BALTIMORE — Facing community pressure amid investigations into the death of Freddie Gray in 2015 and the rogue operation of the Gun Trace Task Force in 2017, Brandon Scott, then-City Council president, introduced a law to publicize misconduct lawsuits against Baltimore Police.

Around five years later, the law is being flouted by people that Scott, as mayor, put into positions of authority to oversee the city’s legal commitments.

A Baltimore Sun analysis found that the city failed to properly report police misconduct lawsuits and settlements this year as required by that law. Experts say repercussions for the reporting agency are unlikely, since the law doesn’t outline any.

“There’s no teeth in laws like this,” said Matt Zernhelt, a Baltimore-based attorney and University of Maryland School of Law professor.

The law, enacted in 2020, requires the department to release semi-annual reports on police misconduct litigation in January and August. The City Law Department failed to publish a report in January.

Department spokesperson and deputy solicitor Stephen Salsbury did not respond to questions asking why the report was filed late, but said that department staff will work to publish future reports in a timely fashion.

The law department misses its deadline

The city law department published a partial version of a report in May in response to multiple requests from The Sun.

The Sun’s analysis compared that version to a Baltimore City Board of Estimates database, and found several police misconduct settlements were missing from the May report, which lists only one lawsuit filed in 2023 and 2024 each. The report lists none that were filed in 2022 or this year.

The May report also was missing information like the dates some cases were filed, and their outcomes.

The Sun also found more documentation and news reporting on other cases that were omitted from the report.

According to the May report, between 24 and 36 police misconduct cases were filed annually from 2017 to 2021, but those totals dropped dramatically in 2022, and have remained low.

Lindsey Eldridge, a Baltimore Police spokesperson, said that the recent decline in lawsuits are tied to the department’s new policies, comprehensive training and accountability reforms.

“Our department is committed to self-assessment, self-correction and early intervention, ensuring that issues are identified and addressed before escalating to serious misconduct,” Eldridge wrote in a statement emailed to The Sun.

But Philip Stinson, a criminology professor at Bowling Green State University heading the school’s Police Integrity Research Group, and leading National Institute of Justice-funded research into U.S. police crime, said it was “hard to believe” the law department had seen such a steep decline in recent years’ misconduct cases.

“Based on the population of the city of Baltimore, the number of sworn officers employed by the Baltimore City Police Department, and the number of cases filed in prior years, I find [the decrease in misconduct lawsuits in this report] surprising,” Stinson said.

Stinson said policing practices have largely stayed the same during his two decades of studying police misconduct, despite police reforms being at the forefront of public discourse.

Baltimore Police Accountability Board Chair Joshua Harris said that the board has encountered faulty reporting pertaining to misconduct complaints shared by the Baltimore Police Department, which often go underreported and lack important information like geographical data.

Harris said keeping the public informed on police misconduct cases and how to file them are part and parcel to motivating citizens to call for police reform.

Several cases weren’t reported

Among the cases missing from the law department’s recent report are some notable police settlements from the last couple of years.

The city settled with a man in February who lost his leg after being struck by a police vehicle three years ago.

Three teenagers received settlements from the city in May after suffering serious injuries in a crash after a police officer ran a red light without activating his siren.

In 2023, the city paid a $225,000 settlement to a woman who was shot by a stray bullet fired by an officer in pursuit of a different person.

The Sun’s analysis also found that the report identified only 23 lawsuits totaling about $17.2 million related to the police department’s Gun Trace Task Force. But a tracker of settlement figures maintained by the Board of Estimates has the total spent by the city at nearly $23 million across 41 cases filed by victims of the task force.

What are the consequences?

Zernhelt, who has won appellate cases against BPD and the city, told The Sun the law department will likely see no consequences for failing to publish an accurate and timely report of misconduct cases.

“If [the law department doesn’t] follow the law, they have carte blanche until someone with the resources can come and challenge them,” said Zernhelt.

He said a public information lawsuit may result in a court order for the department to release the correct information — without any legal repercussions, though the department may be subject to oversight from the Office of the Inspector General if it fails to meet reporting deadlines.

The Inspector General’s office has previously stepped in to probe the law department, including in recent case involving a fraudulent settlement check. The office issued formal recommendations after uncovering these issues, and the law department adopted these reforms.

Scott, who appointed City Solicitor Ebony Thompson to lead the law department, is a vocal proponent of settling and publicizing cases of police misconduct and has been since his time in City Council, calling them a “reminder that [the city has] an obligation to own mistakes that were made” by law enforcement.

Scott’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Consequences of the lawsuits

Cary Hansel, a Baltimore-based attorney who represented three Gun Trace Task Force victims, said that police misconduct settlements are valuable investments in police integrity.

“I think that there’s a good argument to be had that lawsuits, together with the reporting of the facts that they uncover, are the two most important things that drive [police] reform,” said Hansel.

Hansel referenced the consent decree agreement between the Baltimore Police Department and the U.S. Department of Justice, which he said was influenced by police misconduct suits, including the case of Freddie Gray, whose family received a $3.5 million settlement in 2022.

In April, a federal judge lifted two sections of the decree, ruling that the police department has improved its transportation of people in custody — a section shaped greatly by the conditions of Gray’s death — and police officer mental health support.

Councilmember Mark Conway, who chairs the Baltimore City Council’s Public Safety Committee, said recent police reforms could have led to a drop in police misconduct claims, adding that he doubts the reduction is as extreme as the law department’s report suggests.

Since the Gun Trace Task Force claims make up a large portion of Baltimore’s police misconduct settlements, Conway posited that the dwindling number of open cases relating to the task force could contribute to a decrease.

“We get tons of complaints [from] lots of people who have poor interactions with police officers across the city,” Conway said. “Those don’t always necessarily reach the legal stage.”

He said the Baltimore Police Department is a very different department today. Conway said that officers are now much more thoughtful about how they interact with the public, in large part due to the consent decree.

Harris acknowledged that the accountability board has noticed improvements in policing, and a decline in misconduct complaints, albeit at a lower rate than the law department’s report suggests.

The department still has a ways to go in terms of transparency, said Harris, adding that an important factor in the decline in police misconduct claims is that not enough people know how to file them.

He blamed this on the convoluted filing system — with several different channels of lodging the claims, and one of the most prominent being recently dissolved.

“We need data to tell the story, and if we have the wrong data, we may be telling the wrong story,” said Harris.

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