 700,000 law enforcement officers. The massive document dump includes the years from 2007 until June 14, 2020, well into the anti-police brutality protests connected to the George Floyd murder in Minneapolis.

These files, previously hidden by bureaucratic obfuscation tactics, were now available to the eager eyes of investigative journalists, whistle blowers, and police reform groups. Internal records of the MPD show that the department had tried to terminate 24 officers for criminal misconduct in the previous 14 years. Disciplinary records for the officers read like a primer for pirates: indecent exposure to a woman outside of a grocery store; drinking a pint of vodka before responding to a call; punching two women at a Hooters; trying to buy hookers; fleeing the scene of a crime; and domestic abuse of wives and girlfriends.

One officer punched his wife so hard he broke her eye socket. Another officer ran over the mother of his child with a Chevy Tahoe leaving tire tracks on her feet, ankles, and calf. Yet another assaulted his wife so often that she asked her pastor for help worried that her husband would kill her if she caused problems for him at work.

   All but three of these 24 officers were exonerated by the Adverse Action Panel, a panel of three current police officers on the MPD with the rank of captain or above whose members rotate in and out. Officers found guilty of criminal misconduct and recommended for termination after the Internal Affairs Division collects evidence and investigates can appeal to the Adverse Action Panel. Records exposed in the BlueLeaks data dump show the Adverse Action Panel blocked terminations and, in their place, issued slap-on-the-wrist suspensions without pay. The average suspension between 2009 to 2019 was 29 days. Some sources say the MPD had as many as 75 bad cop complaints that were reviewed by the Disciplinary Review Division during that same time.

“These systems that MPD set up to punish or at least give officers their day in court when they committed an infraction, they don’t really work,” said Ronald Hampton, a retired MPD officer who has advocated for more accountability as a member of the city’s recently created Police Reform Commission in an interview with Reveal. Techdirt’s Tim Cushing called the discipline system in the DC Metro Police Department “severely dysfunctional.”

Reveal reported that earlier in 2021, the Police Reform Commission recommended 90 reforms to increase police accountability. One of those recommendations was making the Adverse Action Panel’s hearings more accessible to the public.

What’s the moral of the story? “Refusing to fire cops over criminal misconduct sends a clear message to the bad cops they’re guaranteed employment no matter what they do,” according to Tim Cushing of Techdirt. “To aspiring bad cops, it sends the message there’s little to fear in terms of reprisals.” Perhaps the most damaging message sent by the exoneration of clearly guilty bad actors on a police force is the one good cops understand the best: “blowing the whistle on their fellow officers will most likely result in retaliation.”

Sources: techdirt.com, wamu.org, dcist.com, revealnew.com, theintercept.com

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