investigativevoice.com

By Stephen Janis

A federal civil rights lawsuit that accused the Baltimore city police department of systemic discrimination against black police officers has been settled for $2.5 million dollars.

The details of the settlement are listed on the Monday’s board of estimates minutes awaiting board approval on Wednesday.

The settlement calls for a $2.5 million payment to the fourteen officers who joined the lawsuit filed by Sergeant Louis Hopson, a civil rights activist and veteran police officer who has fought a pitched battle against discrimination in the department for nearly two decades.

The lawsuit was filed in 2004, citing sustained EEOC complaints and discrimination against black officers in the form of uneven and prejudicial internal disciplinary system.

The settlement marks a stark turnaround from a department that has vehemently denied that discrimination was an issue

Two years ago then Commissioner Leonard Hamm bristled at a story written by this reporter that revealed that roughly two thirds of the department’s top 55 commanders were white. At the time 8 of the nine district commanders are white, a ratio that has seen little change under the leadership of Mayor Sheila Dixon, who is black.

The city legal department spent millions of dollar fighting the suit, which dragged on for more than four years, as the city fought the plaintiffs lawyers through the entire discovery process.

Plaintiffs sought to obtained detailed outcomes of internal disciplinary cases by race and rank, hoping to prove that black officers was punished more severely and often than white officers for similar offenses.

But the document flow bogged down, as lawyers for the officer and city fought over the usefulness of information which plaintiffs argued was incomplete.

At one point, thousands of disciplinary records were shredded by police cadets just hours before they were scheduled to be turned over to plaintiffs. City lawyers explained the inopportune shredding as mistake by the supervisors in Internal Affairs, who destroyed the documents because of a shortage of folder files.

Late last year, as the suit hit a standstill, then Federal Judge Paul Grimm appointed a “special master” to oversee the discovery process.

It is unclear what lead to the settlement, as the federal docket has been relatively clear since then and neither party would comment prior to the board’s approval.

The lawsuit, filed in 2004 by Sergeant Louis Hopson, was based on sustained EEOC complaints and allegations that black officer were punished mo9re several for similar offense than black officers.

But the suit also argue that the department made concerted efforts to deny black officer entry onto the force by conspiring to flunk black officer who took polygraph tests, preventing black officers from joining the force.

The loss is the latest in a string of setbacks for a department that has touted racial harmony while filling top command positions with few minorities.

In 2008, the department paid a black Sergeant Robert Smith $200,000 to settle an ongoing dispute with the department after he was charged with a sex offense that he could not have committed because he was off duty at the time. The charges stemmed from allegations of rape against Jemni Jones, who was later acquitted by a city jury. However, the department did not charge the white sergeant who was on duty the time the alleged sexual assault occurred.

More recently the department promoted a white officer at the center of a controversial case in which a black homicide Sergeant Kelvin Sewell alleged he was ordered to view KKK web sites by a white superior. Even though the charges were sustained by the EEOC, the department dropped the case after firing Joanna Woodson-Branche, the former trial board chief citing irregularities,.

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