CASE #1
BALT vs. The States Attorney’s Office
From December 2019 to January 2021, BALT filed eight Maryland Public Information Act requests and two cases in the Circuit Court for Baltimore City with Open Justice Baltimore. BALT won a case in the Court of Special Appeals to demand our government officials uphold our #Right2Access.
BALT requested a list of police officers with integrity issues, investigation files into alleged criminal activity of police officers, and financial records of the SAO agency itself. BALT was met with outright denials by SAO and absurdly high fees for the records. These responses from the SAO were in violation of the law.
This timeline chronicles the MPIA requests BALT made to the SAO and exposes the blatant disregard for MPIA law.
Click the photo below, get receipts.
Or read the Court of Special Appeals Opinion
On May 25, 2022, BALT received a list of 301unique names from the SAO.
Update:
June 14, 2022
On May 25, 2022, Baltimore Action Legal Team received a list of 307 names of officers with integrity issues. The list contains 301 unique names after eliminating duplicates and non-officers. Disclosure of this list came after two and a half years in court and only after the Court of Special Appeals ordered its release.
The list does not contain the reason or rationale for placing an officer’s name on the list. BALT has requested further information from BPD, but we have yet to receive any files. The Baltimore City Law Department (who represents BPD in litigation) is actively denying our ability to determine why an officer may be on this list.
Without having access to the actual misconduct files, we still have found shocking results from reviewing this list.
Of the 301 names: there are 187 officers, 52 sergeants, 2 majors, 1 lieutenant colonel, 1 deputy commissioner, and 41 without a specified rank. Due to an MPIA request submitted by OJB, we know that as of November 2021, 198 of the names on the list are active. The list contained 11 Gun Trace Task Force officers.
Of the 301 names, there are at least 3,400 cases attached to these names as “officer” or “complainant” between the District and Circuit Courts for Baltimore City. Preliminarily, this includes about 2,585 cases at the trial level, 172 post conviction matters, and 698 cases on appeal. This does not consider the number of convictions resulting from involvement of officers on the list.