investigativevoice.com

By Stephen Janis

In the fall of 2006, Baltimore Police Officer Francis Hamilton reported to Internal Affairs that members of her traffic unit were falsifying overtime slips, claiming they were escorting hazardous materials through sensitive areas of the city when they were not on duty.

The police trial board - the administrative body that adjudicates internal charges against officers, fired Hamilton in abstentia. But a year later, Judge Alfred Nance ordered her reinstated, calling her firing "capricious and arbitrary."

After the ruling, Hamilton's attorney Robert recalls trial board chief JoAnn Woodson-Branch was nonplussed.

"She it's not going to happen," said Smith, of the order.  And Branch lived up to her promise, Hamilton has yet to return to duty.

Now the head of the black police officers union says the unfair treatment of black officers is one of the reasons JoAnn C. Woodson-Branch, who headed the trial board, was fired Tuesday.

Sgt. Daryl Massey, president of the Vanguard Justice Society, the black police officers' union, said Wednesday that under Woodson-Branch's watch, internal cases for white police officers were allowed to lapse while black officers were timely charged.

Police Commissioner Frederick Bealefeld fired Woodson-Branch, who also served as the police department's legal counsel, only five months after she had been promoted and had received a $30,000 raise.

Massey said Woodson-Branch was fired after he called attention to discrepancies  in which cases against white officers where allowed to lapse without being charged by letting the statue of limitations expire. Meanwhile, Massey said, black officers facing similar accusations were charged.

"It's sad in this day and age that we have this level of unfairness in which officers receive different treatment," Massey said. "It's not a black or white issue, it's about fairness." 

Massey said he said his organization uncovered several cases in which white offiicers facing internal charges went untouched by the legal department and trial board until the statue of liimitations expired. The Law Enforcement Officers Blll of Rights stipulates that internal charges must be leveled against an officer within one year after the incident is reported.

But Massey pointed to charges against him and five other black officers that Woodson-Branch faxed to his attorney two months after the statute of liimitations had expired.

"The charges were dated for the very last day they could be brought," he said.

Police officials would not comment on Woodson-Branch's firing.

"We have no comment because it's a personnel issue," said Anthony Guglielmi, spokesman for the department.

The firing comes after a controversial case involving Terry Love, a black detective who just was acquitted in a second-degree assault case that his attorney said was retaliation for fiiling an EEOC complaint last year.

Love, a veteran homicide dectective, was found not guilty in connection with an altercation that occured outside a North Baltimore barbershop. Prosecutors filed the charges against Love two days before the statute of liimitations expired. A jury acquitted him Tuesday, the same day Woodson-Branch was fired. 

Disparate treatment of black offiicers by the police department is the subject of a federal lawsuit filed by Sgt. Louis Hopson and 14 other black officers in 2004. The suit alleges that black offiicers were punished more severely than white officers for similar offenses. The pending lawsuit also cites more than a dozen sustained EEOC complaints against white officers for which the department trial board did not take any action.

In 2008, the city's legal department charged Sgt. Robert Smith, who is black, with a rape that occured at Southern disrtict headquarters even though he was not on duty when the assault allegedly occurred. Prosecutors had charged officer Jemini Jones with the allege sex offense of having sex with a suspect, but a city jury found him not guilty.  Smith's lawyer Clarke Ahlers said the charges were in retalation for his client's refusal to drop a defamtion lawsuit he filed against the department connected to a search warrant leaked to the media that accused Smith of having drugs in his office.

The department later dropped the charges and paid Smith $200,000.

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